Corporate brand management imperatives: Custodianship, credibility, and calibration

Copyright 2012 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.Marshaling case study research insights, this article advances our knowledge of the strategic management of corporate brands. Strategic corporate brand management requires commitment to three critically important imperatives: senior management custodianship; the building and maintaining of brand credibility; and the dynamic calibration of seven identities constituting the corporate brand constellation. This article draws on research dating back to the 1990s and is also informed by the identity-based view of corporate brands perspective and by recent scholarship on the AC4ID Test—a strategic, diagnostic, corporate brand management framework

Trust is the new black

Trust is at the heart of ongoing relationships amongst people, but also with brands and companies. It has become a hot topic (Connelly, 2017, Huffington, 2015), particularly given the increasing media coverage of breakdowns in customer trust in well-known companies such as VW, Tesco, BP and Google. But away from these headlines is a stronger, more underlying trend. A move from transactions to longer term customer relationships. The risk of undermining that relationship through not being transparent, not being fair, not having reliable products and services is exacerbated as our world becomes increasingly technology focused. Relationships with suppliers we don’t know are built through trusted on-line third parties. Information about products and services we are unfamiliar with is increasingly sought from others, on-line, and subsequent feedback on customer experiences shared quickly and widely. Where companies are not transparent, the exponential growth in speed and breadth of news spreading makes them vulnerable. It is impossible to hide. However, to assess our own approach to corporate and brand trust, it helps to go back to the key academic theories to discover the concepts that underpin our understanding of trust, the factors that build trust and the outputs that emerge. In addition, we need to understand our performance on trust in the light of data from an industry and global context but also to support the business case for ensuring it remains a business priority. Examining a few of the high-profile failures in trust also helps us identify the range of areas where trust can be undermined. They provide pieces of a jigsaw that, when seen together, help us understand a broader picture of trust to inform our approach with our businesses and our customers now and in the future

Bridging the Disconnect

New York City is facing a youth unemployment crisis, but the city's youth workforce development programs reach only a fraction of those in need of help and are too often misaligned to the developmental needs of young New Yorkers

Lenovo-IBM: Bridging Cultures, Languages, and Time Zones Becoming a Global Player (C)

This case completes the trilogy and attempts to answer the open questions raised in the A and B Cases. It offers a retrospective of the events since the IBM-Lenovo merger in 2005 until August 2012. The main focus is on the period between the global financial crisis and mid-2012. The case describes the frequent changes at the top management level and highlights the leadership issues involved in making Lenovo a global leader in the PC industry. An industry and market overview reveals that while Lenovo was attempting to deal with internal issues during the post-merger integration phase it lost market share to competitors. A series of strategic changes, organizational restructurings, and changes in organizational culture paved the way for a new era in Lenovo's history, marked by strong financial performance, product innovation, and promising growth.Series: WU Case Serie

The Corporate Purpose of Social License

This Article deploys the sociological theory of social license, or the acceptance of a business or organization by the relevant communities and stakeholders, in the context of the board of directors and corporate governance. Corporations are generally treated as “private” actors and thus are regulated by “private” corporate law. This construct allows for considerable latitude. Corporate actors are not, however, solely “private.” They are the beneficiaries of economic and political power, and the decisions they make have impacts that extend well beyond the boundaries of the entities they represent. Using Wells Fargo and Uber as case studies, this Article explores how the failure to account for the public nature of corporate actions, regardless of whether a “legal” license exists, can result in the loss of “social” license. This loss occurs through publicness, which is the interplay between inside corporate governance players and outside actors who report on, recapitulate, reframe and, in some cases, control the company’s information and public perception. The theory of social license is that businesses and other entities exist with permission from the communities in which they are located, as well as permission from the greater community and outside stakeholders. In this sense, businesses are social, not just economic, institutions and, thus, they are subject to public accountability and, at times, public control. Social license derives not from legally granted permission, but instead from the development of legitimacy, credibility, and trust within the relevant communities and stakeholders. It can prevent demonstrations, boycotts, shutdowns, negative publicity, and the increases in regulation that are a hallmark of publicness — but social license must be earned with consistent trustworthy behavior. Thus, social license is bilateral, not unilateral, and should be part of corporate strategy and a tool for risk management and managing publicness more generally. By focusing on and deploying social license and publicness in the context of board decision-making, this Article adds to the discussions in the literature from other disciplines, such as the economic theory on reputational capital, and provides boards with a set of standards with which to engage and address the publicness of the companies they represent. Discussing, weighing, and developing social license is not just in the zone of what boards can do, but is something they should do, making it a part of strategic, proactive cost-benefit decision-making. Indeed, the failure to do so can have dramatic business consequences

Nationbuilding in Malaysia under conditions of globalization

Considering the effects of globalization on the political performance opportunities of nation states, we may detect a more transnational orientation in policy formulation as a challenging factor. In Malaysia, e.g., issues of nationbuilding might be affected in various ways, reflecting either the chances offered by globalization or the structural strains accompanying this process while questioning the resilience of nation states as sovereign political actors. The paper thus inspects in how far strategies of nationbuilding change when the external conditions of diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing change. Malaysia offers a case in point, it is argued, to demonstrate the ever dynamic process of nationbuilding and change of the concept of nation. - The concept of nation is challenged constantly and hence embedded in an ongoing struggle for modification and renewal. The adjustment of nationbuilding strategies to changing conditions of shaping the concept of nation is examined with the help of the sociological approach of analyzing framing processes. --

Identifying factors in the relationship between top management and IS personnel

Permanent development of new technologies, growing expectations of customers and constant struggle for surviving in the market are forcing companies to develop business innovations including innovative information systems in order to obtain competitive advantages. However, consequences of implementing them in inefficient relationship between top management and IS personnel are often neglected. There are still numerous failed IS implementation projects due to failed attempts to align business and IS spheres in the companies. Neglecting the gap between top management and IS personnel can cause severe consequences. The purpose of this research is thus to ease the understanding of the relationship between top management and IS personnel and to define key factors that are important in this relationship. 221 CIOs and 93 CEOs agreed to participate in the research and the responses were compared reciprocally. The result of the empirical investigation reveals the existence of nine factors that are important in the business-IS relationship with seven factors being perceived differently by the top management and IS management and thus causing the gap in the business-IS relationship

Opportunities for Foundation Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs

Profiles three community foundations developing new insights into program areas, new partnerships with community organizations and institutions, enhanced roles in community dialogue, new collaborations and programs, and greater visibility and prominence

The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting

We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to reported earnings and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for outsiders, even more so than cash flows. Because of the severe market reaction to missing an earnings target, we find that firms are willing to sacrifice economic value in order to meet a short-run earnings target. The preference for smooth earnings is so strong that 78% of the surveyed executives would give up economic value in exchange for smooth earnings. We find that 55% of managers would avoid initiating a very positive NPV project if it meant falling short of the current quarter's consensus earnings. Missing an earnings target or reporting volatile earnings is thought to reduce the predictability of earnings, which in turn reduces stock price because investors and analysts hate uncertainty. We also find that managers make voluntary disclosures to reduce information risk associated with their stock but try to avoid setting a disclosure precedent that will be difficult to maintain. In general, management's views provide support for stock price motivations for earnings management and voluntary disclosure, but provide only modest evidence in support of other theories of these phenomena (such as debt, political cost and bonus plan based hypotheses).

Mind the Gap: DBA students, knowledge generation, transfer and impact

Increasingly higher education institutions are expected to demonstrate their contribution to academia, society, and the economy. This is pertinent for business schools as a key purpose for them is to provide education that enhances management practice, with Doctorates in Business Administration (DBAs) being the highest-level qualification offered in pursuit of this goal. Yet there is scant research that captures the impact of DBAs beyond the individual and academia. This paper focuses on the important role of DBAs in generating and transferring knowledge from academia to practice and in creating wider impact in society and the economy. Based on 36 semi-structured interviews with DBA students and alumni, our research shows how DBA students are able to generate and exchange knowledge between academia and business, enabling a wide range of impacts to be achieved. We show how knowledge transfer is the outcome of a learning process in which DBA students and their supervisors learn to speak each other’s language, enabling two-way communication. Facilitated by the power and associated credibility and legitimacy of the DBA students as practicing senior managers, the knowledge can then be transferred. Personal development in the form of analytical skills and increased confidence gained through the learning process results in a personal impact that acts as the precursor to other forms of impact, such as improved organisational performance and broader societal benefits. Research generated by DBAs is thus well-placed to offer opportunities for impact and contribute substantially to the research-practice conversation in higher education