Building an empirically robust framework for corporate brand commiunications using action research

This thesis aims to develop a more robust framework for understanding themanagement processes involved in Corporate Brand Communications.A review of the literature on corporate branding shows a growing body of conceptualwork, but also highlights that much of the recent work in the field has not focused onthe underlying processes involved in managing a corporate brand. There is, therefore, aclear need to understand how a corporate brand is defined, developed andcommunicated.This international study adopts a Participatory Action Research approach, grounded inIntervention Theory (Argyris, 1973), to develop an intervention framework based on theconcept of privileged access' (Torbet, 1991). This methodological framework is testedon a pilot study and then adopted for the study of three separate organisations in theUK, France and the Netherlands to answer three distinct, but related ResearchQuestions.Based upon the findings emerging from these studies, the researcher identifies a seriesof `emergent management stages', and uses this empirical evidence to develop a new`Six Conventions' framework for understanding the processes of nurturing andmanaging a corporate brand. The study makes an explicit contribution to the field byhelping to `join up' many of the existing, disparate conceptual models. It makes afurther significant contribution by grounding the `Six Conventions' framework in richempirical data in a way that operationalizes the inherent management processes in anew and more robust manner than previous studies.These findings offer both new insight to academics, and a set of guiding principles andpractices for managers engaged in managing brands at an organisational level, fulfillingthe requirements of Participatory Action Research to generate both Propositional andPractical knowledge. A further methodological contribution is provided by demonstration of the potential thatparticipatory approaches, utilising the concept of this privileged access', offer incontrast to traditional case research. This leads to the development of a new process toguide effective intervention studies of management processes.