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This is the accepted version of a paper presented at 7th Global Brand Conference of the Academy of Marketing’s Brand Corporate Identity and Reputation Special Interest Group, Oxford, April 6-9, 2011.
Citation for the original published paper:
Cassinger, C., Taalas, S., Vazques, C. (2011)
Branded space-times: narrative production of organisational identity and image.
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Branded Space-Times:
Narrative production of organisational identity and image Cecilia Cassinger, University of Essex, UK
Saara Taalas, University of Turku, Finland
Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Abstract
In this paper we explore what branding strategy constructs socially in an organisational setting. To this end we approach brands from a geographical perspective as epistemic objects that organise the spatial relationship between brand strategy and everyday work-life. Through an empirical case of discussions and contradictions related to branding in a university research centre, we explore how branded space-times are constituted through stories-so-far, individual and collective narratives that intersect in an online discussion mail list concerning the possible need for formulating a proper branding strategy. Our narrative analysis reveals that the vague boundary conditions of these space-times, allowing for multiple inclusions and exclusions, turns branding into an effective mode of governance that is met with very little resistance. However, our case suggests that branding gives rise to branded space-times of faith in and through which the organisation’s academic identity and image are negotiated. In this context branding emerges as a possible source for alignment in a deeply disjointed try to simultaneously find something in common and to set apart.
Keywords: Branding, complex organisations, storytelling, space-time
Introduction
This paper represents an attempt to move beyond the closure that conventional conceptions of brands in the marketing literature impose when considering the relationship between branding and everyday life. Such conceptions, we argue, inevitably reduce brands to names of products, corporations and organisations that are invested with meaning through marketing communication strategies. Thereby they overlook that branding is a process interlinked with other processes, inside as well as outside the organisation, that produce social relationships.
The aim of the paper is therefore to examine the consequences of the omnipresence of branding (i.e. it’s being here and there at the same time) for simultaneously creating and maintaining organisational identity and image. We are interested in how experiences of the organisation and the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are affected by branding as a managerial practice.
Brands were originally developed as markers for goods to denote ownership (e.g. Martineau, 1958; Gardner & Levy, 1955), and supply information about the offer in terms of quality and reliability. In the 1960s and onwards branding theories were integrated with consumer psychology and socio-cultural approaches to brands (Schroeder, 2009; Holt, 2006). From this perspective brands are viewed as devices that simplify consumer decision-making and lower search costs and as vessels of meanings (cf. Kapferer, 1992). It was not until the 1990s, however, that branding emerged as a marketing and business strategy. Moor (2007) describes how practices of branding were developed as a response to a range of different factors, amongst all an increased scepticism before traditional marketing tools such as advertising.
The problem with brand management theory is that it delivers universal models based on the assumption that one-size-fits-all. Branding is typically conceived of as a strategy of aligning of corporate identity and image (see e.g. Hatch & Schultz, 2001, 2003). This is troublesome, as branding is nowadays extended outside the realm of goods and services to complex organisations (e.g. hospitals and universities), people (e.g. celebrities and politicians) and geographies (e.g. cities).
Research on brands conducted from socio-cultural perspectives has recently demonstrated how brands have evolved from being manageable assets to complex interfaces that organise the relation between producers and consumers and consumers and producers (Lury, 2004;
Arvidsson, 2006; Lury & Moor, 2010). Relations are organised around creating and negotiating the brand’s identity and image (cf. Christensen & Askegaard, 2001Thompson &
Arsel, 2003;). The process of building and maintaining a brand is an issue of creating these relations, in doing so a branded space is constituted, one that allows some branding activities to occur, while excluding other (Lury, 2004). Following Lury (2004), we suggest that the brand may be seen as a epistemic object in the sense originally described by Rheinberger (1997) and elaborated by Knorr-Cetina & Broegger (2000, p.149) as any “object of investigation that is at the centre of a research process and in the process of being materially defined” (see also Knorr-Cetina, 1999). The characteristics of an epistemic object rely on its openness and ongoing nature. Hence, epistemic objects are not simply defined by knowledge but by the possibilities their ontologically changing nature offers. As such, they are projections rather than defined and objective things: “they continually acquire new properties and change the ones they have” (ibid.). Understood as epistemic object, a brand is characterized by an essential elusiveness of look, content, shape, and story. It contains, Zwick and Dholakia (2006, p. 27) write, “the capacity to unfold, evolve, change and morph indefinitely”, generating questions for those who participate in the branding process. This material elusiveness turns the brand into a continuous project. It reveals itself progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination and evaluation (ibid.). Through its ongoing definition, the brand creates particular associations, allowing the connection of some relations, while disconnecting others. Lury (2004, p. 1) aptly states that “[the brand] is a mode of organising activities in time and space”. It is this organising dimension of the brand that is at the heart of this paper: it’s capacity for creating what we propose to name branded space- time.
In defining and studying brand as an epistemic object we seek in this paper to understand the entangled geography of the brand, which, as Pike (2009, p. 192) suggest is “socially constructed by agents of production, circulation, consumption and regulation through circuits of value and meaning”. In coining the expression of branded space-time, we explore geographies of the brand and branding. The geographical perspective has been relatively neglected in the previous research on brands, although it responds to the inherent geographical nature of the object of the brand and the process of branding. Pike highlights three reasons why geography is important to brand theory. First, the value of the brand is derived from spatial connections and associations. Space and place, he argues, are given meaning through branded objects and social practices of branding. Second, brands are involved (and evolve) in spatial circuits of production, circulation and consumption that, and this is his third point, are geographically dispersed and uneven.
In order to demonstrate the geographical approach to branding, we study how an effort to brand a complex organisation produces particular space-times in and through which organisational identity and image are interlinked. Following Massey (2005), we understand
space-time as the coexistence of trajectories as stories-so-far or, to put it a little differently, as the encounter of ongoing stories. By focusing on branding stories, and on how they meet-up in the ongoing definition of the brand, we seek to account for the movement of this elusive process as it unfolds. Stories-so-far allow us to examine how alternative organisational identities and images are negotiated in the process of branding. This type of stories warrants a political reading of identity and image, one that interrogates the relations through which they are constructed. It thus becomes necessary to examine whose stories that are voiced and silenced in the process of branding.
Branded space-times: placeness, brandisation and professionalisation in a complex organisation
We apply the understanding of space-time to a study of a 25 pages long online exchange in a discussion mail list about the implementation of a branding strategy at a Scandinavian university research centre. The research centre is used as an example of branding in a complex organisation. With the pressures put on public institutions branding has become a device to increase their visibility in order to attract human capital and funding. This marketisation of higher education (Gioia & Corley, 2002; Czarniawska & Genell, 2002;
Lowrie, 2007; Waeraas & Solbakk, 2009) has positioned branding as a strategic issue for universities. By means of a narrative analysis we demonstrate how the brand is mediated in the relationships between faculty members and in the relation between faculty members and their beliefs regarding the external audiences and who they want to be. While the brand is mediated by these relationships these relationships are simultaneously governed by the brand.
We therefore argue that these relations construct branded space-times in which the image and identity of the research centre emerge simultaneously as it is governed by the idea of the brand.
Our narrative analysis reveals three main types of space-times in and through which the research centre is branded. We categorise these space-times as placeness, brandisation and professionalisation. Organisational identity and image are managed through on-going attempts to fix the boundaries of the brand, that is to say, determining what it needs to include and exclude. The branded space-times complicate the boundaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘ours’
and ‘yours’, ‘excellence’ and ‘mediocrity’. In the stories-so-far about the research centre several versions of organisational identity and image emerge. Brand, space, identity, image and knowledge are involved in an ongoing narrative production. In conclusion we argue that organisational identity/image is not to be found in the fixed boundaries of the brand, but in its relation to the outside. Since the brand becomes a continuous knowledge project for the members of the organisation, the implementation of the branding strategy is met with very little resistance. On the contrary, our study suggests that branding serves as an effective mode of governance in complex organisations, as it give rise to branded space-times of faith in and through which the research centre’s co-existing identities and images are negotiated, renegotiated and ultimately aligned.
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