Building a corporate brand : The internal brand building process in Swedish service firms

There is consensus that every organisation needs to develop a strong brand as part of its business strategy. It is, however, unclear how corporate brands can be effectively developed. The aim of this study is to empirically explore the internal corporate brand-building process in Swedish service firms. This process refers to activities that occur before the implementation of the brand. This is a qualitative study in which three case studies are presented and in which purposive sampling was applied. The study ’ s aim was to find illustrative cases of firms that had recently conducted an internal, corporate brand-building process. The selected firms had initiated the process based on different circumstances (ie due to a crisis, geographical expansion or strategic repositioning). Personal interviews were used as the main data collection method. Three concurrent flows of activities, that is, data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis. All firms aimed to strengthen the corporate brand in their brand portfolio by reducing sub-brands, and by updating their brand identity and brand position statements. Findings show that even though the three firms had initiated the internal corporate brand-building process for different reasons, the three stages in the process, that is, brand audit, brand identity and brand position statements, could still be identified. Differences, however, occurred within the stages.QC 2012012