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Wissett, John Spencer (2005) Branding & Organizational Performance. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Marketers, business strategists and investors commonly believe that organizations with strong brands with high employee buy-in perform better than those with weaker brands. This belief affects the way managers view their organizations and develop their strategies today. The aim of this research was to test this belief. A positivist approach was taken for this research and so an overarching hypothesis was developed, based upon three supporting hypotheses, which were then tested using a framework developed by the researcher.

To test the hypotheses the internal brand perception and organization performance of two business units of a large British insurance company were researched. One unit was a heavily branded Internet direct insurer with a single brand identity while the other unit used traditional indirect sales channels through intermediaries and represented a variety of brands. Both business units had multiple call-centre sites which formed the lowest organizational unit for the research.

The hypotheses were developed from the literature review which encompassed branding and organizational behaviour theories to identify the perspectives of branding linked to organization performance. Four perspectives were identified: brand as the company, or corporate brand; brand and self-concept; brand and values; and, brand and vision. Corporate brand is an overarching perspective that includes the other three which formed the basis of the hypotheses. To develop the framework to test the hypotheses the literature review extended to performance measurement which included management accounting, branding and human resource management theory.

The resulting framework comprised of: a questionnaire to survey employees to gauge the degree of congruence between their personal self-concept or identity, values and vision, and that of the corporate brand; a mix of performance metrics, similar to the Balanced Scorecard in concept; and a method for aggregating the data to enable a multi-level investigation of the correlation between organization performance and employee-brand congruence In practice, the questionnaire could not be used and an alternative source of staff data was employed. Also, the performance measurement data proved hard to source and so some further compromise on the detail of the analysis had to be made. Furthermore, having limited the research to two corporate brands it was not possible to show a statistical correlation between performance and employee-brand congruence at the brand level, although evidence was found for the correlation at the call-centre sitelevel. The conclusion to the research was that while there was not enough data to prove or disprove the hypotheses the evidence tilted in support of the overarching hypothesis that organization performance correlates positively with the congruency of employees' values and self-concepts with the values and identity of their organization's corporate brand.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User:	EP, Services
Date Deposited:	06 Jan 2006
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2018 07:07
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/20105

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