Organizational dynamics and complexities of corporate brand building—A practice perspective

SummaryThe paper introduces a marketing-as-practice-approach to the domain of corporate brand management and presents findings from an empirical study that illustrates this approach in the context of a large transnational corporation. Conceptualizing corporate branding as something that occurs within and as part of a field of socially instituted practices, the paper focuses on the patterns of routinized activity through which corporate brands are built in organizations. By means of a 5-year ethnographic study, the aim is to identify a set of trans-subjective organizational practices that govern the praxis of brand building as well as to analyze the steering effects that these practices may have on the collaborative production and delivery of the brand promise in the day-to-day of organizational activity.