ADVANCING IMC AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL PARADIGM AND CORPORATE BRANDING AS A GOVERNANCE MODEL: CO-CREATION AS THE WAY FORWARD

Despite its widely recognized relevance in both management and marketing strategies to gain competitive advantage, the field of corporate brand studies suffers from a number of highly fragmented perspectives, that make it difficult to identify common strategic guidelines based on shared knowledge to discern the value of corporate branding (CB) and orient its practices. Our study acknowledges the CB complexity but is aimed at “clarifying and unravelling complexity” by depicting a possible unifying pan-organizational framework that can both make sense out of the different and heterogeneous perspectives on CB and serve as a diagnosis apparatus to support CB decision-making. This framework is aimed at solving tensions, enhancing the complementarities emerging from different viewpoints and promoting closer collaboration between academic scholars and practitioners to combine the holistic conceptual view of the former with the relevance and practicality of the latter, to the benefit of both. Based on our findings, we propose Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) as a potential unifying framework capable of building shared knowledge on CB by harmonizing dialogue between academic and practitioners’ perspectives and encouraging co-construction of CB meanings and development trajectories, embracing a multi-stakeholder approach.