The networked brand identity

Abstract

A corporate brand is a complex construct, which might be difficult to manage because of a lack of insight into the network of relevant influencers. Sense Observation Systems (Sense) is a small software company developing software that helps users to get information from the sensor data of their telephones. Sense is aware of the possible threats to privacy users of their products might perceive and wishes to express their vision on privacy in the corporate brand. The communication manager aiding Sense in their external communications works for their parent company Almende. Almende advocates self-organization and the bottom-up approach that goes with it. Sense therefore wishes to manage their corporate brand with as little management as possible. The proposed self-organizing approach is a novelty in corporate brand management. This research aims to aid the communication manager of Almende in managing Sense’s corporate brand. To help the communication manager in this management task, we defined the following research question: How to manage the corporate brand of Sense Observation Systems so as to encompass the principles on end-user privacy present within the corporation? --Method-- Semi-structured interviews were used to gather insight into how principles on end-user privacy are present within the corporation. A total eight respondents were interviewed: six employees of Sense, and two of the parent company Almende. The respondents cover different functions in the company: four software developers, two managers, and two other members of staff. A conceptual model for brand management was developed from relevant literature and used to structure the interviews. Six identity types were linked to the corporate brand to distinguish between personnel, products, corporate communication, clients, market, and vision. In the interviews was searched for Sense-specific actors (humans, artefacts, policy, organizations, etc.) represented in these identity types. The interviews provided the following information needed for the conceptual model: • 75 actors from all identity types influencing the corporate brand; • 7 aspects of privacy relevant for Sense; and • the distribution of privacy aspects over the actors. --Results-- From the 75 actors we defined 10 representative actor clusters, each cluster consisting of actors with similar associated privacy aspects and from identical identity types. For each of the privacy aspects, we visually analysed the tension within the actors network using the privacy landscapes defined in the conceptual model. Based upon the preference of Sense employees and network analysis results, we advised Sense to focus on the privacy aspect use limitation. We also advised to add more stable elements to the actor network, so that core values become more embedded in the network. The practical suggestions of such stable elements were to develop a corporate slogan, build a product showcasing the corporate values, develop a market strategy leading to clients fitting the corporate values, write out the corporate vision so that it becomes more public. --Conclusion and discussion-- The developed privacy landscapes enable us to indicate points of attention in the actor network attributing to the corporate brand of Sense. Also, the advice to manage the company brand using stable elements increases the practical applicability; the effort for the communications manager at Almende can therefore decrease over time. The developed method is a novelty in brand management because of its ability to visually point out actors unaligned to the (preferred) corporate brand. Furthermore, the method provides insight not only in misalignments between but also within identity types by the use of actor clusters. Information privacy research might benefit from the observation of the following privacy aspects that were not found in literature: ownership of the data collected about a person, restriction of access to user data for the company where data is stored, how ownership is distributed in issues concerning multiple parties, and the depersonalisation of data so that it can not be traced back to an individual. We believe that the developed method and resulting privacy landscapes can be applied to other companies using different concepts in order to find points of attention within the corporate actor network. We recommend to reduce the possibilities for observer bias in the methodology by replacing the individual semi-structured interviews with group sessions. with Participants in such sessions have limited observer influence and can determine concepts for the brand identity and label and cluster actors. Instead of a research approach, the group sessions would be more similar to creative sessions.