Managers’ and employees’ perspectives of internal branding in an airline company

Abstract

Internal branding is an ongoing process involving all agents within the company. As such, an exploration of internal branding will not only be limited to the formal understanding of internal stakeholders but will allow the subjective meanings of their understanding to be revealed as well. This investigated the perceived organizational factors, brand support behaviours, and views of managers and employees on the delivery of brand promise in an airline company case study and developed an internal branding framework based on the findings. Specifically, the research investigated how the managers and employees perceived the organizational climate and communication channels in their company; how they made sense of their brand knowledge, commitment, and citizenship; and how they viewed the delivery of their company brand promise. The consequent findings from the investigation served as the building blocks in the development of the internal branding framework in the study. The study used the qualitative design, adopted the constructivist/interpretivist philosophy; and utilized the inductive approach, with a focus on a single institution. The semi-structured interview was used to optimise data collection. A total of 30 individuals consisting of 10 managers and 20 employees participated in the study. The data was analysed using thematic analysis and phenomenological reduction and supported by sense-making tools. The study found that organizational factors contributed to the creation of a social space that allowed managers, employees, and other internal stakeholders to interrelate in various ways. It is within these social spaces where internal stakeholders re-framed their brand knowledge, commitment, and citizenship within the context of their lived experiences. As a corollary, the internal branding framework developed in the study demonstrated that the presence of a positive organizational climate and information-rich environment creates an enabling social environment that facilitates the interaction of internal stakeholders. This type of environment enables them to construct and reconstruct their knowledge about their company brand and allows them to make sense of their brand commitment and citizenship that sustain their perception of the delivery of the brand promise. The framework of internal branding developed in the study is the major contribution of this research. Furthermore, this study contributes insight into the dynamics of internal branding from detailed information derived from the perspectives of managers and employees which were used to edify the internal branding framework developed in the study. The framework demonstrates how companies can best leverage their physical and human resources to enhance their brand image through internal branding. The study also provides an analysis of a dataset on brand knowledge, commitment, and citizenship that contributes knowledge of internal branding in an economically dynamic and multi-cultural company context. Lastly, this study contributes to the growing efforts of investigating the internal branding process using a qualitative approach by demonstrating how qualitative studies can be used to explore branding concepts.