Aligning employees’ work engagement and behavioral performance with internal branding: the missing link of employees’ perceived brand authenticity

The present research examines the relationship between internal branding and employees’ behavioral performance and proposes a research model that includes employees’ perceived brand authenticity and work engagement as sequential mediators to explain the examined relationships. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 3.0 statistical software is used to validate the proposed research model. The results of a self-administered online survey distributed to 95 frontline employees in a Kuwaiti bank confirm the positive direct effect of internal branding on employees’ behavioral performance. Interestingly, mixed results are obtained regarding the mediating effects of work engagement and brand authenticity. Overall, the results indicate that employees’ perceived brand authenticity is the missing link for internal branding and its effects on employees’ work engagement and behavioral performance. The findings provide important theoretical and practical implications for researchers and practitioners on the use of internal branding to promote the brand promise to frontline employees and support employees' brand-building behaviors.

     

Internal branding experiences in the financial services sector in South Africa

There is little doubt that employees are critical to the delivery of the service brand. Although existing models propose methods of internal branding, very little is known about the actual corporate experience. Academics around the world have spent decades probing internal marketing, its subset—internal branding—and the impact of internal branding on service delivery. This research focuses on how organisations execute internal branding, revealing critical success factors as well as obstacles encountered. The research was conducted in five large organisations in the financial services sector in South Africa. Each organisation is a highly recognisable consumer brand; the oldest of which is nearing 200 years of being in business and the youngest is just 20 years old. This research adds to the body of knowledge regarding organisational practice of internal branding. Key themes are identified, three of which are largely absent from extant models and literature.     

Creating corporate advantage

What differentiates truly great corporate strategies from the merely adequate? How can executives at the corporate level create tangible advantage for their businesses that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts? This article presents a comprehensive framework for value creation in the multibusiness company. It addresses the most fundamental questions of corporate strategy: What businesses should a company be in? How should it coordinate activities across businesses? What role should the corporate office play? How should the corporation measure and control performance? Through detailed case studies of Tyco International, Sharp, the Newell Company, and Saatchi and Saatchi, the authors demonstrate that the answers to all those questions are driven largely by the nature of a company's special resources--its assets, skills, and capabilities. These range along a continuum from the highly specialized at one end to the very general at the other. A corporation's location on the continuum constrains the set of businesses it should compete in and limits its choices about the design of its organization. Applying the framework, the authors point out the common mistakes that result from misaligned corporate strategies. Companies mistakenly enter businesses based on similarities in products rather than the resources that contribute to competitive advantage in each business. Instead of tailoring organizational structures and systems to the needs of a particular strategy, they create plain-vanilla corporate offices and infrastructures. The company examples demonstrate that one size does not fit all. One can find great corporate strategies all along the continuum.     

A survey of key success factors in financial services marketing and brand management

What challenges and opportunities do financial services marketers face as they strive to improve marketing and brand performance, relevance, value and accountability within their organisations? To help answer this question, MCorp., a strategic brand and marketing consultancy, surveyed marketing executives from 67 financial services institutions across the USA in the autumn of 2004. The survey grouped responses into several categories, ranging from an understanding of how marketing and brand performance is tracked, to respondents' views on specific challenges to improve marketing and branding effectiveness. Across all categories, data drove two ‘big-picture’ conclusions which reveal key strategic issues facing financial services marketers today. First, there is a stated lack of brand and marketing performance information, and an absence of the systems and programmes to track it. Secondly, there is a perceived lack of top-down organisational understanding of the importance, value and meaning of brand within respondent organisations. Within the overall context of these conclusions, analysis led to a series of key findings, and drove specific recommendations for addressing the issues raised. While the illustrations given are based on data gathered from institutions in the USA, the author's experience suggests that the conclusions and attendant recommendations can serve as a basis for process and performance improvement in any financial services institution.     

Selling the brand inside

When you think of marketing, chances are your mind goes right to your customers--how can you persuade more people to buy whatever it is you sell? But there's another "market" that's equally important: your employees. Author Colin Mitchell argues that executives by and large ignore this critical internal audience when developing and executing branding campaigns. As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company's advertising--either because they don't understand what the ads have promised or because they don't believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. Mitchell offers three principles for executing internal branding campaigns--techniques executives can use to make sure employees understand, embrace, and "live" the brand vision companies are selling to the public. First, he says, companies need to market to employees at times when the company is experiencing a fundamental challenge or change, times when employees are seeking direction and are relatively receptive to new initiatives. Second, companies must link their internal and external marketing campaigns; employees should hear the same messages that are being sent to the market-place. And third, internal branding campaigns should bring the brand alive for employees, creating an emotional connection to the company that transcends any one experience. Internal campaigns should introduce and explain the brand messages in new and attention-grabbing ways and then reinforce those messages by weaving them into the fabric of the company. It is a fact of business, writes Mitchell, that if employees do not care about or understand their company's brands, they will ultimately weaken their organizations. It's up to top executives, he says, to give them a reason to care.     

Are the strategic stars aligned for your corporate brand?

In recent years, companies have increasingly seen the benefits of creating a corporate brand. Rather than spend marketing dollars on branding individual products, giants like Disney and Microsoft promote a single umbrella image that casts one glow over all their products. A company must align three interdependent elements--call them strategic stars--to create a strong corporate brand: vision, culture, and image. Aligning the stars takes concentrated managerial skill and will, the authors say, because each element is driven by a different constituency: management, employees, or stakeholders. To effectively build a corporate brand, executives must identify where their strategic stars fall out of line. The authors offer a series of diagnostic questions designed to reveal misalignments in corporate vision, culture, and image. The first set of questions looks for gaps between vision and culture; for example, when management establishes a vision that is too ambitious for the organization to implement. The second set addresses culture and image, uncovering possible gaps between the attitudes of employees and the perceptions of the outside world. The last set of questions explores the vision-image gap--is management taking the company in a direction that its stake-holders support? The authors discuss the benefits of a corporate brand, such as reducing marketing costs and building a sense of community among customers. But they also point to cases in which a corporate brand doesn't make sense--for instance, if you are a product incubator, if you've recently experienced M&A activity, or if you are expecting fallout from risky ventures.     

商业银行公司治理机制的发展趋势研究

公司治理机制是现代公司制度的基本架构。从公司制度诞生至今,良好的公司治理机制始终和公司的健康运行密切相关。由于商业银行区别于一般公司的特殊性,构建良好的公司治理机制一直是国际银行业所关注的焦点。本文从公司治理机制的理论和制度两个层面分析商业银行公司治理机制的发展趋势,并探讨这种变化趋势对中国商业银行公司治理改革的借鉴意义。作者认为商业银行应当按照国际会计准则提高信息披露的质量,利用市场竞争的力量来改善公司治理机制,注重外部审计和内部审计力量的结合,注重法律在公司治理机制中的作用,实现商业银行激励与约束机制的创新。     

现代企业制度下我国内部审计的建制构想

内部审计是我国社会主义审计体系的重要组成部分。如何完善我国内部审计制度 ,使之不断满足建立现代企业制度的要求 ?如何强化行业监管 ,遏制企业腐败 ,确保国有资产及其权益不受侵犯 ?要解决目前我国内部审计所存在的问题 ,就需要在市场经济的大环境下 ,基于现代企业制度 ,对内部审计加以重新认识和定位 ,并对我国内部审计的建制提出构想。     

A theory of the corporate decision to resist FASB standards: An organization theory perspective

This paper develops a theoretical framework that specifies the conditions under which corporations are likely to resist financial reporting standards proposed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Determinants of corporate resistance to FASB standards are identified at three levels of analysis: the standard, the corporation, and the corporation’s industry. Propositions are formulated summarizing the effects of the determinants at these three levels, and guidelines are suggested for testing the propositions. Implications for the theory and the practice of accounting regulation are also discussed. The overall goal of the paper is to enhance our understanding of the drivers of corporate resistance to FASB standards, so that accounting regulators can manage the implementation of accounting standards more effectively.     

INTEGRATING RISK MANAGEMENT AND CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

Capital management and risk management are two sides of the same coin. But by treating them separately, the conventional theory and practice of corporate finance fails to account for important connections between them. Moreover, an exclusive focus on debt and equity ignores the full range of capital resources available to a corporation, thus distorting management's view of the firm's cost of capital (and its return on equity).
An understanding of the role of corporate capital–including off-balance sheet as well as paid-up capital—and its relationship to the riskiness of a firm's activities provides the foundation on which the author builds a corporate finance framework that ties together both the insurance and capital markets. This framework, called the "Insurative Model," captures the economics of both conventional insurance and corporate finance instruments and embraces a wide variety of solutions and instruments—be they debt, equity, insurance, derivative, contingent capital, or any other—and allows managers to evaluate their effectiveness in a consistent, unified way.
The Insurative Model demonstrates that a company's decisions on insurance and risk retention can be just as important as its decisions about its debt-equity mix. In fact, the determination of a firm's optimal debt-equity ratio should be the last in a series of capital and risk management decisions. Earlier decisions should address risk retention, risk transfer, and the optimal amounts and structure of off-balance-sheet capital used to support the company's retained risks.     

Measuring the Contributions of Brand to Shareholder Value (and How to Maintain or Increase Them)

Since 1993 Young & Rubicam has invested over $130 million in collecting and interpreting data on consumers' perceptions of some 44,000 product and service brands in over 50 countries. At the core of Y&R's research effort is the Brand‐Asset® Valuator (or “BAV”), a model that converts the firm's hoard of data on global consumer perceptions and behavior patterns into assessments of brand strength and value. When combined with the findings of independent research by academics in marketing and finance (using Compustat data on corporate operating and stock‐price performance), the BAV's assessments of brand values can be used to quantify the contributions of brands to both corporate earnings and market values. One of the main findings of this research is that brands contribute to the market value of companies by increasing not only current earnings, but the price‐to‐earnings (P/E) multiples that investors assign to current earnings. Such increases in P/E multiples in turn reflect investors' expectations for lower risk, higher growth or both. At the same time, more recent consumer surveys (conducted in 2005‐2007) provided indications of brand “erosion” even as the markets were pushing up share prices, presumably with the expectation that intangibles like brand would continue to drive operating earnings in the future. For the leaders of consumer‐related corporations, the resulting “disconnect” between stock prices and brand values points to a continuing challenge for brand management. Building brand value is important for both finance professionals trying to increase shareholder value and marketers trying to build brand strength and increase sales and margin. The aim of the authors' research is to bring these two groups—finance and marketing— closer together by demonstrating the role of marketing strategy and brand equity in driving shareholder value.     

商业银行公司治理：进展及改革着力点

随着我国金融业的全面对外开放,银行面临更多更大的挑战。如何有效应对?银行公司治理是个关键。巴塞尔原则和我国有关的法规制度,对银行公司治理有积极作用。但是,公司治理是否有效,还需通过银行的商业实践来验证。优化董事会结构、加强内部控制建设并重视利益相关者的作用,是银行公司治理的重要内容;提高创新能力、服务能力和抗风险能力,是银行保持长久竞争力和实现利润最大化的基础和前提。     

Multinational headquarter control of wholly owned foreign subsidiaries

This paper examines how contingent factors, important for wholly owned foreign subsidiary operation, affect the management control system exercised by multinational corporation headquarters. We focus on two sets of contingent factors: first, strategic factors relating to corporate and competitive strategy; and second, factors related to integration internal and external to a multinational corporation. We apply a control archetype approach to more comprehensively consider the controls exercised, relative to extant literature. Our evidence is based on data from a cross-sectional survey completed by 159 Australian multinational corporation headquarters. Our findings indicate activity sharing corporate strategies, low cost competitive strategies, and higher internal integration, lead to greater degrees of control of wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. Differentiation based competitive strategies and external integration have less substantial and narrower implications on the degree of control exercised. These findings are robust to sensitivity tests and are consistent with our expectations that headquarters exercise a higher degree of control in contexts perceived as less problematic.     

Incorporating Strategic Risk into Enterprise Risk Management: A Survey of Current Corporate Practice

Since ERM is a relatively recent activity and has yet to be fully implemented in most companies, there has been little academic research about its accomplishments and about the obstacles to further progress. In particular, very little has been published about corporate attempts to identify and manage corporate strategic risks while integrating them into a corporate‐ wide ERM framework. This article uses responses collected from a survey of 271 risk and financial executives in North American and European companies to address the following questions: What forces are behind this push for a more organized and integrated management of significant risks? What challenges are companies encountering as they implement implement ERM? Once fully in place, how does ERM affect the company's ability to implement its strategy? The primary drivers of ERM are said to be corporate governance requirements and other regulatory pressures, and management and investor demand for greater understanding of strategic and operating risks. The benefits of full ERM implementation are increased management accountability and better governance practices, greater managerial understanding of and consensus about corporate strategy, and, in some cases, higher credit ratings and hence a lower cost of capital. The tools and techniques to measure the impact of strategic risks appear to vary, depending on the stage of ERM implementation. For advanced ERM companies, the most frequently used tools and techniques are key risk indicators, self‐assessments, and scenario analysis.     

Paper and Hill: An In‐Class Corporate Governance Case

Corporate governance is a set of rules and processes that help ensure that firms are effectively run for the benefit of their stakeholders. Good corporate governance is predicated on having directors fulfill their fiduciary duties while acting as stewards of the corporation. The fact that good corporate governance is essential to a well‐functioning and prosperous society is reflected in CPA Canada's Strategy and Governance competency. Unfortunately, there are few in‐class Canadian corporate governance cases that instructors can use to help accounting students improve their understanding of these three fundamental governance concepts: director duty of care, director duty of loyalty, and the business judgment rule. This Canadian corporate governance case is based on the actual events regarding the approval of Steven Hill's employment contract as the Chair of Paper Enterprises Inc. The case is presented using PowerPoint slides, rather than in a traditional narrative format, as it intended to be used as an in‐class case that does not require advance student preparation.     

Allocating Shareholder Capital to Pension Plans

This article discusses the corporate challenge of providing retirement income to employees while limiting the costs and risks of pension plans to the companies themselves by addressing five main questions:

• ? What are the major issues and challenges surrounding pensions? Although the pension shortfalls have been the focus of attention, the author argues that the more serious concern is the risk stemming from the mismatch between pension assets and pension liabilities— that is, the funding of debt‐like liabilities with equity‐heavy asset portfolios.
• ? To what extent do the equity market and equity prices reflect the shortfall in value and the mismatch in risk? While the author describes some evidence of the market's ability to capture pension risk, analysts' P/E multiples and management's assessments of cost of capital may still be distorted by failure to take full account of the risks associated with pension assets.
• ? How should management analyze and formulate strategic solutions? Without offering specific solutions, the author presents a framework for analyzing the problem from a strategic perspective that can be used in formulating a company's pension policy. In particular, the article recommends that companies take an integrated perspective that views pension assets and liabilities as parts of the corporate balance sheet, and the pension asset allocation decision as a critical aspect of a corporate‐wide enterprise risk management program.
• ? If a company chooses to make a major change in its pension policy, such as a partial or complete immunization accomplished by substituting bonds for stocks, how would you communicate the new policy to the rating agencies and investors?
• ? What are the major issues to be thinking about when contemplating a change from a DB plan to a defined contribution, or DC, plan? The author argues that DC plans without some corporate oversight or responsibility for results are not a long‐term solution.

     

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mapping tool--the brand portfolio molecule--that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify each brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to customers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy relative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connect to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have over this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling program or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atoms, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The usefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that influence a customer's buying decision--and to provide a powerful new way to think about brand strategy.     

Branding and relationships: Customer and supplier perspectives

This paper explores and investigates the role of branding within financial services. Specifically, the study aims to assess the importance of branding and its associated elements including brand image and brand experience in the relationships that exist between consumers and their financial brands. It aims to achieve this through research, which identifies gaps between the managerial and consumer perspectives on branding in relationships in retail financial services. It is well established that the characteristics of services are different from those of manufactured goods and that service personnel play a central role in the services experience. Moreover, the concept of relationship marketing within services proclaims the importance of one-to-one relationships between businesses and customers as well as relationships between consumers and their brands. Drawing from the fields of brand management, relationship marketing and services marketing, this research aims to investigate the perceptional differences between consumers and suppliers in relation to the importance of branding in financial service relationships. The research findings indicate that brand experience appears to be far more salient than brand image in shaping and building meaningful and lasting brand perceptions and promoting customer retention.     

CFO驭变

从低调潜行到"首席忽悠",2012,看知名CFO如何演绎变"化"财道。天下武功,无坚不破,唯快不破。对公司理财而言,为企业创造价值,已成CFO共识,但在瞬息万变的商业环境中,唯有拥有应对变化的快速反映能力,才能真正赢。任何武功,都有自己的不足,防守的再好,也有破解方法,只要意识、攻、守、应机变化等速度远远高于对方,势必游刃有余。公司理财也是如此,现实工作中面临的种种困惑不仅仅要求CFO"武功"高强,要想轻松驾驭变"化",必须具有快速化解困惑的能力,才能发挥"武功"的威力。     

国外旅游目的地品牌化研究进展

本文阐述了国外旅游目的地品牌和旅游目的地品化进程,以及旅游目的品牌战略等内容,并且介绍了各类旅游目的地品牌化的案例研究情况,最后总结出旅游目的地品牌研究有待深入的几个方面。