Exploring the Impact of Silos in Achieving Brand Orientation

Brands are widely recognised as important sources of competitive advantage. The newly emerged concept of brand orientation has be used to assess the extent to which the whole organisation is orientated around the brand and thus the extent to which organisational resources are focused around maximising brand potential. Whilst offering potential to improve our understanding of how brands can be effectively managed and offering practitioners a set of tool to this end, this concept is limited in both its empirical and theoretical foundations. Through a case study this paper documents how functional silos are associated with different mindsets that create barriers to the achievement of brand orientation. The case follows a medium sized manufacturing company in its efforts to introduce a brand revitalization strategy across the organization. Despite the strategy having top management full support, the strategy was not successful due to conflicts in priorities across the functional silos of the organisation. The paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the barriers to the achievement of brand orientation through a focus on silos and mindsets. The paper concludes that the brand platform must be implemented meaningfully within each silo.