Reciprocal Corporate Brand Identity Co-creation

Corporate brand identity used to be considered as a fixed and stable managerial creation. This conventional approach has been challenged because stakeholders do not necessarily interpret and enact the corporate brand identity as the management intends. Researchers have begun to recognize corporate brand identity as a co-created process through dynamic interaction and negotiation between the brand and its stakeholders. However, the existing scant research on corporate brand identity co-creation has been typically conducted in business-to-customer (B2C) contexts, and only a few researchers have studied this in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. This is surprising because B2B corporate brands require more cooperative long-term interactions with multiple stakeholders than B2C corporate brands. To better understand the reciprocal corporate brand identity co-creation between the focal corporate brand and its stakeholder corporate brands, we plan to adopt a multiple case study design by conducting two case studies in the tourism industry. This research aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the complex processes of reciprocal corporate brand identity co-creation.