Understanding co-creation and its relationship with corporate brands

The success of any corporate brand is reliant on maintaining consistency between the internal identity and its external image (Dowling, 2001; Roper and Fill, 2012). Given that there are multiple internal and external stakeholders engaged with a university, there is a compelling argument for encouraging consistency through the co-construction of a corporate brand which draws upon different stakeholder perceptions (Gyrd-Jones and Kornum, 2013; Iglesias et al, 2013).

Whilst the role of shared staff values in shaping corporate brand identity is recognised, there is limited research that considers the role external stakeholders play in the development process of an organisation’s identity and brand. The notion of “co-creation” seems to accept that internal and external stakeholders play a role in building and framing the identities of brands. Applied to a HE context, ‘customers’ are most likely to be students but could also be, for example, commercial organisations or government departments commissioning research. More recently a number of authors stress that a corporate brand needs the engagement of multiple stakeholders and that multiple opinions should be involved in co-constructing values, meanings and influencing branding strategies (Gyrd-Jones and Kornum, 2013; Iglesias et al, 2013). Gyrd-Jones and Kornum (2012:1486) refer to this as “value complementarity” where synergy is created when a set of stakeholders, such as staff, students, funders and the local community, collectively generate more value than the sum of each partner creating values alone.

Despite some progress in this area, there continues to be a scarcity of research that explores the co-creation process and branding from a multi internal and external stakeholder perspective (Gyrd-Jones and Kornum 2013). Existing research on cocreation and branding tends to focus on a single approach drawing upon one relationship between an internal (seller) and external (customer) stakeholder which would be typically a University and student in a HE context (Kornum and Muhlbacker 2013). This strengthens the calls for more research devoted to understanding co-creation and its relationship with corporate brands from an internal and external multiple stakeholder orientation grounded in different situations and contexts (Gyrd-Jones and Kornum 2013; Melewar et al, 2012; Vallaster and Wallpach 2013).