Brand, Identity and Reputation: Exploring, Creating New Realities ...

Branded space-time: Narrative productions of organisational identity and image
Cecilia Cassinger, University of Essex, U.K.
Saara Taalas, Turku School of Economics, Finland
Consuelo Vásquez, Département de communication sociale et publique, Canada
Abstract In this paper we approach brands as epistemic objects that organise the spatial relationship between brand
strategy and everyday work-life profoundly challenging the role of branding work. Through an empirical case of
discussions and contradictions related to branding in a university department setting, we explore how branded spaces
emerge in stories-so-far produced in an email exchange concerning the possible need for formulating a proper branding
strategy. Our narrative analysis reveals that the vague boundary conditions of these spaces, allowing for multiple
inclusions and exclusions, turns branding into an effective mode of governance that is met with very little resistance. On
the contrary, our case suggests that branding gives rise to branded spaces of faith in and through which the faculty
members‘ academic identities and images are negotiated. In this context branding emerges as a possible source for
alignment in a deeply disjoined try to simultaneously find something in common and to set apart.
Keywords Branding, complex organisations, storytelling, space-time
INTRODUCTION
The reading of brands and branding have changed in recent years. The complexity of brands warrants new ways of
conceptualising the phenomenon. In this paper we approach brands as epistemic objects that organise the spatial
relationship between brand strategy and everyday work-life profoundly challenging the role of branding work. Brands
were originally developed as markers for goods to denote ownership (e.g. Martineau 1958; Gardner and Levy 1955),
and supply information about the offer in terms of quality and reliability. In the 1960s and onwards branding theories
were integrated with consumer psychology and socio-cultural approaches to brands (Schroeder 2009; Holt 2006). From
this perspective brands are viewed as devices that simplify consumer decision-making and lower search costs and as
vessels of meanings (Holt 2006). It was not until the 1990s, however, that branding emerged as a marketing and
business strategy. Moor (2007) describes how practices of branding were developed as a response to a range of different
factors, amongst all an increased scepticism before traditional marketing tools such as advertising. What differentiates
branding from marketing communication is that branding encompasses the whole organisation; it is omnipresent (i.e. in
every place at the same time). In contrast to promotional strategies that primarily rely on time, branding strategies rely
on space. Pike (2009) proposes that the object of the brand and the process of branding are inherently geographical for
three reasons. First, the value of the brand is derived from spatial connections and associations. Space and place, he
argues, are given meaning through branded objects and social practices of branding. Second, brands are involved (and
evolve) in spatial circuits of production, circulation and consumption that, and this is his third point, are geographically
dispersed and uneven. The problem with brand management theory is that it delivers universal models based on the
assumption that one-size-fits-all (Holt 2006). This is troublesome, as branding is nowadays extended outside the realm
of goods and services to public institutions such as hospitals, cities and universities, people (e.g. celebrities and
politicians) and geographical places. Research on brands conducted from sociological perspectives suggests that brands
have evolved from being manageable assets to complex interfaces that organise the relation between producers and
consumers and consumers and producers (Lury 2004; Arvidsson 2006). Relations are organised around creating and
negotiating the brand‘s identity and image (cf. Thompson and Arsel 2003). The aim of this paper is to examine the
consequences of the omnipresence of branding for creating and maintaining organisational identity and image. To this
end we define the brand as an epistemic object (Knorr-Cetina 1999; Knorr-Cetina and Broegger 2000) that organise
relations in a spatial sense. Understood as epistemic object, a brand is characterized by an essential elusiveness of look,
content, shape, and story (Zwick and Dhloakia, 2006). It allows the connection of some relations, through the encounter
of some stories-so-far, while disconnecting others. As Zwick and Dholakia (2006: 21) put it: ―A knowledge object may
thus be called more or less ontologically liquid (or ontologically viscous) depending on the speed by which the object is
revealed and the rate at which it changes‖. Given the fluidity and elusiveness of the epistemic object, new identities and
images are not fixed, but negotiated. This mode of organising is not only ‗in time and space‘ but constructs a fluid
space-time, which enables the continuous creation of organisational identities and images. Following Massey (2005) we
understand space-time as the coexistence of trajectories as stories-so-far or, to put it a little differently, as the encounter
of ongoing stories. In this sense, space-time is to be understood as the production of interrelations, which are necessarily
embedded in material and symbolic practices. Taking this relational and performative definition of space-time prompts
the following question: How does branding (re)configure the organisation‘s spatial relations – the meeting-up of storiesso-far?
This question warrants a political reading of organizational identity and image, one that interrogates the
relations through which they are constructed. It becomes then also necessary to ask: whose story is at issue here?
(Massey, 2007)
BRANDED SPACE-TIME
We apply this understanding of space-time aspect of branding to a narrative analysis of a representative situation of
branding related exchange engaged in the internal discussion mailing list in an academic department in a Scandinavian
university during May-July 2010. The email exchange concerned the possible need for the university to formulate a
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