GRIN Verlag Corporate Brand Management

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 5.0 (summa cum laude), Kozminski University, language: English, abstract: Interest in corporate brands and corporate brand management has risen significantly in recent years. Corporate brand management has moved to the key strategic agenda not only for owners/shareholders and top management but also for other stakeholders. The major factor behind that is the modern shareholder value movement. As a result, the main task of management is to maximize shareholder value and consequently, the majority of big companies have shifted to the adoption of shareholder value as the criterion for evaluating strategies and manager's performance (Doyle, 2008, p. 22). Therefore, the main objective of the dissertation is the conceptual and empirical analysis of the corporate brand management process. The study focuses on three industries: Higher Education Institutions (HEI), Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), and Automotive (AUTO). The reason behind the research of such a diverse group of industries is the intent not to show how a corporate brand works in a certain industry but rather to analyze the common factor: the corporate brand in the process of brand management. In order to fulfill the above stated objective, the thesis will answer the following three research questions: 1) What is the role of the corporate brand in brand management?; 2) How important is the corporate brand for the major stakeholders: company and customers?; 3) What are the most important factors in corporate brand management? In this thesis, mixed method research is used which, on the basis of a thorough literature review, combines both qualitative and quantitative methods. This is more than just the mixing of these approaches; it involves the combined use of the approaches. The research first collected qualitative data (19 interviews with senior managers involved in brand ma