Internal branding has recently been introduced to the literature as an enabler of the organisation's success in ensuring the delivery of the brand promise by their employees, particularly the customer-interface employees. Relatively few studies have been carried out to understand the internal branding concept from the viewpoint of employees, despite its importance. Moreover, there is only an assumption that when employees are identified with, committed and loyal to the brand, they would behave in ways that support the brand reality. Therefore, this research's aim was to explore the employees' perceptions regarding their role in the promise delivery process because they are as important as those of management and researchers. Furthermore, this study provided empirical evidence to support the link between internal branding and employees' brand attitudes and brand behaviours. Following a case study strategy using the hotel industry in Thailand as a single unit of study with mixed methodologies, the author could perform data triangulation by incorporating the literature review with the findings from the qualitative and the quantitative phase. This thesis revealed the important role of employees and their perceptions of the relevant internal branding mechanisms, including internal communications and training. Importantly, this thesis empirically supported the contention that internal branding affects employees' brand identification, commitment, and loyalty. It also provided empirical evidence supporting the previously assumed link between internal branding and employees' brand behaviour. Furthermore, it added to the existing knowledge that these attitudes, particularly brand identification and loyalty, need to be positively influenced because of their mediating roles. Finally, it revealed the moderating factors in the internal branding process that were identified by the internal audience. As such, this thesis sends an overriding message to management that the coordination between marketing and human resource departments with support and understanding from management is necessary to optimise the success of any internal branding campaigns in aligning employees with the brand.

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Corporate branding research has developed fairly rapidly over the past fifteen years. Insights from a diversity of contexts have contributed significantly to the development of the concept. However, extant studies still, by large, remain under the purview of marketing and insights from non-marketing perspectives are very limited. Furthermore, the viewpoint of employees in engineering-intensive contexts is widely understudied. Hence, this thesis aims to shed further empirical light on the meanings and implications of corporate branding from the perspective of engineers in the context of three British engineering consulting companies. An interpretive, qualitative and inductive approach through case study research design is adopted as the methodology of this thesis. Findings revealed the meanings and implications of corporate branding as well as the reasons for engineers’ disengagement with the corporate brand initiatives. Emergent themes and findings are presented through six organizing themes: the inter-dynamism and mutual implications of personal brands and the corporate brand, the tensions between the two organizing structures of professional partnership and corporation, the conduct of corporate branding and corporate brand communication, the implications of economic downturns for the corporate brand, the engineering-marketing dichotomy and its implications for the corporate brand and, last, the association between organizational culture, organizational identity and the corporate brand.

This thesis uses an in-depth case study of an English university's brand to examine the utility of Martin Kornberger's account of branding. It argues that structuration theory powerfully explains both the relationships between Kornberger's four main categories of branding theory, and the relationships within the empirical evidence presented in the thesis. Using self-ethnography, the thesis reports on an extensive set of semi-structured interviews with 33 participants at the University of Exeter which generated over 600 pages of rich qualitative data, and looks at how the Institution has sought to position itself in the emerging higher education market since the mid-1990s. The thesis offers a summary of the major developments in higher education in England, focussing on the creation of a more marketized sector, and noting the emergence of both the commodification of HE and the rise of the student-as-consumer. It undertakes an extensive review of the theoretical literature on branding, using Kornberger's 2010 book Brand Society to organise the discussion into the four quadrants of his brand box, which in turn becomes the organising principle used to structure the discussion of the empirical material. The thesis concludes by drawing out the main empirical findings from the data, and then turns to examine the utility of Kornberger's account of branding, thus constituting the first detailed use of his work in an empirical setting; it finds that his account is predominantly an agency-based one, as distinct from a structure-based . account. The thesis points out the power of structure-based accounts of branding, and how the two accounts interact, which has important implications not only with regards to the specific case study examined in the thesis, but for branding theory more generally. Specifically, Giddens' theory of structuration is used to resolve the tension between the agency-based and the structure-based accounts of branding advanced in Kornberger's brand box. Finally, the thesis looks at the implications of the forthcoming major changes in the English HE environment and what this implies for the role of branding in higher education.

Fashion retailing within the British market is characterised by large scale companies operating within a dynamic and turbulent environment. An important feature of the British fashion retailing sector is the extent to which the leading fashion retailers sell products marketed under their own name. The sale of own brand products offers fashion retailers' control over retail operations, is a basis for differentiation within the market, and is the means by which the corporate brand is represented within the public domain. This study examines the branding strategies of British fashion retailers, considering the issues which are important to the creation. development and implementation of corporate and own brand strategies.

This thesis examines two critical intraorganisational elements of corporate brand reputation management in service organisations; the role of service employees and the subsequent need for aligning the corporate culture with the corporate brand requirements as a means of promoting "on-brand" attitudes and behaviours. It attempts to identify the extent to and ways through which employees are involved in the reputation management practices of service organisations and to examine the challenges that service companies face in encouraging their staff to "live" the corporate brand. The review on the reputation management, services marketing and corporate culture literature has highlighted that despite the increasing acknowledgement of the aforementioned intraorganisational aspects, there is a dearth of empirical research in this area. In order to shed some light into this gap, the researcher designed a twophase, sequential mixed methods study. The fieldwork initially involved fifteen elite interviews with reputation consultants and service managers. This was followed by a programme of qualitative and quantitative research within one leading service organisation that has recently gone through a corporate re-branding exercise and is striving to promote "on-brand" attitudes and behaviours across the organisation. This involved 14 interviews with company Directors, observation of two senior staff meetings and the completion of an Intranet-based questionnaire by 243 respondents. The research found that reputation consultants and managcrs perceive the role of service personnel and cultural alignment to be of critical importance to the successful management of corporate brand reputations. As a result, consultants and managers argued that trying to involve employees in the reputation management process and aligning attitudes and behaviours through committed leadership and "on-brand" internal communication, training and rewards processes are key in sustaining favourable reputations. However, similarly to academic writings in the reputation literature, practitioners appeared to approach the topic of culture rather simplistically, often ignoring the challenges that sub-cultures could pose in this process. Interestingly, in practice, findings highlighted that employees are often at the receiving end of the reputation management process and that managing corporate brand reputations is more PR-Ied than internally-driven. Commercial pressures, lack of commitment, intraorganisational power dynamics and the lack of a joint effort between the marketing and the HR department, are among the plethora of factors that obstruct organisations from "living" the brand and embracing the corporate brand promise. The study also identified that despite the myth of the one corporate culture, organisations often have sub-cultures with varying degrees of alignment with the corporate brand. Moreover, findings highlighted the importance of organisational commitment in the process of "living" the brand (especially in the case of rebranding exercises) and emphasised the challenges posed by resistance to change within organisations. The thesis therefore suggests that managing these intraorganisational elements is much more complex than is depicted in most established reputation management frameworks. Academics and practitioners should seek to understand the complex nature of culture in organisational settings and strive to adopt reputation management processes that are centered on employee involvement and committed leadership.

Brands and the management of brand equity has become a consideration of both marketing practitioners and marketing scholars. The complexities of brand management warrant study from a diverse range of theoretical disciplines and paradigms. This study seeks to explore branding from the perspective of the SME retailer. A multiple case study approach is utilised, which investigates retail branding in the context of 18 small to medium retailer enterprises. The findings of this study showcase the importance of both the SME specific dynamic~ upon retail branding and, conversely, the nature of retail branding upon SME brand management. As such, a number of contributions are made to the brand management, retail branding and SME branding discourses. These findings include the very nature of retail branding, as a disparate marketing concept, and its implications of this upon SME brand management practice. The inherent constraints of the SME context introduce a number of idiosyncracies to retail branding. Conversely, the structure of the SME, specifically the centricity of the owner manager, elicit a number offacilitators to retail brand management. In practice, this study finds that retail branding in SMEs encompasses management of the retail process across a number of store based components. Moreover, SME owner managers focus on service and product mix features of their retail businesses and attempt to embed meanings of localisation, familyness and heritage into their brand. Finally, the entrepreneurial nature of brand performance is exposed in terms of how SMEs appraise their brand equity based upon intuitive, colloquial customer brand centricity.

Product placement is the practice of integrating branded products in media content. Although this practice has been growing rapidly, systematic scholarly work in this area is only two decades old and focuses mainly on the effect of placement strategies and its acceptability across cultures. Yet no research has examined how consumers process product placements, nor is there any research on placement effectiveness across cultures. This research was conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) and Hong Kong (HK). It is argued to be a unique cross-cultural comparison where differences in response are attributed primarily to culture, rather than any other conditions. Specifically, this research addresses three main research questions: 1) Do consumers in the two cultures exhibit different opinions towards the marketing practice of product placement? 2) Do consumers in the two cultures have different exposure to product placement in films? and 3) What are the key determinants of product placement effectiveness? These research questions are addressed with three separate, but complementary studies. Phase 1 addresses research question 1 and involves 32 in-depth interviews in the UK and HK, exploring young consumers' understanding and perception of product placement. Phase 2 addresses research question 2 and consists of a content analysis of brand appearances in the UK and HI<. high grossing films. Significant differences were found between the two markets in relation to exposure of product placement. Phase 3 addresses research question 3 and involves a full-factorial 2x2x2 experiment on 572 participants (283 from the UK and 289 from HK). It was found that high prominence and low brand awareness led to less positive evaluation of placed brands, while prior disclosure did not cause any differences in evaluation. Participants from the more assertive and performance-oriented culture were less positive towards a prominently or a less well-known placed brand. Prominent placements also elicited more extensive processing, which was negatively correlated with brand attitudes. The findings of this research make a contribution to existing literature by showing I) how placement effectiveness varies across cultures; 2) the mediating role of depth of processing on placement effectiveness; and 3) the role of further regulation in product placement.

Brand identity is important for consumer products because it is a means through which brands are recognised and perceived. It embodies the visual representation of the brand and it can be regarded as a manifestation of the brand style. Brand is recognised through a number of cues such as logo, shape, colour and graphics. For the purpose of this research, brand style is the distinctive appearance of a product based on the shape features that people use to recognize the brand. This research focuses on the shape aspects of the style of a brand and then uses the style in the generation of new designs. For consumer products in supermarkets, a challenge in the development of a brand lies in the brand owner's ability to create designs for new products that will be recognised by consumers. In responding to this challenge, there is a need for tools to support the design of products that have strong brand identity, and, therefore, are more likely to be recognised by consumers. A framework is proposed for describing style, which includes style identification, style definition, style properties and style representation. The framework relates to the geometric aspects of brand style and was used to extract the style from a corpus of designs. The proposed approach to extract style for brand identity includes product selection, identification of brand characteristics, analysis of shape elements, creation of shape grammars, generation of new designs and validation experiments. In a soap bar case study, the experimental results showed that over 90% of participants recognised new designs resulting from this process as belonging to their intended brands. The soap bar case study illustrated the feasibility of capturing style for brand identity through shape rules and using these rules to generate designs .recognisable by potential consumers. In future, such systems could be a useful tool in the brand development process.

This research investigates the distinct characteristics of Kuwaiti heritage in the context of textile and fashion accessories. Moreover, it addresses how these characteristics can be used in the creation of new contemporary designs that reflect Kuwaiti women’s cultural identity at the current time and are perceived as luxury fashion. Luxury has always been associated with privileged and high-class people who use it as a tool to distinguish themselves from the public in any society. This has been practiced as far back as ancient civilisations such as the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks. In Kuwait, before the discovery and production of oil, Kuwaiti society was predominantly living in modesty and poverty, luxury being exclusive to merchants and the ruling family since they could afford it and, importantly, had access to it. Nowadays, a phenomenon exists, mostly among women in Kuwaiti society, in which women’s identity and social status are determined by the visible brands and luxury fashion logos they choose to wear. This research concentrates on the spread of luxury culture in Kuwait from the period just before the discovery of oil until the current time. Furthermore, the research investigates the relationship between the formation of cultural identity and luxury fashion brands within the context of Kuwait. The purpose of this study is to investigate the main factors and events that have a significant impact on Kuwaiti women’s tendency towards the acquisition of Western luxury fashion brands. In addition, it aims to identify the factors that have remarkably contributed to changing the perception of luxury in Kuwaiti society, in order to understand the relationship between luxury and the formation of cultural identity. The researcher uses interviews as the main method for data collection and deploys observation, analysis of visual evidences and participation as supporting methods. Moreover, the chosen strategy is mainly employed in the form of a case study and action research. This study found that there is usually a model for the spread of luxury culture in any society. Kuwait passed through a number of phases in that model within almost 75 years. Currently, Kuwaiti women are recognizing the concept of luxury fashion through their access to Western luxury brands. They wear luxury fashion brands as a means of defining their social position in society, demonstrating that they are economically capable of purchasing expensive fashion labels. However, they are defining their cultural identity through other aspects than fashion. Moreover, both cultural identity and perception of luxury are constantly changing and are influenced and shaped by the surrounding dynamic environment.