The corporate brand and strategic direction: Senior business school managers' cognitions of corporate brand building and management

This revelatory study focusses on top Financial Times (FT)-ranked British business school managers' cognitions of corporate brand building and management. The study insinuates that there is a prima facie bilateral link between corporate branding and strategic direction. The data revealed that, among this genus of business schools, corporate brand building entailed an ongoing concern along with strategic management, stakeholder management, corporate communications, service focus, leadership and commitment. These empirical findings chime with the early conceptual scholarship on corporate brand management dating back to the mid-1990s. These foundational articles stressed the multi- disciplinary and strategic nature of corporate brand management and stressed the significant role of the CEO. As such, this research adds further credence to the above in terms of best practice vis-a-vis corporate brand management. Curiously, although senior managers espouse a corporate brand orientation, corporate brand management is seemingly not accorded a similar status in the curriculum. Drawing on a general embedded case study methodological approach, data was collected from eight leading (FT-ranked) business schools in Great Britain at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bradford, Cranfield, Warwick, Lancaster and City (London) Universities. Each of these eight British business schools can be deemed 'top' business schools by virtue of their inclusion in the influential FT worldwide list of top business schools. The primary mode of qualitative data collection comprised the 37 in-depth interviews with business school Deans, Associate Deans and other senior faculty members and other managers.