Brand building 375
over time. New staff could appreciate from the
culture how to contribute as brand builders. In
less successful corporations, new managers
were uncomfortable with the issues of corpor-
ate culture and brand visions, and over time
lost sense of their core values. New staff were
less confident about the corporation’s core
values and different styles of behaviour
evolved, causing disparate perceptions
amongst stakeholders.
In corporate branding, staff are not only
critical contributors to the brand’s values, but
represent evaluative brand cues. As such, the
HRM Director should be a key member of the
brand’s team, since he/she devises policy that
impacts on brand building, such as recruit-
ment, induction and training. At Waterstone’s,
the Marketing Director’s view is ‘Recruitment
is a branding exercise, it’s part of the manage-
ment of the corporate brand’ (Ind, 1998, p. 325).
For successful corporate branding, staff must
understand the brand’s vision, be totally com-
mitted to delivering it, and more emphasis
should be placed on internal communication
(e.g. intranets).
In corporate branding, the CEO is respon-
sible for the corporate brand’s health and their
leadership needs to enable all employees to
recognize the importance of the corporation’s
values. An advantage of focusing everything
behind a common name is not only to provide
clear direction for staff, but also to achieve a
coherent focus for the portfolio and commu-
nicate a consistent message to all stakeholders.
The disadvantage is that problems with the
organization’s reputation can taint the image of
the whole portfolio.
Brand as shorthand
There are finite limits to our abilities to seek,
process and evaluate information. Yet surfing
the web, or considering other forms of advertis-
ing, quickly makes one aware of the emphasis
many organizations place behind the quantity,
rather than the quality, of information. To
protect their limited cognitive capabilities, peo-
ple have developed methods for processing
such large quantities of information. Miller
(1956) carried out research into the way the
mind encodes information and his research,
along with that of Jacoby et al. (1977) plus
Bettman (1979), helps us to appreciate what
happens. If we compare the mind with the way
computers work, we can evaluate the quantity
of information facing a consumer in terms of
the number of ‘bits’. All the information on the
packaging of a branded grocery item would
represent in excess of 100 bits of information.
Researchers have shown that, at most, the mind
can simultaneously process seven bits of
information.
To cope with this deluge of marketing
information, the mind aggregates bits of infor-
mation into larger groups, or ‘chunks’, which
contain more information. An analogy may be
useful. Novice yachtsmen learning Morse code
initially hear ‘dit’ and ‘dot’ as information bits.
With experience, they organize these bits of
information into chunks (letters), then mentally
build these chunks into larger chunks (words).
In a similar manner, when first exposed to a new
brand of convenience food, the first scanning of
the label would reveal an array of wholesome
ingredients with few additives. These would be
grouped into a chunk interpreted as ‘natural
ingredients’. Further scanning may show a high
price printed on a highly attractive, multicolour
label. This would be grouped with the earlier
‘natural ingredients’ chunk to form a larger
chunk, interpreted as ‘certainly a high quality
offering’. This aggregation of increasingly large
chunks would continue until final eye scanning
would reveal an unknown brand name but, on
seeing that it came from a well-known organiza-
tion (e.g. Nestl ́e, Heinz, etc.), the consumer
would then aggregate this with the earlier
chunks to infer that this was a premium brand:
quality contents in a well-presented container,
selling at a high price through a reputable
retailer, from a respected manufacturer known
for quality. Were the consumer not to purchase
this new brand of convenience food, but later
that day to see an advertisement for the brand,