Artifacts of Corporate Identity in Emerging Business Relationships

Abstract

The notion of relationship marketing encompasses a wide range and forms of continuous exchanges between market actors. The continuity of exchanges stresses the need for new underlying postures and behavioral consistency, leading to the call for strong corporate identities as a means to maintain and develop market relationships. Corporate identity acts as a facilitator for the establishment and development of inter-firm relationships. When considering business relationships within supply networks, how suppliers and buyers understand and interpret their trading partners’ corporate identity, affects the business agreement and, ultimately, business performance (e.g., Robson et al., 2002; Simoes and Mason, 2012). Companies use instruments or artifacts (e.g., nomenclature, logos, visual identity systems) to convey a desired identity. Attention centers on the management of corporate symbols that transmit the strategic, visual dimensions of corporate identity to various audiences. References to the management of identity symbols may be found in the visual identity literature (e.g., Olins, 1991; Bosh et al., 2005) and organizational studies (e.g., Hatch and Schultz, 1997; Richard and Cornelia, 1997), amongst others. This research focuses on the manifestations of identity at the value chain—channel members—level. It constitutes an exploratory study into the association between market relationship dynamics and corporate identity artifacts. In order to explore the multiple perspectives of corporate identity within a supply network, we developed an exploratory-descriptive research design. The primary form of data collection entailed twenty-eight interviews within a supply network from the engineering industry. Findings suggest that corporate identity embedded in artifacts helps buyers and suppliers define and shape the terms of the agreement and the related emerging inter-firm practices. Corporate identity embedded in artifacts helps to create common and shared grounds for how relationships might work and how unanticipated problems might be handled. Artifacts become important boundary spanning objects. From a managerial perspective, the study suggests that identity artifacts should be used in a consistent way assisting the development of the relationship. Research limitations and implications for future studies are drawn.