‘Brandspeak’: Metaphors and the rhetorical construction of internal branding

What exactly is internal branding?

The idea of internal branding is, according to organizational scholars such as Edwards (2005) and Kornberger (2010), an extension of culture management that is focused on brands. Like culture management, internal branding revolves around normative control aiming to regulate the employees’ inner lives, their self-image, feelings and identifications (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Indeed, advocates of internal branding suggest that employees (have to) align their behaviours, attitudes, demeanours, outward appearances and language use with the company brand (see, for example, Bergstrom et al., 2002; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Chong, 2007; Miles and Mangold, 2004; Punjaisri et al., 2008). In contrast to culture management, however, internal branding does not want to sell the brand (or culture) to the employees but rather to have the employees act as ‘living brands’ to sell the brand to the customers.

Internal branding differs from the related concepts of corporate branding and employer branding in a specific way. Corporate branding presents the entire company including its products, logo, buildings and relationships to stakeholders and employees as a brand (Schultz et al., 2006). According to Foster et al. (2010), corporate branding has two sub-concepts: employer branding (with an external focus on prospective employees) and internal branding (with an internal focus on current employees). Internal branding and corporate branding are interconnected, but the crucial difference, according to Edwards (2005), is that employer branding uses the organization as a branded entity to target prospective employees, whereas internal branding uses employees as the branded entity to target consumers who interact with branded employees (Edwards, 2005: 272, emphasis added). In recent studies, Brannan et al. (2011, 2015) and Kärreman and Rylander (2008) show that corporate branding and employer branding can have internal effects on employees and their identity work because the employees are an additional audience to these branding activities. However, internal branding focuses on employees as the actual means to communicate to an external audience. In this way, employees are not just an additional audience for the brand message (as in corporate branding), but they actually are the message (see Müller, 2017).

Proponents of internal branding in marketing enthusiastically present it as an innovative tool to enhance employee commitment, motivation and loyalty (Miles and Mangold, 2005; Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005). Employees, regardless of whether they have customers contact or not, are expected to align their attitudes (Aurand et al., 2005; Baumgarth and Schmidt, 2010; Burmann and Zeplin, 2005; Punjaisri et al., 2008), appearances (Chong, 2007; Miles and Mangold, 2004), demeanours, behaviours (Bergstrom et al., 2002; Mangold and Miles, 2007; Miles and Mangold, 2004) and language use (Alcorn et al., 2008; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Morhart et al., 2009) with the brand. This, according to the internal branding literature, will raise employees’ brand awareness (Andruss, 2010; Burmann et al., 2009; Burmann and Zeplin, 2005) and brand enthusiasm (Burmann et al., 2009; Gapp and Merrilees, 2006; Ind, 2003).

Advocates of internal branding often use terms such as ‘employee empowerment’ (e.g. Henkel et al., 2007; Mahnert and Torres, 2007; Burmann and Zeplin, 2005; Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005), ‘passion’ (e.g. De Chernatony, 2002; Mitchell, 2002) or the ‘creation of meaning’ (Bergstrom et al., 2002; Gapp and Merrilees, 2006) and conceal the companies’ economic goals that are, in actuality, the motivation behind internal branding activities. Willmott (2010) mentions that brands have become intangible assets with a monetizable value. Internal branding strives to add to this monetizable value through improving service quality and customer satisfaction (Miles and Mangold, 2004; Punjaisri and Wilson, 2007). De Chernatony (2002), for example, states that internal branding enables employees to deliver services to customers ‘in a more natural manner, with passion and commitment’ (p. 122).

Critics of internal branding, however, highlight important issues. Mitchell (2004), one of the few critics in the field of marketing, argues that internal branding turns employees into ‘Stepford Wives’ ² or branded robots. Edwards (2005) writes that internal branding considers employees a malleable resource for the brand, and questions the ethicality of the concept. Harquail (2007) raises concerns about the effects of internal branding practices on employees’ identities as these practices involve recruitment, appraisal, internal and external communications, socialization processes, organizational décor and artefacts, such as ‘logoed’ clothes (Harquail, 2007). Cushen (2009) points to the normalizing effects of ‘fashioning an ideal employee identity based on the organisation brand’, which may be ‘a normative step too far’ (p. 102). Moreover, Land and Taylor (2010) observe a qualitative shift in employees’ work-life balance as internal branding approaches attempt to tie employees’ personal interests and leisure activities to the brand. This is done, for example, through posting pictures of leisure activities that are related to the brand on the company web page or by presenting employees as engaging in these activities in the company catalogue for customers.

The discourse and language of internal branding

The idea of internal branding emerged in the field of marketing and is based on related concepts such as corporate branding – which appeared in the in the mid-1990s (Schultz et al., 2006) – or employer branding – which emerged in the late 1990s (Ambler and Barrow, 1996). The socio-economic background in which the idea of internal branding appeared is connected to the transformation of brands into strategically important and monetizable assets and to the increasingly precarious conditions of employment in organizations.

The transformation of brands into monetizable assets is an important factor in the rise of internal branding. From being a mere marketing issue in the early 1980s, brands have now found their way into the stock prices of well-known companies or, in the case of acquisitions, into companies’ balance sheets (Willmott, 2010). In 2004, the World Economic Forum declared that ‘corporate brand reputation outranks financial performance as the most important measure of corporate success’ (Power, 2008: 129). The intangible qualities of brands thus have turned into measurable and comparable (e.g. in online rankings) financial assets in the form of brand value or brand equity. As valuable assets, brands are also of strategic importance to organizations as branding efforts and investment in branding have become part of strategic descision-making to create shareholder value (Willmott, 2010).

The precarious employment conditions employees often face today are, according to sociologists such as Kalleberg (2009), the result of macro-level changes of neoliberal globalization (market-driven solutions, privatization strategies and removal of government protection) that led ‘employers to seek greater flexibility in their relations with workers’ (p. 3). In the popular business discourse, the end of standard working arrangements (long term, full time and on-site) was celebrated, and new forms of employment (part time, temporary and contract work) were idealized as leading to freedom and fulfilment (Vallas and Cummins, 2015). Kalleberg (2000) and Smith (1997) report that these new non-standard working arrangements increased significantly in the last decades. Thereby employers ‘convert full-time jobs to part-time, primarily as a strategy to cut labour and benefits costs’ (Smith, 1997: 327). The constant threat of discharge through short-term contracts leaves workers increasingly susceptible to market imperatives and has posed a new scheme of employee control that promises only that the skills and experience employees gain in the current job will be useful in future jobs at other companies (Vallas and Cummins, 2015). Culture management, based on long-term commitment to organizational cultures, did not fit well with the rise of precarious working conditions and so organizations and their consultants formulated new concepts such as internal branding in an effort to strengthen the weakened bond between employees and employers.

The discourse of internal branding emerged in this wider context of rising precarity in employment conditions and the increasing economic value of brands for organizations. The discourse appeared, as mentioned, in the field of marketing when the term ‘internal branding’ began appearing in texts that advocated the idea of internal branding and it consists of a growing number of articles by and for practitioners and academics. It is an interconnected system of texts that construct a certain idea through a ‘particular way of representation’ (Fairclough, 2003: 17). The texts represent speech that is highly deliberate and a trace ‘of an author’s world view, preserved at a point in time and immune to retrospective construction’ (Barley et al., 1988: 27). The authors’ language use is thereby an important factor in how they construct and convey the idea of internal branding and turned it into a concept.

Language, as we can see, is a central resource for formulating ideas around a new concept. In his study on how language servers to normalize new concepts or events, Hirsch (1986) introduces the concept of linguistic framing and writes that ‘without concrete terms, metaphors, and contexts in which to describe and interpret new, unexpected events, it is unlikely that they can become conceptualized as normal, routine, and acceptable, that is, become absorbed into the culture of the collectivity’ (p. 821). In this article, I focus on metaphors as special instances of language because they influence people’s thoughts and understanding of the world (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Morgan, 1980, 2006). In this way, metaphors are important elements of the linguistic framing of concepts such as internal branding. In the next section, I provide more details on metaphors.

Metaphors in a nutshell

To examine how metaphors provide linguistic framing for internal branding, I focus on the ability of metaphors to influence our perceptions and thoughts. The Macmillan dictionary defines metaphor as ‘a word or phrase that means one thing and is used for referring to another thing in order to emphasize their similar qualities’ (Rundell, 2007). Through drawing on the meaning of a word to refer to something else, metaphors can generate mental images as visual associations (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009; Cornelissen, 2005, 2006; Lakoff, 1987; Morgan, 1980; Ricoeur, 1978). Metaphors, like other rhetorical master tropes (Chandler, 2007), are, thus, not merely language embellishments. Rather, they influence our understanding of the world through alternative ways of thinking and, therefore, are of utmost interest in the field of organizational and management research (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009; Cornelissen, 2005; Cornelissen et al., 2008; Heracleous and Jacobs, 2008; Morgan, 1980, 2006; Oswick et al., 2002).

The literature on metaphors describes original and conventional metaphors, and these two types differ slightly in how they generate mental images and visual associations. Original metaphors are easily recognizable as unusual phrases and consequently have a particularly high potential for generating mental images. An example of an original metaphor is ‘Juliet is the sun’ (Shakespeare, 2008: 33). In contrast, conventional metaphors are often not very noticeable; they had typically started out as original metaphors but have become socially established over time and turned into conventional metaphors (Billig and MacMillan, 2005; Charteris-Black, 2004). An example of a conventional metaphor is ‘sunflower’. Metaphor, as we can see, is a ‘graded phenomenon’ (Steen et al., 2010: 18). Only few people appear to recognize ‘the visual quality or etymological origins’ of conventional metaphors (Billig and MacMillan, 2005: 640) in terms of mental images before their mind’s eyes, but these qualities continue to resonate ‘unconsciously’ to ‘shape our understanding’ (p. 461). Both original and conventional metaphors thus evoke images and associations as non-explicit layers of meaning and point to an ‘underlying system of ideas’ (p. 29) that influences people’s perceptions (Charteris-Black, 2004).

A metaphor analysis typically provides insights into what mental images and visual associations certain metaphors generate. In organizational research, the primary approach to analysing metaphors is cognitive linguistics (Cornelissen, 2005, 2006; Heracleous and Jacobs, 2008; Oswick et al., 2002). In cognitive linguistics, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has strongly influenced subsequent research. They argue that people conceptualize bodily experiences which they can understand easily (Billig and MacMillan, 2005), in order to translate these experiences into metaphors by mapping the less clearly delineated concept onto the more clearly delineated. For example, in the metaphor of ‘love is a journey’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the more concrete meaning of journey (based on bodily experience) as the source domain influences the meaning of love as the more abstract target domain. However, CMT assumes stable meanings of metaphors across the language, that is, in very different contexts or fields, without being sensitive to specific discourses (Cameron, 2008). In contrast, I use semiotics as the basis for the metaphor analysis in this article. With its focus on signs and the meanings these signs carry in specific discourses or communities (Barley, 1983; Chandler, 2007), semiotics allows me to focus on the particular discourse in which the metaphors are used, specifically, the normative discourse of internal branding in academic and practitioners’ journals. In the texts on internal branding, certain metaphors appear recurrently in titles, page headers and abstracts and, therefore, must play an important role in the discourse of internal branding. Thus, I want to ask the following question: What is the role of recurring metaphorical phrases in the rhetorical construction of internal branding and how do these phrases portray brands, organizations, employees and their relationships to one another?

Collecting internal branding texts

Drawing on Cornelissen (2006), I collected the texts that I analysed (the ‘corpus’) through a systematic search of seven databases known as common search tools in the social sciences (Jacso, 2005; Walters, 2009): Google Scholar, Business Source Premier, Academic Source Premier, EconLit, SocINDEX, the SSRN and the Web of Science (20 October 2014). My search terms were the words ‘internal branding’ and ‘employee branding’ because some authors (e.g. Edwards, 2005) suggest that they are synonymous, but I also included ‘internal’ and ‘brand(ing)’ and ‘employee’ and ‘brand(ing)’ in a Boolean search. To compare the emerging internal branding corpus with other corpora, I also ran searches for ‘corporate branding’ and ‘employer branding’. To distinguish between different text genres, I created three sub-groups of texts which were academic papers including a reference section and often a quantitative or qualitative study, shorter articles for practitioners, and texts for both practitioner and academic audiences (see also Barley et al., 1988).

I shortlisted the first 50 results (in English) from each database and assessed the relevance of the articles according to title, abstract and introduction section. I deleted texts that made only passing reference to internal branding (see Cornelissen, 2006: 692) and collected only texts that had a clear focus on internal branding. The refined empirical material consisted of 89 texts: 82 journal articles (in practitioner and academic journals), 4 online texts and 3 book sections. About 65% of internal branding texts were marketing texts, whereas the others were mostly in general management. All these texts appeared between 1999 and 2010.

Identifying internal branding metaphors

The next step consisted of identifying metaphors. However, metaphor identification is often based on interpretation (Steen et al., 2010) or intuition (Cornelissen et al., 2008). To develop a systematic approach, the Pragglejaz Group (2007) introduced the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) which Steen et al. (2010) explain as follows: the metaphorical meaning of a word arises out of the contrast between its context meaning (in which it is used in the text) and its more basic meaning defined in a dictionary. Steen et al. (2010), for example, use the Macmillan English Dictionary of Advanced Users (Rundell, 2007) or the Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles (Little et al., 1977). However, while Steen et al. (2010) use MIP to analyse metaphors based on one word or term, the metaphors of interest for this article were metaphorical phrases in which the metaphorical meaning was carried by the entire phrase. To determine whether certain phrases in internal branding texts were metaphorical, I applied MIP to the terms ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ as key components of nearly all phrases and assessed the metaphoricity of the entire phrase.

The definitions of the noun ‘brand’ in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles (Little et al., 1977) included the following: a ‘burning’ (earliest known meaning), ‘a mark made by burning with a hot iron’ (from 1552), ‘a mark (usu. of infamy)’ (1597), ‘a trade mark’ (1827), ‘a branding-iron’ (1828) and ‘a class of goods’ (1854) (p. 230). Although the older definitions such as a mark made by burning have receded into oblivion, metaphors can easily evoke these meanings, as practitioners and academics in marketing themselves admit (Estell, 2002; Judson et al., 2009). The Macmillan Dictionary (Rundell, 2007) described the contemporary basic meanings of the term ‘brand’ as ‘a product or group of products that has its own name and is made by one particular company’ or ‘a mark that is burnt onto the skin of an animal such as a cow, to show who owns it’ or in a literary sense ‘a burning piece of wood’ (p. 169). A comparison between the current basic meaning (product made by a particular company) and the contextualized definition of ‘brand’ in internal branding texts (a promise, set of values, vision, image or message) confirmed a difference between these meanings. A ‘brand’ in internal branding texts was thus always metaphorical. Furthermore, Macmillan (Rundell, 2007) defined the basic meaning of ‘branding’ as ‘the use of advertising, design, and other methods to make people recognize and remember a particular product’ (p. 169). As this definition did not include the alignment of employees’ attitudes with the brand, ‘branding’ had an indirect and metaphorical meaning in the internal branding texts.

The metaphorical meanings of ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ in internal branding texts consequently enhance the metaphoricity of the other parts of the metaphorical phrases. These phrases are complex metaphorical phrases in which the ‘production of sense is borne by the whole utterance’ (Ricoeur, 1978: 146). The complexity of most of these phrases is due to the fact that either two metaphors come together (e.g. in the phrase ‘brand ambassador’, in which both ‘brand’ and ‘ambassador’ are metaphorical) or that one part of the phrase – typically ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ – heightens the metaphoricity of other parts of the phrase and turn the entire phrase into a metaphor. For example, in the rather conventional phrase ‘to deliver a service’ the term ‘deliver’ is of low metaphoricity, but in the phrase ‘deliver the brand’, the meaning of the phrase changes and portrays people acting and thinking in accordance with a predefined set of norms. Due to their high metaphoricity, internal branding metaphors can be seen as original metaphors.

Analysis of internal branding metaphors

The third step of the metaphor analysis consisted of carefully reading through all the texts on internal branding I had collected. I coded only metaphors that combined the brand and employees directly. For example, I coded ‘identification with the brand’ but not ‘identification with the organization’s values’, I coded phrases including the term ‘behaviour(s)’ only when they also contained the term ‘brand’ and I coded phrases of ‘living the brand (values, promise, etc.)’ but not ‘live the organization’s values’. Moreover, I documented findings of additional reinforcing phrases that supported the meanings of the metaphors. However, these reinforcing phrases only appeared in a few texts, not systematically in several or many texts.

To illustrate the frequency of the metaphors and their systematic use in many different texts, I additionally used WordSmith Tools which is a quantitative corpus linguistics software package. This tool allowed me to compare frequencies of certain metaphors between the three text sub-groups of internal branding texts (academic articles, practitioners’ texts and texts for both) and between different discourses (internal branding, corporate branding and employer branding). To prepare the texts, I excluded recurring page headers, reference sections, tables and figures so that the software could only count the metaphors that were part of the running text. The search words came from either the preceding qualitative analysis or the ongoing corpus analysis. After several iterations with new search words, the search was sufficiently comprehensive. Yet, while the search yielded a list of thousands of short text lines encompassing the search words, it could not tell me whether these expressions have metaphorical meaning (see Musolff, 2004). Therefore, I had to re-contextualize the results through extensive manual reworking (see Koller, 2004) before they could support the qualitative analysis. I then documented each phrase according to whether it was metaphorical and tied to internal branding.

Through linking the qualitative and quantitative parts of the analysis, I could add rigour to the analysis because I not only found and identified metaphors but also (1) illustrated the frequency of the metaphors in articles on internal branding, (2) compared the frequencies across authors and in different text sub-groups and (3) compared the frequency of these metaphors between the internal branding discourse and related discourses (as mentioned, corporate branding and employer branding). Moreover, as a cross-check, I searched for all metaphors (with exception of the phrase ‘internal branding’, because it had served as a search word for collecting the internal branding texts) in all databases to see whether they appeared in any other publications or discourses. This search also showed at which time the metaphors appeared for the first time.

Analysing metaphors as semiotic chains

As a fourth step, I analysed the internal branding metaphors I had collected on the basis of semiotics. Semiotics can be summarized as the study of signs or sign systems (Chandler, 2007). For my analysis, I turned to the concept of semiotic chains and developed a method for turning metaphors into semiotic chains. In this section, I first introduce semiotic chains in more detail before I show how I analysed metaphors as semiotic chains.

Semiotic chains are chains of metaphorical associations that connect different practices, objects and so on (Barthes, 1973; Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983). For example, in his classic article on practices in a funeral home, Barley (1983) uses chains of metaphorical thinking to associate the closed eyes of a deceased person with the expression of a sleeping person. In this example, death, metaphorically, is sleep. The basic ingredients of a semiotic chain are systems consisting of three parts: signifier, signified and sign (Barthes, 1973; Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983). The signifier (e.g. the sound pattern of the word ‘tree’) and the signified (the association in the form of a mental image of a tree) together produce the sign (the word ‘tree’ invested with a certain meaning). A semiotic chain consists of two (or more) of these systems that are interlinked as one is superimposed onto the other. In the first-order system, the signifier and the signified produce a sign. This sign, in turn, functions once more as a mere signifier in the higher-order system. This means that the sign/signifier in the ‘middle’ is part of both systems. The first-order system produces explicit denotations based on the common dictionary usage of the sign or word. The second-order system brings non-explicit connotations into play and adds layers of sociocultural associations (Chandler, 2007).

Semiotic chains are typically used to connect practices (Barley, 1983), objects, pictures and so on through metaphorical thinking, but for the analysis of internal branding metaphors, I turned the metaphors themselves into semiotic chains. According to this approach, the first-order system consists of the linguistic expression (a word or phrase) as the signifier and the basic dictionary meanings of the linguistic expression as the signified. Together they produce the sign which turns into the signifier of the second-order system. The second-order system then adds socio-cultural associations (see Figure 1). Thefirst-order system produces denotation and the second-order system connotations the metaphor conveys. In this way, metaphors become double systems of meaning that build on the visual qualities of both original and conventional metaphors. Conventional metaphors typically feature denotation, but connotations arise from historical or etymological contexts. Original metaphors usually feature connotation, but denotation is needed to understand the metaphor as a metaphor. Connotations are powerful visual associations, but, according to Barthes (1973), they are ‘confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations’ (p. 119). Nevertheless, denotation and connotation always exist, and even if one appears dominant, the other still resonates.

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Figure 1.

Detail of a metaphor as semiotic chain.

The link between denotation and connotation depends on the context, in this case the discourse of internal branding. This means that social and historical circumstances always play a role in semiotic analyses (Chandler, 2007) in that the meanings and interpretations are not generalizable across the language as in CMT (Cameron, 2008).

Moreover, the semiotic analysis of internal branding metaphors also included examining oppositions. In semiotics, oppositions appear in the form of paired contrasts (e.g. good–bad, mind–body and culture–nature; Chandler, 2007). However, while one part of these paired contrasts is mentioned explicitly, the other is ‘absent’ or non-explicit. This absent part ‘goes without saying’ and indicates consensus about a certain way of thinking in a certain community and is connected to an underlying social value system (Chandler, 2007). In this way, even the absent contrasts can influence the readers’ thoughts. Barthes (1973) argues that semiotic double systems are often charged with a value system corresponding to the interests of the powerful. Discourses and language then are grounded in value systems (Chandler, 2007; Fiol, 1989), but these values remain hidden so that normative messages appear self-evident and natural.

Internal branding metaphors and their meanings

In this section, I present internal branding metaphors and illustrate their ability to convey different meanings simultaneously due to the interplay of denotations and connotations. The findings show two types of metaphors: metaphors about the entire process of internal branding (the phrases ‘internal branding’ and ‘employee branding’) and metaphor groups about certain aspects of the internal branding process. The metaphor groups are sets of metaphors connected in overarching groups according to their denotations and connotations. The metaphors appear systematically, that is, frequently and across authors and genres, as common intertextual elements.

Metaphors about the entire process of internal branding

The metaphors ‘internal branding’ and ‘employee branding’ are often used synonymously by authors (e.g. Aurand et al., 2005; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Devasagayam et al., 2010; Edwards, 2005; Sartain, 2005). These metaphors summarize the idea of internal branding and provide a label for the discourse. The denotations of ‘internal branding’ tell readers that branding, as a marketing tool, should affect the internal side of an organization, namely, its employees. However, a closer look at ‘internal branding’ shows that it is a complex phrase. ‘Branding’ as well as ‘internal’ are metaphors with ‘internal’ referring to the inside not only of organizations (as the denotation suggests) but also to the internal space of individuals (their bodies and minds). These connotations portray internal branding as an enforced process that fundamentally changes the mindsets of employees. Vallaster and De Chernatony (2006), for instance, write about organizations ‘changing their employees’ mindsets’ (p. 768).

The first appearances of the phrase ‘employee branding’ were in three practitioners’ texts: Estell (2002), Farrell (2002) and Mortimer (2002). Davies and Chun (2003) link this phrase to the method of identifying livestock in the 19th century in the United States to which Judson et al. (2009) adds ‘branding in the marketplace is similar to branding on a cattle ranch. The purpose of a branding programme is to differentiate your cow from the other cattle on the range’ (p. 55). Estell (2002) mentions that ‘employee branding’ makes people think about ‘some aspect of cattle ranching’ (p. 42). These authors refer to the original context of the phrase ‘a brand mark on a product or animal’. Commonly, people do not have this in mind when they talk about branding in marketing; however, as mentioned, language is to some extent always figurative (Steen et al., 2010). In this way, the original context resonates with those using the term in a non-explicit way. The non-explicit original context leads to connotations of employees as livestock or cattle, brand marks on employees, or declared ownership of employees. Baumgarth and Schmidt (2010), for example, refer to the ‘brand-owner’s employees’ several times.

These connotations of brand marks on skin are also illustrated in MacLeod et al.’s (2009) article ‘Employee Branding’ as seen in the pictures in Figure 2. In the first picture, a man’s neck shows a tattoo reading ‘Born to work’; in the second, a woman’s ankle bears a tattoo reading ‘I go the extra mile’, a phrase employed in several internal branding articles to describe ‘on-brand behaviour’.

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Figure 2.

Pictures in an article (MacLeod et al., 2009: 18f).

Metaphor groups about certain aspects of the internal branding process

These findings show three metaphor groups: activation metaphors that depict how the brand gets inside employees, influence metaphors that depict the brand’s growing influence on employees and living metaphors that picture employees turning into living, breathing brands. Table 1 presents examples of the metaphors from texts advocating internal branding.

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Table 1.

Examples of metaphors in internal branding texts.

Metaphors		Representative examples
Activation metaphors
Employees are repositories for brand	Brand is put into employees	Andruss (2008) mentions the phrase ‘to infuse employees with a company brand message’ (p. 26). Bendapudi and Bendapudi (2005) mention principles ‘to instill the brand and its meaning in their [the companies’] employees’ (p. 125). Chong (2007) writes repeatedly about ‘infusing employees with core values’.
	Into hearts and minds	Baumgarth and Schmidt (2010) talk about the ‘“anchorage” of the brand in the hearts and minds of the workforce’ (p. 1257). De Chernatony and Segal-Horn (2003) mention the process of ‘positioning service brands inside the minds of staff’ (p. 1105). Vallaster and De Chernatony (2006) present ‘a framework to leverage the brand’s identity into the minds and hearts of the employees’ (p. 767).
	Identification with brand	Baumgarth and Schmidt (2010) mention ‘personal identification with the brand’ (p. 1250). Punjaisri et al. (2009a, b),Punjaisri and Wilson (2007) and Karmark (2005) talk of ‘brand identification’ several times. Burmann et al. (2009) mention ‘employees’ identification with the brand’ (p. 282).
	Internalization of brand	Burmann et al. (2009) mention the ‘internalisation of a brand into one’s personality and understanding of the self’ (p. 266). Miles and Mangold (2004) write about employees who ‘permanently internalize the brand image and deliver on its promises’ (p. 76). King and Grace (2008) write, ‘Through the internalisation of the brand, employees are better equipped to fulfil the explicit and implicit promises inherent in the brand’ (p. 360).
	Incorporation of brand	Burmann et al. (2009) write about ‘the degree to which the employee has incorporated the brand’ (p. 266). Devasagayam et al. (2010) mention ‘employees’ incorporation of brand values’ (p. 213).
Influence metaphors
Employees behave according to brand	Brand-centred behaviours	Several authors mention ‘on-brand behavior(s)’ (e.g. Mitchell, 2002; Punjaisri and Wilson, 2007; Whisman, 2009) and other authors ‘brand supporting behavior(s)’ (e.g. Chong, 2007; Foster et al., 2010; Lamons, 2005; Punjaisri et al., 2008; Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005, 2006) or ‘brand-building behavior(s)’ (Miles and Mangold, 2004; Morhart et al., 2009). Burmann and Zeplin (2005) and Burmann et al. (2009) introduce the concept of brand citizenship behaviour, a kind of ‘extra-role behaviour’ due to ‘brand enthusiasm’ (p. 266).
	Brand-centred attitudes	Burmann and Zeplin (2005) mention ‘employees’ brand-centred attitudes’ (p. 282), and Punjaisri et al. (2008) write several times about employees’ brand attitudes.
	Delivery of brand	Bergstrom et al. (2002) write about the ‘delivery of the brand essence’ (p. 135). Chong (2007) mentions the need to ‘empower employees to deliver on the brand promise’ (p. 203). Mangold and Miles (2007) refer to employees who ‘are intrinsically motivated to deliver the desired brand image’ (p. 429).
	Enactment of brand	De Chernatony (2002) says that employees are ‘enacting the corporate brand’ (p. 319) or ‘enacting the brand promise’ (p. 10). According to Punjaisri and Wilson (2007), employees should ‘enact the key characteristics of the brand’ (p. 59).
	Commitment or loyalty to brand	Burmann and Zeplin (2005), Punjaisri et al. (2009b) and Kimpakorn and Tocquer (2009), for example, mention ‘brand commitment’ of employees several times; Punjaisri et al. (2009a)and Devasagayam et al. (2010) write about their ‘brand loyalty’.
Employees represent the brand	Brand ambassadors, champions, maniacs, evangelists	Many authors suggest that employees should be ‘brand ambassadors’ (e.g. Andruss, 2008; Boone, 2000; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Karmark, 2005; Kimpakorn and Tocquer, 2009; Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005, 2006). Andruss (2008) uses the term ‘employee ambassadors’ (p. 26). Morhart et al. (2009) talk about ‘employees as “brand ambassadors” or “brand maniacs,” “brand champions,” and “brand evangelists”’ (p. 123).
	Brand representatives	Karmark (2005) and Morhart et al. (2009) mention the employees’ role as brand representatives, and other authors mention that employees represent the brand (e.g. Aurand et al., 2005; Chong, 2007; Foster et al., 2010).
	Visual representation: reflect and project the brand	Employees are motivated and willing to ‘project the desired brand image’ to others (e.g. Miles and Mangold, 2004, 2005), or they reflect the brand values (Bendapudi and Bendapudi, 2005; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Hankinson, 2004).
Living metaphors
Employees turn into living brands	Living the brand, become living brands, embody the brand	According to Estell (2002), employees are a ‘living, breathing extension of your brand’ (p. 42); Bendapudi and Bendapudi (2005) suggest that organizations consider ‘employees as their living brand’ (p. 124) (see also Ind, 2001). Employees ‘live the brand’ (Bergstrom et al., 2002; Boyd and Sutherland, 2006; Burmann and Zeplin, 2005; Chong, 2007; De Chernatony, 2002; Ind, 2003; Karmark, 2005; Mitchell, 2002; Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005), ‘live the brand values’ (Vallaster and De Chernatony, 2005, 2006), ‘become the brand’. They can ‘be the brand’ (Karmark, 2005), ‘embody the brand’ (Chong, 2007; De Chernatony, 2002; Mahnert and Torres, 2007) or become ‘“walking” and “living” embodiments’ of the brand (Chong, 2007: 210). Champ et al. (2007) describe a brand training programme: ‘The first program was “I am the brand”’ – “I am [brand name] and proud of it”’ (p. 14). Employees, therefore, can make ‘the brand come alive’ (Boone, 2000; Mitchell, 2002); Kimpakorn and Tocquer (2009) claim that ‘the role of employees in building the brand and making the brand “come alive” is seen as essential’ (p. 532).

Activations metaphors (e.g. ‘instil’ or ‘infill the brand’ into the ‘hearts and minds’ of employees), and their denotations tell readers that employees learn what the brand means so that they can understand it, support it and establish psychological connections to it. Potential connotations, in contrast, portray employees as repositories, that is, passive recipients, for the brand. These connotations first picture the assimilation of the brand through terms such as ‘instilling’ and ‘infusing’ the brand into employees or ‘anchoring’ it in them. Connotations also focus on the location of the brand in the ‘hearts and minds’ ⁴ of employees as their internal emotional and cognitive space. Some phrases, such as ‘identifying with’ the brand, ‘internalizing’ or ‘incorporating the brand’, capture this process. Although identification, incorporation and internalization rely on active involvement from employees, the connotations of these terms imply enforced processes of employee involvement that create peculiar tensions. All these metaphors portray the employees’ importance to the brand but primarily through their being repositories for it.

Influence metaphors (e.g. ‘brand behaviour’, ‘brand advocates’ or employees ‘projecting the brand image’ to customers) have the following denotations: (1) the employees’ behaviours and attitudes are in line with the brand; (2) they ‘represent the brand’, act on its behalf and believe in it; and (3) the employees produce or reflect an image based on the brand. Potential connotations, however, revolve around the influence of the brand on employees: employees behave according to the brand’s attributes, and the brand guides the employees in order to develop their commitment or loyalty to the brand. This becomes visible in the employees’ own behaviour and appearance. In this way, the brand controls the employees, depriving them of their freedom and leaving them dependent. The brand turns into a powerful entity that makes the employees appear rather powerless. Some authors of internal branding texts mention ‘brand citizenship behaviour’ (Burmann et al., 2009; Burmann and Zeplin, 2005) which fits well with the connotations of passionate ‘brand ambassadors’ representing the brand to others, ‘brand advocates’, ‘brand champions’, ‘brand apostles’ and ‘brand evangelists’. These metaphors originate in politics, sports and religion, and their connotations portray employees as developing a special kind of loyalty to the brand. Some phrases include visual representation due to employees ‘projecting’ or ‘reflecting’ the brand onto others, while other phrases are about ‘brand commitment’ or ‘brand loyalty’ (employees’ inclination to stay with the brand). Such relations suggest, as already mentioned, that the employees are governed by a brand depicted as being so powerful (a quality frequently mentioned in many texts) that it might override the employees’ autonomy and leave them powerless.

Living metaphors (e.g. ‘living brands’, ‘becoming the brand’ or ‘embody the brand’) should tell the readers, according to the denotations, that the brand plays an important role in both employees’ work-related activities and in their leisure time. Phrases such as ‘living the brand’, ‘embodying the brand’ and ‘being (or becoming) the brand’ appear even in the employee questionnaires used to study internal branding (e.g. Boyd and Sutherland, 2006). The connotations, in contrast, picture employees as actual living breathing brands. They imply that employees indeed are the brand, meaning that the brand defines and controls their entire existence. The connotations thus portray internal branding as a form of alienating transformation and manipulation process. Ultimately, the employee as a ‘living brand’ is objectified and dehumanized, while the brand becomes personified (in the body of the employee). Here, the metaphor and its connotations are bidirectional and ambiguous. In this way, the person becomes the brand but at the same time the brand becomes the person. This outcome points to the producibility of employees as ‘living brands’. Living metaphors are prominent phrases in the internal branding discourse and appear frequently with some authors using them as slogans, titles, page headers or labels instead of the term ‘internal branding’ itself (e.g. Karmark, 2005).

The (sudden) appearance of novel internal branding metaphors

In this section, I present the findings of the quantitative analysis that complements the analysis of the meanings metaphors convey. These findings show the frequencies of different metaphorical phrases in internal branding texts, in different sub-groups of these texts, and in related branding discourses such as corporate branding and employer branding. Moreover, a cross-check of these phrases found in all databases mentioned earlier shows when exactly the discourse around internal branding appeared.

The findings of the frequencies of metaphors (see Tables 2 and 3 ⁵ in Appendix 1) confirmed that the metaphors appear frequently. In all the texts together, I counted a total of 3574 phrases. Of these phrases, internal branding appeared 1112 times in 75 texts, employee branding 377 times in 23 texts, activation metaphors 292 times in 42 texts, influence metaphors 1434 times in 67 texts and living metaphors 359 times in 68 texts. A comparison of frequencies in different sub-groups of texts within the internal branding discourse shows that they appear systematically, that is, across different text sub-groups (academic articles, practitioners’ texts and texts for both) and authors. Table 2 (Appendix 1) shows that only 6 of the 24 metaphorical phrases I searched for do not appear in all three sub-groups.

The systematic search for internal branding texts in all mentioned databases and the cross-check of all metaphors in these databases showed that the metaphors only appeared in the early 2000s – with the exception of one article in 1999 that can be seen as the starting point for the discourse. This means that these metaphors are inherently tied to the discourse of internal branding because they simply did not exist earlier or were not part of any published texts before that time. The metaphors appeared together with the internal branding discourse and were novel at the time in which they appeared.

The findings of the search of the metaphors in all databases also confirmed that the metaphors are not part of other discourses outside of internal branding, employer branding or corporate branding. Nevertheless, the results showed that the metaphor frequencies per 1000 words are significantly higher in the internal branding discourse than in the corporate or employer branding discourses (see Table 3, Appendix 1). The novel metaphorical phrases are thus characteristic of internal branding but not of corporate branding or employer branding. As a result, the quantitative analysis shows that the metaphorical phrases in internal branding texts are novel, systematic, frequent and highly characteristic of the internal branding discourse.

Additional rhetorical features in internal branding texts

The findings also highlight additional rhetorical features that support the meanings the metaphors convey. Reinforcing phrases are strategies used to reinforce the connotations of the metaphors mentioned earlier, and distractions work to either downplay problematic connotations or distract the readers’ attentions.