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Brand, identity and reputation in SMEs and entrepreneurial organisations
Edited by Temi Abimbola and Christine Vallaster
Introduction
The theme of this paper is that entrepreneurial and small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) (henceforth referred to as ESME). Branding is richer, meaningful and relevant when addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Such orientation integrates the cognitive disciplines of entrepreneurship/marketing, resource-based view (RBV), and our research concepts of brand, organizational identity (OI) and reputation. Published literature on brand/brand equity ([1] Aaker, 1996; [21] De Chernatony and McDonald, 2003; [34], [35] Keller, 1993, 2003; [71] Shocker et al. , 1994); identity ([7] Balmer and Greyser, 2003; [32] Hatch and Schultz, 2001; [55] Rowden, 2005) and reputation ([26] Fombrun and Rindova, 2000; [18] Davies, 2002; [29] Goldberg et al. , 2003; [16] Cretu and Brodie, 2007) testifies to the vibrancy of research on these concepts. These works and numerous others that we reviewed, offer assumptions, theories, empirical findings, facts and beliefs that provide background knowledge and realities of these concepts in practice. But, the realities that the studies on concepts of brand and reputation presented are mainly based on and reflect what obtains in, and are relevant to, large corporations. Although, conceptual, theoretical and epistemological issues need not differ in studying large and ESME organizations, empirical manifestations, differences in operations, size and resources ([44] McCartan-Quinn and Carson, 2003; [64] Stokes and Wilson, 2006), create a significant chasm to warrant differing paradigms.
Following [65] Storey (1994) and [64] Stokes and Wilson (2006), SME is defined as a small to medium firm managed by its owner(s) in a personalized way with a relatively small share of the market in economic terms, and having 10-49 employees. Medium-sized firms have similar characteristics but usually have between 50 and 249 employees. "Entrepreneur" refers to a "predisposition on the part of individuals or firm to take a chance in the hope of gain" ([51] Penrose, 1995, p. 33) by committing effort and resources to identifiable activity. Although ESMEs differs from their larger counterparts, they share a number of factors. They are both engaged in:
- economies that are global in nature and information rich;
- a competitive market led by intangibility ([43] Mahoney, 1995) and expressive and symbolic consumption patterns ([9] Baurdrillard, 1998);
- rapid innovation diffusion...