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Lars Thoger Christensen: Department of Intercultural Communication and Management, The Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and
Soren Askegaard: Department of Marketing, Odense University, Odense, Denmark
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors thank George Cheney, The University of Montana, James Fitchett, University of Exeter, and anonymous reviewers at European Journal of Marketing for useful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the notions of image and identity are receiving growing scholarly and managerial attention. While contemporary social critics have pointed out that we live in a society saturated with images (e.g. Baudrillard, 1981; Ewen, 1988), scholars within marketing and organisation are arguing that the quest for visibility and credibility in a cluttered and sometimes hostile environment has made the questions of identity and image salient issues for organisations in most sectors of society (e.g. Christensen and Cheney, 1994; Cheney and Christensen, 1999). As a consequence, the pressure on contemporary organisations to focus attention on the symbolic dimensions of their activities has been, and still is, on the rise.
In a seminal article, written more than 20 years ago, Kennedy (1977, p. 130) quoted a Philips company report for saying:"In this age of technology and competition, the buying public is being increasingly faced with a wide choice of similar designs and features within each price range for all kinds of products. It is clear that when there are no obvious differences in price, quality, design and features, the purchase decision may increasingly be influenced by a positive reputation of the brand and of the manufacturer."
Today, with still more competing brands, intensified communication and the advent of new information technology, this observation and its implied challenge is more topical than ever - not the least for the marketing discipline. And indeed, the discipline has in many respects been able to meet the challenge. Knowing that a strong identity has a number of potential benefits for an organisation - e.g. adding value to increasingly similar products, generating consumer confidence and loyalty, stimulating investments, attracting high-quality personnel, and breeding employee motivation (e.g. Balmer, 1995; Fombrun and Shanley, 1990; Olins, 1989; van Riel, 1995; van Riel and Balmer, 1997) - marketing scholars and practitioners have consistently sought to keep the issue of identity on the agenda of...