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Increasingly, the management of corporations' identities is being conducted in the context of empowered, socially engaged, culturally adept social actors who present organizations with a range of conflicting societal and economic expectations. These social actors, referred to as societal constituents, claim moral legitimacy to influence the decisions and actions of corporations they feel have affected their personal and community space. Firms' environments come to be regarded as complex webs of social groups whereby the cultural meanings embedded in their corporate brands come to be morphed across the range of social groups. As such, the management of corporate brands becomes a task of symbolic facilitation and managing contradictions.
Keywords: corporate branding; corporate identity; stakeholder; constituent; society; activism
Today's societal constituents, empowered by the democratizing effects of advances in communication (i.e., Internet and digital) technology, pose important implications for how we consider corporations' identity-building and branding efforts. Far from adhering to their secondary or auxiliary role as prescribed in the traditional stakeholder literature (cf. Clarkson 1995), empowered societal constituents have, with increasing effectiveness, hurled their morally laden vagaries at corporations (Gioia, Schultz, and Corley 2000). As companies increasingly turn to corporate branding to present their corporate personas and values (Balmer 2001; Bhattacharya and Sen 2003; Dacin and Brown 2002; Hatch and Schultz 2003), it is corporate brands in particular that serve as beacons for the voices and actions of societal constituents who challenge corporate marketers' identity-building efforts (Holt 2002). Whether it is an individual's decision to boycott a firm or engage in acts of consumer resistance (Klein, Smith, and John 2004; Sen, Gurhan-Canli, and Morwitz 2001; Thompson and Arsel 2004) or a growing range of organized consumer activist movements (Holt 2002; Kozinets and Handelman 2004), corporate identity claims face a growing range of societal reactions not typically considered in the extant corporate identity literature.
The purpose of this article is to develop a societalconstituent perspective of corporate brand and identity management. In this article, societal constituents are presented not as secondary actors who play a subservient role to "primary" economic transaction-based stakeholders but as empowered, engaged, culturally adept social actors who present to corporations a range of conflicting societal and economic interests. Such a perspective leads to two main implications for how we think about the...