Strategies moulding brand reputation building in the early 21st century

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the changing political, economic and social environment and globalisation have contributed to change business behaviour in South Africa. Nowadays, business strategies are built alongside sustainable business goals, with renewed emphasis on quality and brand reputation management. Business intelligence (BI) systems and research demand show clear emphasis on customer brand franchising and brand citizenship in particular. Brands are no longer used only as marketing communication tools. Nowadays, brand companies seem well aware of stakeholders’ concerns with non-financial business aspects and are responding through re-branding, improved customer relations and good corporate citizenship behaviour. Consequently, direct customer feedback via customer satisfaction and franchise-building research, as well as corporate citizenship image and perception surveys have emerged as key research tools that generate business intelligence used to build and protect company reputation. The way in which contemporary research designs are constructed to guide reputation building and protection, and how these inputs are used to guide business reputation strategies form the core of this article. The discussion reveals that corporate reputation and brand management functions are increasingly being synchronised in support of customer-based brand equity, customer franchise and reputation building. This suggests substantial communality between the management functions relating to corporate reputation and branding. Corporate branding and reputation are anticipated to evolve as a core business strategy aimed at building and protecting corporate identity and image. To meet this endeavour, companies will continue to brand their identity and image and create brand awareness and customer relations to enable stakeholders to differentiate company products, services and features from competitor offerings, but will simultaneously strive to enhance customer loyalty. Customer care and ethical behaviour will probably lead the thrust in creating positive corporate reputation. As long as corporate reputation building and branding are pursued, the demand for business intelligence information related to these topics will remain a priority and will guide future marketing and communication strategies in building and protecting corporate reputation.     

Who is (South) African? A re-reading of Thabo Mbeki's ‘I am an African’ speech in the context of the banned (later unbanned) Nando's ‘diversity’ television commercial

Abstract

In 2012 flame-grilled chicken company, Nando's, released a 52-second advert showing people of various races and ethnicities vaporising into thin air, one after the other, leaving a lone San Bushman wearing a xai who declares: ‘I'm not going anywhere. You f*#@ng found us here.’ Broadcasters SABC, DStv and etv initially banned the advert, citing fears of a xenophobic backlash. In 1996, former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, who was deputy president at the time, delivered what has become known as the ‘I am an African’ speech at the adoption of the South Africa Constitution Bill. In the speech Mbeki appears to codify ‘Africanness’ into a consciousness not just of history, but a shared history. The conceptual reach of his speech seems to imply that everyone who may share South Africa's history is somehow South African and African. This article argues that the Mbeki speech and the Nando's advert, taken together, draw attention to the simultaneous richness and poverty of citizenship in South Africa, and the potential benefits and contradictions of claiming citizenship in the sense preferred by the two texts. The context is supplied by a sampling of 22 randomly selected online comments centering on the censored advert.     

On the use of play theory in analyses of online public commentary

Abstract

The concept of play mediates between deliberation as a mode of reason and resistance as a mode of culture, thus opening a way to think about hostile comment (e.g., ‘flaming’) on online news forums as normal patterns of behaviour, instead of a departure from the received view of how citizens ought to consider matters of public interest. The play concept corresponds with current thinking around the notion of cultural citizenship. To illustrate the relevance of play theory in the analysis of online political discourse, this article uses an example from recent posts concerning the Protection of Information Bill (POIB) in the online site of the South African Mail & Guardian newspaper. The cogency of play theory to the concept of citizenship is argued through a discussion of how citizenship has been understood from the 1930s to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the improved capacities of information and communications technologies (ICTs) made online deliberation a normal site for citizenship to be exercised.     

Global Civil Society and International Summits: New Labels for Different Types of Activism at the COP15

Research in the field of citizenship, civil society, and social movements in relation to larger democratic summits has either focused on radical confrontational elements of activism, broad public demonstrations, or the professional non-governmental organizations. In this article, I label the types of activist groups involved in and around the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen (2009). My proposition is that such a categorization may help to refine the general debate through more nuanced distinctions and accurate definitions and provide a better understanding of why the creative elements seem to take a central role in today's activist landscape. I develop these typological conceptual representations based on an understanding of civil society as a mediating catalyst. By presenting six versions of citizenship participation based on an analysis of diverse ends and means, I identify how each of them has their own specific logic about the democratic challenges surrounding the summit. This analysis leads me to address the question of whether an attempt to bridge the gap between the official system and the active citizen through a distinction between antagonistic and negotiation-friendly forms of activism is fruitful. In conclusion, the creative activist is revealed as a mediating figure in civil society pointing towards a new definition of ‘facilitating citizenship’.     

The 'Bad Mother' in Media and Legal Texts

Mothers who kill or injure their children highlight crucial disjunctions between the status ‘mother’ and the practices and expectations of mothering. Failures of ‘mothering’ reconstruct the meaning of the maternal, while being themselves given meaning by it. Violent mothers may be pathologised and excused, demonised and condemned, but the explanatory narratives that are used draw centrally on notions of the maternal and, more broadly, the feminine. These discourses are reproduced in legal proceedings and sentences, and in the media reports of these proceedings. This paper will analyse the construction of the bad mother in legal proceedings in one prominent recent Victorian case, and in the print media reports of this case.     

“Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?” Immigration,Multiculturalism and the Disavowal of Racism in the Run-up to the 2005 British General Election

The overt expression of racist discourse in the public realm is today—even in the case of far-right organizations like the British National Party—avoided at all costs. Yet approaches by competing political parties to the “populist” issue of asylum/immigration in the months preceding the 2005 General Election were clearly informed by negative ideas of racial difference.

This article sets out to describe the conceptual logic and rhetorical structures of political discourses of cultural pluralism underwritten by the spectre of racism. This “official multiculturalism” is in large part shared by mainstream political parties and national news media, and is predicated on the self-conscious disavowal of racism and racist intent, while simultaneously serving to attack or problematize the existence or behaviour of certain racialized groups, both within and without the nation.

I argue that such interventions increasingly circulate around definitions of legitimate cultural citizenship; that is, on ideas of civil society predicated on normative models of belonging to multicultural Britain. I will consider how the electoral campaigns of both Labour and Conservative parties were carefully constructed with a view to their reporting in the news media, and the extent to which such discourses of (multi)cultural citizenship publicly disavow—yet remain strongly marked by—exclusionary concepts of racialized difference.     

An aesthetics of diasporic citizenship: the example of Lebanese women in the UK

Migration for Lebanese is an ancestral practice that can be traced back to the Phoenicians. This cultural and social heritage has been maintained throughout time and still has an impact on the country to this very day. In the light of the expansion of capitalist mode of production on a global scale and the accentuation of human mobility across borders, the Lebanese migration represents an interesting case. This is not only because of their long tradition of travelling across the world but also, on closer inspection, because Lebanese people seem to have anticipated what has now emerged as a widespread ‘diasporic’ condition. In this regard, aspects such as belonging and participation are crucial. The aim of this work is not only to study a specific migratory experience through a transnational perspective but also to use gender as a fertile analytical category to interrogate all-encompassing issues such as human mobility and citizenship, and to raise more general theoretical questions. Ultimately, this approach will prove useful to critically examine concepts such as citizenship, identity and boundaries produced by contemporary nation states. The objective is to understand what the articulations of belonging and participation across boundaries are and how trajectories affect them. The research has no pretence of exhaustiveness. Nonetheless, as it takes advantage of qualitative methods of analysis, it sheds light on aspects that can prove useful to frame contemporary migration in a novel global perspective.     

Policy framing and denizen enfranchisement in Portugal: why some migrant voters are more equal than others

The enfranchisement of non-citizens across different democracies has been mostly approached at with macro-explanations that propose national traditions of citizenship or transnational influences as remote causes, leading researchers to explain variation through some fuzzy balancing of the two. This article joins the more recent literature focusing on the meso-level, particularly on political discourses on denizen enfranchisement, to examine the deviating case of Portugal, based both on strict reciprocity and on differentiating clauses that divide non-citizen migrants into different universes of voters and non-voters. Such a case allows theoretical refinement of process-based and discursive approaches on denizen enfranchisement and shows that it succeeded in Portugal when parliamentarians framed it as a symbolically generous but practically restricted move that promised prestige gains vis-à-vis Europe and Portuguese emigrants.     

After citizenship: autonomy of migration,organisational ontology and mobile commons

This paper explores the relevance of the autonomy of migration approach for understanding the role of citizenship in the sovereign control of mobility. There is an insurgent configuration of ordinary experiences of mobility emerging against this regime of control. At its core is the sharing of knowledge and infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care among people on the move. The sovereign regime of mobility control is displaced on the level on which it attempts to take hold: the everyday movements of migrants. The frenetic fixation with security is challenged by the creation of common worlds of existence; the obsession with governance is replaced by inhabiting social spaces below the radar of existing political structures. This paper attempts to contribute to a reconstruction of this mundane ontology of transmigration, an ontology which we will describe as the mobile commons of migration.     

‘I am an American’: protesting advertised ‘Americanness’

How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.