Abstract
Family firms form the majority of enterprises in almost all national economies. While public corporations consist of the two components ownership and business, family firms have a third component: the family. In the past, brand management and family firms have been seen as two separate fields of research. This empirical study focuses on brand management of family firms, which can be seen as a complex interdisciplinary field of research. Taking the complexity into account, a model based on the brand identity model of Burmann, Halaszovich, and Hemmann (Identitätsbasierte Markenführung. Springer-Gabler, 2012) and qualitative interviews that were conducted with German family firm managers, is developed. This model, the so-called “markencloud”, categorizes the different aspects of brand management in family firms and gives family firm owners additional hands-on information on their company’s brand. The “markencloud” does not only illustrate complexity from a scientific point of view, it also works as a practitioners’ tool to support a family firm’s brand management.
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- 1.
Definition of the metropolitan area: https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/regionales/rbs/metropolregion.asp?Kat=4201
- 2.
The IfM Bonn classifies all enterprises as family firms if they have up to two natural persons or their family members who hold at least 50 % of the shares of an enterprise and if these natural persons are on the management board (see Haunschild & Wolter, 2010).
- 3.
According to the Dafne database. https://dafneneo.bvdep.com
- 4.
The program MAXQDA by VERBI GmbH has been used for categorization according to codes.
- 5.
The interviews were conducted in German. The quotes are translated by the authors of this paper.
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Felden, B., Fischer, P., Graffius, M., Marwede, L. (2016). Illustrating Complexity in the Brand Management of Family Firms. In: Berger, E., Kuckertz, A. (eds) Complexity in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology Research. FGF Studies in Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27108-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27108-8_11
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