and culture (Collis and Montgomery, 1995). Fombrum (1996) identifies six categories of reasons why people like or respect, or did not like or respect, companies and establishes a ‘reputation quotient’ (RQ ):
• Emotional appeal: how much the company is liked, admired and respected
• Products and services: perceptions of the quality, innovation, value and reliability of the company’s products and services
• Financial performance: perceptions of the company’s profitability, prospects and risk
• Vision and leadership: how much the company demonstrates a clear vision and strong leadership
• Workplace environment: perceptions of how well the company is managed, how good it is to work for and the quality of its employees
• Social responsibility: perceptions of the company as a good citizen in its dealings with communities, employees and the environment These six categories (Fombrum, 1996) extend further than traditional rankings of assessment for stakeholders and attempt to define some traits of personality in the business. These internal values of the company should be aligned with the external values of its products and brand name resulting in ‘brand manners’ that influence corporate behaviour and enable a partnership between customers and staff, resulting in a self-confidence and distinction in competitive terms (Pringle and Gordon, 2001).
The term personality in the context of the business (Crosby, Evans and Cowles, 1990; Kardon, 1992) as well as in the context of the product brand (Lannon, 1991; Chernatony and McDonald, 1992; Lautman, 1993; Van Raaij and Verhallen, 1994) has been used by several authors.
A simple perception of personality results from the competencies, capabilities and interaction with the customer, or the behaviours dis- played by the business. Strategic positioning may therefore be said to represent the successful linkage between the personality of the business and the performance expectations in a target market. It is now important, therefore, to look further at the nature of personality in this context.
Positioning 51 emphasizes the role that the person (actor) displays to the public. Most academic definitions of personality are more concerned with the person (actor) than with the role played. Personality is ‘the most adequate con- ceptualisation of a person’s behaviour in all its detail’ (McClelland, 1951: 69), ‘a person’s unique pattern of traits’ (Guildford, 1959: 5) and
‘the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychosocial systems that determine his characteristic behaviour and thought’
(Allport, 1961: 28). Personality defines differences rather than similarities
‘a systematic account of the ways in which individuals differ from one another’ (Wiggins, 1979: 395). Hellriegel, Slocum and Woodman (1989) refer to ‘something’ representing the unique qualities of personality. The words unique, pattern of traits, behaviour, differences and something suggest that personality reflects an organization’s values through its attitudes and behaviours towards the customer.
Competitors have a diversity of strategies, origins and ‘personalities’
with different ideas about how to compete (Porter, 1979: 143). In seeking competitive advantage, marketers are attempting to define unique dif- ferences between themselves and competitors, and competitive products and services. The essence of any differences will be defined by unique patterns of traits and behaviours within the organization, the something that reflects the culture of an organization, demonstrated to the customer before, during and after an exchange transaction through the expression of the whole process of marketing: ‘Organizations are understood and analysed not mainly in economic or material terms, but in terms of their expressive ideational and symbolic aspects’ (Smircich, 1983: 347).
The expression mentioned by Smircich (1983) is not always through tangible attributes of the product or service, or even behaviour charac- teristics such as expressions of helpfulness and care, but possibly through cosmetic aspects such as perceptions of reality.
Kent (1986:149) points out: ‘Existing production specifications, prices, markets, and so on are the sum of the firm’s history up to that point and represent the accumulated “wisdom” of marketing and other managers in recent and current attempts to achieve individual and organizational objectives.’ This wisdom reflects a chosen approach to the market, a par- ticular way to achieve competitive advantage, and specific to the organ- ization, and not replicable by other organizations because of unique circumstances and patterns within each organization throughout its existence.
Smircich and Stubbart (1985: 725) agree: ‘Strategy, naturally, is defined as the fit between an “organization” and its “environment”. An organization will approach the external environment according to its view of the
world, its philosophy expressed as values and beliefs, its culture. The recognition of the involvement of the whole organization is reflected in the term ‘part-time marketers’ for employees (Gummesson, 1987: 17).
The provision of credible information is a primary approach to the cre- ation of commitment but ultimately behaviour, ‘volitional, irreversible, and public’ distinguishes genuine commitment to the customer (Ulrich, 1989: 20). Turner (1990) describes the organizational structures as the
‘personality’ of the organization’s system.
Lannon (1991) recognizes that behaviour is the key to both user and brand personality, what people do and then describing what they are like, and not the other way round. The development of brand personality supports an ongoing relationship between the customer and product or service because ‘psychological segmentations may be more directly helpful in describing brand personalities than in defining user personal- ities’ (ibid., 164). Credibility and behaviour are potent factors in establishing trust and commitment with customers. Lannon (1991) develops her theme of personality by describing categories such as alcoholic drinks, perfumes, cigarettes, certain clothing and some toiletries as self-expressive
‘badges’ for making public an aspect of personality and the way people wish to be seen and how they feel about themselves or others. She describes these as ‘personal display items and as such the nature of the message will be image and style based’ (164) and suggests that we should ‘think of these situations as different points in time in one culture rather than different cultures at the same point in time and the possibility of devising different strategies within the same brand per- sonality becomes clear’ (166).
There is an interaction between consumers’ attitudes towards a brand and the brand’s attitude towards the consumer (Blackston, 1992).
A positioning-related competitive strength is a reflection of what may be termed ‘corporate dominance’; a firm’s position could be dominant, strong, favourable, tenable, weak, or non-tenable (El-Namaki, 1992) and this may be understood as a result of external appearance and behav- iour. This seems to be a description of the differences between people and their abilities or inabilities to interact and react with each other.
Indeed, Lautman (1993) suggests ‘dimensionalising’ the service on human characteristics and creating a brand personality as appropriate when there is an absence of differentiating benefits.
The term strategic architecture is used to denote invisible, intellectual, philosophical, and even normative ‘DNA’ that participates in virtually all important business decisions and forms the foundations for strategy building (Kiernan, 1993). According to Chatman and Jehn (1994), the
Positioning 53 personality and ‘shared meaning’ of an organization adopt consistent and stable patterns of distinctive behaviour. They identify seven core elements in successful strategy building; organizational learning, innovation/experimentation, constructive contention, empowerment/
shared leadership, optimised value potential, corporate sustainability, and strategic re-framing. Van Raaij and Verhallen (1994) conclude that general personality scales and personality type characteristics are not well suited to explain behavioural differences because behaviour is determined by the interaction of both people and situation variables.
They consider personality as a subjective variable contrasting with behavioural patterns as an objective variable.
The effect of cultural and institutionalized factors is described in the magazine of the consulting firm AD Little by Deschamps illustrating that personality is mimicked through displays of behaviours that seem to conform to acceptable organizational norms:
Technologists in fast-moving consumer goods companies – arche- types of marketing-dominated companies – tend to adopt a low profile and do what they are asked to do without much debate, so convinced are they that their companies, being market-orientated, must be marketing-driven. The reverse is equally true: in technology – or engineering-driven companies. Marketers often tend to follow – and sometimes mimic – their colleagues in the technical departments (from which they themselves often come). (Deschamps, 1994: 11–12) Kotler (1994b: 354) has noted that the fundamental concept of marketing is exchange, and exchange is a democratic means of acquiring goods.
He observes that ‘too many companies are inside–out thinkers and not outside–in thinkers, they are product centred not market centred’.
Customer loyalty can be no more and no less than an understanding of mutual benefit gained through a repeated and successful series of exchange transactions based on value. Kotler (1994b: 360) says:
‘Marketing’s job is to enlarge the benefits and reduce customers’ costs’.
Gronroos (1994: 9) summarizes this mechanism as: ‘Marketing is to establish, maintain and enhance relationships with customers and other partners, at a profit, so that the objectives of the parties involved are met. This is achieved by a mutual exchange and fulfilment of promises.’
The ability and willingness to think in these ways is dependent upon a ‘marketing persona’ with the associated behaviours and traits that support this personality label. An organization’s positioning, or who
they are, will reflect the customers that they target and wish to serve as well as the way they choose to seek competitive advantage.
Brown (1995: 25) says: ‘There are now two types of corporation: those with a marketing department and those with a marketing soul. Even a cursory glance at the latest Fortune 500 shows that the latter are the top performing companies while the former, steeped in the business trad- itions of the past, are fast disappearing altogether.’ Jackson (1997: 56) does not believe that ‘strategy is what happens in the future’. Strategy is therefore part of the values and personality of the organization because
‘strategy is about what you do today to create the future. Strategy is here and now.’