Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose a fundamentally new extension of the marketing paradigm. This is theoretically and practically necessary since in the authors' view there is an insufficient balance between customer and brand thinking. Design/methodology/approach - While the marketing paradigm is focused on customers, marketing strategy focuses on both the demand and supply side of the market. The authors suggest bringing the paradigm and strategy more in line by adding the brand identity into a new, more balanced, marketing paradigm, called identity based marketing. Findings - The brand identity can be considered the representative of the resource based view since identity will be based on competences and capabilities. Although branding is widely accepted as a marketing issue it has until now not been dealt with within the scope of the marketing paradigm. Originality/value - Adding branding to the highest level in the marketing theory hierarchy (marketing as concept/paradigm, strategy, and tactics), has important implications for marketing practice and leads to a research agenda with more emphasis on the relation between (changes in) brand identity and customer perceptions and needs. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
This longitudinal study investigated reciprocal associations among various professional identity tensions and Dutch primary student teachers’ teacher identity. Students (N = 201, 82.9% female) completed the professional identity tensions scale and the teacher identity measurement scale across three waves. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models showed that five out of nine investigated professional identity tensions were negatively associated with teacher identity at the inter-individual level. At the intra-individual level, no significant cross-lagged relationships were detected. Our findings imply that the development of professional identity tensions and teacher identity are not automatically interrelated and should, therefore, be both explicitly addressed in teacher education.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop a research model to investigate corporate visual identity (CVI) management from an organisational perspective. It is assumed that characteristics of the organisation and of the way a CVI is managed will affect consistency of CVI. Design/methodology/approach - The model was tested in a survey carried out among employees in 20 Dutch organisations. Structural equation modelling with AMOS was conducted to get insight into the various influences and relationships. Findings - CVI management characteristics - socialisation processes related to CVI, knowledge of CVI strategy, and CVI tools and support - have a strong impact on the consistency of CVI, and organisational characteristics affect the way CVI is managed. With the exception of the openness and dynamics of an organisation, no supporting evidence was found for a direct relationship between organisational characteristics and CVI consistency. Research limitations/implications - CVI has been measured by the judgement of the respondents, all employees of the organisation concerned. Therefore the measure was the perceived consistency of CVI. Further research could include a visual audit and the perception of external stakeholders towards the visual identity. There was no distinction examined among the main corporate visual identity and sub- or product brands. The study was conducted in the Netherlands, where the Dutch term huisstijl is unambiguous and clearly related to the corporate brand or identity. Future research can take different brands into account or can broaden the concept of CVI (including cultural aspects, language, rituals, myths, etc.). Practical implications - The results indicate that CVI management matters, that CVI management is related to more general organisational characteristics, but that communication managers nevertheless have a considerable amount of freedom in determining the way they manage their CVI. Originality/value - Corporate visual identity has received little attention in research and hardly been studied at all from the perspective of this paper. This paper has value to both researchers in the fields of corporate identity and organisational identity, as well as professionals involved in managing the corporate identity. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
MULTIFILE
This project addresses the fundamental societal problem that encryption as a technique is available since decades, but has never been widely adopted, mostly because it is too difficult or cumbersome to use for the public at large. PGP illustrates this point well: it is difficult to set-up and use, mainly because of challenges in cryptographic key management. At the same time, the need for encryption has only been growing over the years, and has become an urgent problem with stringent requirements – for instance for electronic communication between doctors and patients – in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and with systematic mass surveillance activities of internationally operating intelligence agencies. The interdisciplinary project "Encryption for all" addresses this fundamental problem via a combination of cryptographic design and user experience design. On the cryptographic side it develops identity-based and attribute-based encryption on top of the attribute-based infrastructure provided by the existing IRMA-identity platform. Identity-based encryption (IBE) is a scientifically well-established technique, which addresses the key management problem in an elegant manner, but IBE has found limited application so far. In this project it will be developed to a practically usable level, exploiting the existing IRMA platform for identification and retrieval of private keys. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has not reached the same level of maturity yet as IBE, and will be a topic of further research in this project, since it opens up attractive new applications: like a teacher encrypting for her students only, or a company encrypting for all employees with a certain role in the company. On the user experience design side, efforts will be focused on making these encryption techniques really usable (i.e., easy to use, effective, efficient, error resistant) for everyone (e.g., also for people with disabilities or limited digital skills). To do so, an iterative, human-centred and inclusive design approach will be adopted. On a fundamental level, scientific questions will be addressed, such as how to promote the use of security and privacy-enhancing technologies through design, and whether and how usability and accessibility affect the acceptance and use of encryption tools. Here, theories of nudging and boosting and the unified theory of technology acceptance and use (known as UTAUT) will serve as a theoretical basis. On a more applied level, standards like ISO 9241-11 on usability and ISO 9241-220 on the human-centred design process will serve as a guideline. Amongst others, interface designs will be developed and focus groups, participatory design sessions, expert reviews and usability evaluations with potential users of various ages and backgrounds will be conducted, in a user experience and observation laboratory available at HAN University of Applied Sciences. In addition to meeting usability goals, ensuring that the developed encryption techniques also meet national and international accessibility standards will be a particular point of focus. With respect to usability and accessibility, the project will build on the (limited) usability design experiences with the mobile IRMA application.