=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2239/article_14
|storemode=property
|title= Brand Identity Ontology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2239/article_14.pdf
|volume=Vol-2239
|authors=Dina Elikan,Yves Pigneur
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/vmbo/ElikanP18
}}
== Brand Identity Ontology==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2239/article_14.pdf
Brand Identity Ontology
Dina Elikan and Yves Pigneur
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC),
University of Lausanne
1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
{dina.elikan, yves.pigneur}@unil.ch
Abstract. Brand Identity is of paramount importance for or«ganizations today.
Due to the advancement of technology, faster innovation, growing competition
and more demanding consumers, managing a brand is becoming more and more
complex. Entrepreneurs in Startups and SMEs need to have a clear branding strat-
egy: a narrative that defines the company’s vision, inspires employees and others,
and remains relevant through changes. This is hard since the branding concept
has been researched from many different perspectives, which makes it foggy.
This paper aims to present an ontology that uncovers the key concepts of startup
and SME brand identity, in order not only to bring some semantical clarity to the
topic but also to lay the foundation for the development of a co-design tool to
collaboratively inquire on brand identity in startups and SMEs.
Keywords: Brand modeling, Brand identity, Startup, SME
1 Introduction
Brand identity is of paramount importance for organizations today. Due to the advance-
ment of technology, faster innovation, growing competition and more demanding con-
sumers, managing a brand is becoming more and more complex [28],[5],[2],[20]. Brand
identity strategies aim at guiding brand decisions, guarantee the coherence of a market-
ing strategy over time and should be associated with specific and limited core values
that are complementary to organizational value and culture [8];[30]. It is through the
development of a specific brand identity that a company makes a brand unique and
conveys its distinctiveness [29].
The creation of a well-defined brand identity during a company’s infancy helps it to
manage its strategic direction and the value it creates for stakeholders. Startups and
SMEs need to attract attention from both internal and external stakeholders in order to
be successful [7]. They need to communicate their purpose and identity in order to sell
to their potential investors and customers, as well as to communicate consistently on
social media. However, often SME owner-managers seem to think that branding is out
of their reach [22]. Adding to that, Fetscherin and Usunier [10] state that the concept of
brand is still unclear and could benefit from a conceptual model.
2
Because brand identity is an ill-defined problem, a co-design tool would help practi-
tioners better frame the problem and allow them to collaboratively prototype potential
solutions [4]. Nonetheless, to our knowledge and according to a SME in the domain of
energy in Switzerland and a Fintech Startup based in Switzerland and Mexico, who
both tried to rethink their brand identity strategy, it is a real issue and to date, there is
no existing tool that has proven useful for that. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that
startups and SMEs have so far put little emphasis on branding [19],[11],[25].
This paper’s contributions are twofold: first we present a state of the current brand
identity ontology and second, we lay the foundation for the development of a visual
inquiry tool for entrepreneurs to co-design their brand identity. This ontology, imple-
mented in a formal language could also be used by companies for supporting their In-
formation Systems for managing their brand identity. The remainder of the paper is
organized as follows: in section 2, we describe the components of the ontology. We
present the current state of that ontology in section 3. In section 4, we discuss these
results and present future work in section 5.
2 Brand Identity
A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted [9] in order to uncover the differ-
ent components captured and useful for the “brand identity ontology”. A total of 1592
papers were found on the topic of “corporate brand identity” in the different sources
looked at (Google Scholar, Emerald Fulltext, JSTOR, ISI Web of Knowledge and
Springer Link). Then some inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, to keep only
the papers written in English, that were relevant to define the brand identity concept.
We ended up with a total of 55 papers, which led to 24 concepts seen as relevant.
Among these 24 concepts, some were sharing a same meaning but with different se-
mantics and others were not applicable for startups and SMEs brand identity strategy.
Thus, we kept only nine elements, which seemed to summarize all the necessary con-
cepts of brand identity applied to startups and SMEs. When trying to apply the concept
of “corporate brand identity” to startups and SMEs, one has to look at the main differ-
ence between brand identity for large organization (LO) and smaller organizations
(SO). According to Spence and Hamzaoui [28], the main differences are the following:
in a LO, the brand identity concept comes from a visionary management, whereas in
SO, it comes from a visionary individual (i.e.: the entrepreneur). In LO it is a systematic
process based on extensive market research in order to fill a gap in the market place,
whereas in SO it is an intuitive process based on the entrepreneur’s personality and
values. As for the strategy, in LO multiple strategies are used with the aim of maxim-
izing market coverage and overlaps. It is usually part of the overall brand strategy de-
velopment. In SO, the number of strategies is limited. Collaborative strategies as well
as corporate branding are generally not used at all.
These findings show that the concept of brand identity has been looked at from a wide
range of disciplines (marketing, organizational behavior, strategy and communication),
which explains the semantic confusion around this concept. The brand identity concept
3
includes a set of components that determine a brand’s way of being, thinking and be-
having. It defines the purpose and meaning of a brand and the directions it should fol-
low. For marketing scholars, one of the main concepts of corporate branding is identi-
fication. For instance, Aaker [1] and Melewar et al., [21] have defined it as the commu-
nication of the unique features of a product or service to customers, which in turn dif-
ferentiates the brand from its competitors. From a strategic perspective, it is seen as a
key activity that requires to be managed, which is constructed by different activities. In
organizational behavior, scholars tend to look at brand identity to understand the rela-
tions between internal and external stakeholders in organizations. But in different dis-
ciplines, authors seem to agree that the brand era has shifted from a “relationship-focus”
era where only external and internal customers were taken into account to a “stake-
holder-focus” era, where all stakeholders are considered [23].
3 Method
This project relies on a design science research methodology [31], which is widely ac-
cepted in Information Systems (IS) for designing innovative artefacts. This approach
particularly suits this project because it allows both to support the design phases and
the evaluation phases of the different artefacts that are to be developed. In particular,
Hevner et al., [31] state that « knowledge and understanding of a problem domain and
its solution are achieved in the building and application of the designed artifact. ». Be-
cause the aim of this project is to better understand the problem of brand identity in
startups and SMEs and to build new artefacts to solve it, this seems like the appropriate
approach.
4 Conceptual Model
From the literature review, and following a classical ontology engineering methodology
[12], a formalization as a brand identity ontology is developed. The ontology follows
the modelling principles of the previous section and tries to be as close to the literature
as possible. The objective is to develop an ontology flexible enough to accommodate
all the existing theories from all the different fields of research, like the ones presented
in the section 2. The first step has been to formalize the brand identity model.
We started the model by looking at brand identity from a strategical viewpoint. To do
so Hatch and Schultz [17], propose that vision image and culture are the main concepts
that need to be aligned. They explain that an organizational identity is an ongoing pro-
cess that behaves like a conversation between the organization self (the culture) and the
images held by the key stakeholders. In that sense, they are the first authors and to our
knowledge the only ones to look at identity as a dynamic process constructed from
interrelations between different concepts. We started from these three elements and
tried to look at all the components found in the literature with that lens. We thus, looked
at all the other elements in relations with these three main elements. Two main different
4
parts or interfaces can be identified in the model, they differentiate between the internal
and external parts of a company.
Fig. 1. Emergent brand identity relationships based on the SLR
Vision is an internal element of an organization that will drive the positioning of an
organization’s brand. It is the organization’s long term purpose, reason of existence,
vision and philosophy. It describes the starting point from where all the activities of the
organization are initiated. It will also generate a certain culture. Culture is a collective
way of thinking, a collective feeling among internal stakeholders. This feeling results
from values, culture strength and future directions, as for instance differentiators from
competitors. Culture is highly influenced by the values, which are the moral beliefs and
principles of the organization. These values mixed with all the beliefs and the ideologies
present in an organization form its personality. This personality will highly influence
the visual components (i.e: all the visual elements, such as the name, symbols, design,
website and everything that can be seen) that will be used to communicate with different
stakeholders. Communication refers to all the media used for communicating with
stakeholders, which will transform these different communications that reach them into
an image. Image is seen as being both internal and external to an organization. Some
researchers see it as the way they would like outsiders to see their organization whereas
others see it as the way different external stakeholders actually see the organization. By
combining both of these views, we state that image is a holistic view held by stakehold-
ers (internal or external) towards a specific organization and it is the result of sense-
making by these stakeholders and communication from the organization of a projected
picture of itself. It is also influenced by daily interactions between organizational inter-
nal members and external audiences (relationships).
5 UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology)
In order to enrich the ontology, we chose to take existing upper ontologies into account.
Upper ontologies, also called top-level ontologies allow for defining the basic entities
and general categories that constitute the universe and provide a common reference
framework and vocabulary [14]. For building new ontologies, foundational ontologies
5
are seen as a good starting point to provide a reference point for allowing comparisons
among different ontological approaches. They are conceptualizations that contain spec-
ifications of domain independent concepts and relations based on formal principles de-
rived from different sources [24]. Because we want to define an ontology, based on
new concepts, we adopted the descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engi-
neering. This allows us to better define these new concepts by grounding them in more
general categories.
UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology) was created by Guizzardi [15], it was developed
to provide foundations for conceptual modeling based on philosophically principles as
well as capturing the ontological distinctions underlying human cognition and common
sense. It is adapted to the brand identity concepts, because they are drawn from different
domains of research (i.e.: marketing, organizational theories, strategy). It has proven
useful for helping defining (ontological) real-world semantics for their underlying con-
cepts and providing guidelines for their correct use [16]. OntoUML is a pattern-based
and ontologically well-founded version of the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
[6]. Its meta-model was designed in compliance with the ontological distinctions of the
Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). It is thus logical to use OntoUML when design-
ing a unified formal ontology. It allows to attain a great level of expressivity while
producing an ontology that can be easily shared through the web and thus be opened to
third party extensions. The ontology presented in this paper has been formalized on
OLED, a lightweight editor for developing, evaluating and implementing domain on-
tologies using OntoUML. The result is shown in Fig 2.
Fig. 2. Brand Identity Ontology conceptualized using UFO, formalized in OntoUML
6
The different parts of the model have been modelled using the primitives provided by
OntoUML. The main building blocks are categories. The first step has been to model
all of the found concepts shown in Fig. 1 as categories. Therefore, there are categories
such as Vision, Culture, Image, and so on. For the relations among these concepts in
the model, properties have been generated, i.e. derived, formalization, characterization,
etc. The full specification of the Brand Identity Ontology, in OntoUML format can be
available upon request.
The previous formalization provides little semantics apart from those explicitly present
in the model. We have started this conceptualization by looking at the three components
of a brand identity that need to be aligned in order to provide the company with a strong
a coherent brand identity. These three elements are “vision”, “culture” and “image” and
according to Hatch and Schultz [18]. Vision is the long-term vision of an organization,
the reason of existence and the purpose of a company. It describes the starting point
from where all the activities of the organization are initiated. It is the result of a com-
pany’s purpose and reason of existence. It then influences the positioning, which is
derived from values and positioning. We have added the sub-kinds of the visual com-
ponents and the members of the members of the collective “stakeholders”. The different
relations between the components have also been further specified.
6 Conclusions and Future Work
In this paper, we present a model for describing brand identity in the context of startups
and SMEs. The model is formalized as an ontology that can easily be computerized.
This concept, even though it lacks clarity and formalism, has not to our knowledge been
looked at in a formal way until now. And according to [10], the concept lacks a clear
definition and would benefit from a conceptual model. To conceptualize brand identity
in startups and SMEs we propose an ontology based on a systematic literature review
and the definitions of relevant contextual elements. This ontology is based on the On-
toUML standards, which allows it to be mutable, expandable and reusable. Having
taken this approach, we can deal with the fuzziness and complexity of the topic of brand
identity.
Further work includes evaluating this ontology, trying to apply it on real-case scenario
to see if it manages to describe brand identity creation and management in startups and
SMEs. Evaluations and iterations of this ontology will allow to specify it and refine it
as well as enrich it to make it as close as possible to the reality of the observed phe-
nomenon. Gomez-Perez [13] proposes that evaluations allow for correctness and com-
pleteness of ontologies’ definitions, documentation and software. They should thus be
evaluated on any intermediate or final definition, a set of definitions, documentation,
and software environment. Almeida [3] proposes a framework that allows to evaluate
whether the ontology is representative of the domain it tries to model. The evaluation
process proposed by this author lies in two phases: prototype use and questionnaire
answers. The goal of the prototype is to see if an application of the ontology can be
used whereas the questionnaire is aimed at the concerned users to ask them to evaluate
7
whether the ontology is able to represent what it should according to their knowledge
and expectations. We plan on applying both of these authors’ propositions and evaluate
different intermediate versions of the ontology before reaching some stabilization.
The next steps include the design of a visual tool corresponding to the proposed and
refined ontology after it has been evaluated. Designing a visual artefact corresponding
to the logic of this ontology will allow its use for startups and SMEs. Following Avidiji
et al. [4], this ontology would be the basis of a visual inquiry for entrepreneurs to co-
design their brand identity. The conceptual model would be instantiated into a visual
tool using visualization principles. This tool would allow practitioners to have a shared
visual and shared understanding of their brand identity strategy. It would support and
guide them towards explorations and discussions about potential brand identity strate-
gies. This visual instantiation would be a Brand Identity Canvas that would comple-
ment the Business Model Canvas [26] and the Value Proposition Canvas [26]. It would
thus, contribute to the practical domain by giving practitioners a strategic tool that can
be used to co-design the building and management of their brand identity.
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