Corporate Patriotism as a Corporate Branding Strategy: A Managerial Perspective

Sammanfattning

Corporate patriotism has become an increasingly visible element of corporate branding inmarkets where national identity shapes consumer behavior and public discourse. Existingscholarship has examined patriotic branding primarily at the product and advertising levelthrough consumer-oriented studies which leaves how marketing practitioners interpret andnavigate corporate patriotism at the corporate brand level vastly underexplored. This studyaddresses this gap through an exploratory qualitative design drawing on elevensemi-structured interviews with marketing practitioners across public and private banks inVietnam, a collectivist and patriotism-intensive context. The findings reconceptualizecorporate patriotism as a dynamic configuration that is reflexively navigated rather than afixed brand identity attribute. Practitioners interpret it as an interior identity formationprocess grounded in leadership conviction and internal culture from which communicative,operational, and institutional expressions are projected downstream. They navigate it throughongoing negotiation between competing state and market logics across episodic andcontinuous time horizons with reflexive recalibration in response to institutional expectations,market opportunities, organizational capabilities and cycles of national sentiments. The studycontributes to corporate branding literature by relocating corporate patriotism to the corporatebrand level by reordering its directionality. It exposes corporate patriotism as alogic-dependent construct shaped by competing legitimacy logics and reframes it as a familyof strategic configurations between which firms reflexively shift.