ON CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP AND BRANDED ORGANIZATIONS MARK BLOEMHARD A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Ph.D. in Leadership and Change Program of Antioch University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June, 2016 This is to certify that the Dissertation entitled: ON CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP AND BRANDED ORGANIZATIONS prepared by Mark Bloemhard is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership and Change. Approved by: ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Mitchell Kusy, Ph.D., Chair date ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Laura Morgan-Roberts, Ph.D., Committee Member date ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Roger Blackwell, Ph.D., Committee Member date __________________________________________________________________________________________ Thomas Kaplan, Ph.D., External Reader date Copyright 2016 Mark Bloemhard All rights reserved Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to extend my appreciation for Antioch University’s Leadership and Change Program—to all the visionaries, the directors, faculty, staff. It has been an amazing journey of self-discovery and possibility. My passion for branding has been sparked by the opportunity to work for and with some remarkable people. Among those are Bruce Dybvad, Lee Carpenter, Scott Jeffrey, Bill Chidley, Lee Peterson, and Bob Welty—each one of you are nothing less than game-changing giants in the exciting land of branding. In fact, thanking each one that has contributed to my development as a practitioner, a scholar, and a person would be impossible—their contribution of intelligence, wit, humor, wisdom, knowledge, and patience has formed the very fabric of my being. I would be remiss not to start by highlighting an extraordinary group of academic advisors; Dr. Mitchell Kusy (my esteemed chair and advisor), Dr. Elizabeth Holloway, Dr. Elaine Morris Roberts, Dr. Diana Ridgwell, Dr. Laura Roberts, and my highly esteemed content expert, Dr. Roger Blackwell. Thanks for your friendship, wisdom, knowledge of the industry, personal care. Thanks for holding me accountable and continuously challenging me to conduct rigorous research. This effort is a product of their toil and contribution; any shortcoming in meeting their incredibly high standard is solely my responsibility. Thanks to my cohort. Without you, this incredible journey would have been incomplete. Thanks to my close association of friends, friends, family, and the fascinating lives of four amazing children I have been entrusted to raise; Dakota, Jackson, Atticus, and Liberty. You make my life so indescribably rich. Thanks to my parents, Henk and Maaike Bloemhard as well as my in-laws, Ken and Judy Shelley. Thanks to the various friends that have provided a lifetime i of unconditional support, Greg Portis in particular. The completion of this incredible effort would never have been realized without their consistent care and support. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, thanks to Bethany Merri Bloemhard—aka, my “better three-quarter.” I will be eternally grateful for your love and support. ii Abstract This qualitative study examined a leader’s enigmatic decision-making process guiding innovative and complex organizations—organizations that are not able to rely on market research or the precedence of industry emulators for making strategic decisions. Leaders of highly creative organizations regularly make catalytic decisions that have fateful outcomes; their ability to recognize and appropriately adjudicate complex and unpredictable market forces determine the consequences. Such influential choices often require a deep level of intuition with very little research and time to decide. The purpose of this dissertation has been to develop a framework that presents Brand Leadership as a distinct and viable leadership paradigm. A claim that leadership may be best described as a way of being with comprehensive system-thinking capable of fully understanding the context in which he or she leads; the complexity of the organization and the trends of the marketplace. A Representative Case Research study, which included three brand leaders and nine ancillary interviews, was conducted and four unique contributions have been offered: First, while certainly related to marketing, brand is the higher order and requires strategic leadership. Second, the evolving role of the brand leader fulfills certain needs, including that brand leaders see the organization in the eyes of the customer; and that Brand Leadership represents an internal momentum in which customers are at the center of the organization. Third, Brand Leadership ,in fact, should be considered a unique leadership paradigm as it sees the leader’s intuition as a quintessential proponent to understanding context of the organization and leading within the context of a larger marketplace. And fourth, Brand Leadership is an untapped educational frontier. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, http://etd.ohiolink.edu iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ i Abstract ................................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................. iv List of Tables ....................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... vii List of Supplemental Files ................................................................................................. viii Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 Research Question ................................................................................................................ 4 Research Positioning ............................................................................................................. 5 Definitions ........................................................................................................................... 11 Significance and Justification for Study ............................................................................. 15 Research Criteria for Evaluation ......................................................................................... 32 Organization of Research .................................................................................................... 32 Literature Review ................................................................................................................ 33 Literature Review Methodology ......................................................................................... 34 A Brief History of Branding ............................................................................................... 36 Brands in Trouble ............................................................................................................... 37 What Is a Brand? ................................................................................................................ 40 Introduction of Brand Management .................................................................................... 42 More Than Brand Management Needed: Leadership Required ......................................... 45 Tension of Intuition in Brand Leadership ........................................................................... 48 Brand as the Framework for Making Effective Decisions That Require Intuition ............ 59 Brand Leadership Situated in Contemporary Leadership Theories .................................... 62 Brands and Critical Theory ................................................................................................. 72 Relevant Themes ................................................................................................................. 73 Summary and Implications for Research ............................................................................ 74 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 77 Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 80 Research Question .............................................................................................................. 80 Considerations for Selecting an Appropriate Methodology ............................................... 80 iv Introduction to Representative Case Research (RCR) ........................................................ 83 Sampling Technique ........................................................................................................... 90 Criteria for Judging Quality ................................................................................................ 91 Designing Representative Case Research ..........................................................................