Do your employees think your slogan is “fake news?” A framework for understanding the impact of fake company slogans on employees
| Pages | 199-208 |
| Published date | 24 June 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-12-2018-2147 |
| Date | 24 June 2019 |
| Author | Linda W. Lee,David Hannah,Ian P. McCarthy |
| Subject Matter | Marketing |
Do your employees think your slogan is “fake
news?”A framework for understanding the
impact of fake company slogans on employees
Linda W. Lee
Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, and
David Hannah and Ian P. McCarthy
Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –This article explores how employees can perceive and be impacted by the fakeness of their company slogans.
Design/methodology/approach –This conceptual study draws on the established literature on company slogans, employee audiences, and fake
news to create a framework through which to understand fake company slogans.
Findings –Employees attend to two important dimensions of slogans: whether they accurately reflect a company’s (1) values and (2) value
proposition. These dimensions combine to form a typology of four ways in which employees can perceive their company’s slogans: namely,
authentic, narcissistic, foreign, or corrupt.
Research limitations/implications –This paper outlines how the typology provides a theoretical basis for more refined empirical research on how
company slogans influence a key stakeholder: their employees. Future research could test the arguments about how certain characteristics of
slogans are more or less likely to cause employees to conclude that slogans are fake news. Those conclusions will, in turn, have implications for the
morale and engagement of employees. The ideas herein can also enable a more comprehensive assessment of the impact of sl ogans.
Practical implications –Employees can view three types of slogans as fake news (narcissistic, foreign, and corru pt slogans). This paper identifies
the implications of each type and explains how companies can go about developing authentic slogans.
Originality/value –This paper explores the impact of slogan fakeness on employees: an important audience that has been neglected by studies to
date. Thus, the insights and implications specific to this internal stakeholder are novel.
Keywords Values, Slogans, Organizational culture, Typology, Value propositions, Fake news, Employee attachment
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Research interest in “fake news”has focused largely on how
fake news impacts communicationsrelated to elections (Allcott
and Gentzkow, 2017;Guo et al., 2018), journalism
(Khaldarova and Pantti, 2016;Murtha, 2015) and health care
(Cantoni, 2017;Speed and Mannion, 2017). As fake news
involves the production of false information, there have been
calls by marketing scholars to explore the complicated
relationship that brand management has with fake news
(Berthon and Pitt, 2018). In response,this article explores how
company slogans can be a form of fake news, conveying false
information about a company’s actual values and value
propositions.
The fakeness of a company slogan can impact a range of
stakeholders, including customers, potential customers,
shareholders and employees.This article focuses on employees
for two reasons. First, employees are an important but
somewhat neglected stakeholder when it comes to research on
slogans. Slogans are not only created by firmsto communicate
the essence of a brand or company’s value proposition to
customers (Dahlén and Rosengren, 2005;Keller, 1993)but
also to influence employees of the organization, who are
expected to follow the values espoused by the slogan (Baker
and Balmer, 1997;Gray and Balmer, 1998;Stuart and
Muzellec, 2004). Second, by focusing on how employees
perceive and are impacted by slogan fakeness, we offer
bounded and specificimplications for this type of stakeholder.
To connect the phenomenon of fake news with slogans this
article begins by defining fake news and identifies three
different ways slogans can be fake news: through association
with fake news, through the slogan itself being fake, and
whether the slogan is real but conveys fake news about the
brand or the company. The article focuses on the last and
explores when employees perceive that slogans convey fake
news. It is argued that employees attend to the following two
important characteristicsof slogans:
1 whether they reflect company values, i.e. the practices and
culture of the firm; and
Thecurrentissueandfulltextarchiveofthisjournalisavailableon
Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
29/2 (2020) 199–208
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-12-2018-2147]
Received 1 December 2018
Revised 21 February 2019
Accepted 22 February 2019
199
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