Brand identity

To establish Wood Wood’s brand identity an interview was conducted with two employees focusing on deriving their perceptions of the brand identity. Furthermore, a survey was conducted among store employees in order to test the brand identity claims presented in the interview and solidify the validity.

3.3.1 INTERVIEW

Interviews are useful “to reconstruct the temporal and narrative structure of events that have already occurred or practices that the researcher cannot observe” (Jerolmack & Khan 2014:180). As such, interviews were chosen as part of the research design due to the purpose of eliciting brand identity claims from Wood Wood. The interview took place at Wood Wood’s headquarters in Nørrebro and was conducted with Morten Meldgaard, the Marketing & PR Manager, and Annika Agerled, the Showroom Manager. The interview was conducted with both respondents present. The limitation of this approach is concerned with reoccurring situations where only one respondent provided answers, while the other respondent only supplemented briefly, which might have resulted in fewer insights. The two respondents were selected based on their job positions that enable them to influence the brand identity as well as their high level of contact with the external environment. This could indicate that they are gatekeepers of the brand identity. A general implication of conducting interviews is that they are prone to attitude-behavior inconsistencies as the expressed opinions of the respondents may not be an accurate reflection of their real world behavior (Jerolmack & Khan 2014).

However, this is not considered a limitation in the research design, since the primary focus of the interviews was on respondents’ perceptions about the brand identity, and not on their behavior in relation to it.

The interview was conducted in a semi-structured manner, which partly consisted of open-ended questions from

the interview guide as well as follow-up questions that allowed exploration into areas outside the immediate scope.

The interview process generally followed a traditional survey interviewing approach, where respondents are viewed as a “passive subject [that] ultimately holds the answers sought in the research” (Gubrium & Holstein 2001:116). The limitations of such an approach include the lack of significant recognition of the interviewer being a contributor of meaning and mutual understanding. The interview was also partly characterized by the active interviewing approach, particularly in relation to the follow-up questions. Active interviewing is “an occasion for constructing, not merely dis-covering or conveying, information.” (Gubrium & Holstein 2001:118). Thus, the meaning is created in the interaction and communication between the respondent and the interviewer. The active interviewing approach is consistent with so-cial constructivism focus on soso-cially constructed interactions. The respondent is thus viewed, as a productive source of knowledge and the interviewer is an active contributor of meaning. Consequently, the limitation of this approach is centered on the possibility that the interviewer can influence the respondent to a large degree (Gubrium & Holstein 2001). Prior to the interview, the respondents received the interview guide to prepare for the interview. The interview began with the research design being briefly introduced to the respondents along with a comment encouraging them to clarify a question if they had any uncertainties. The interview guide consisted of 17 open-ended questions that were structured around the six facets of the identity prism: physique, personality, culture, relationship, self-image and reflection. As previously mentioned, whenever a brand communicates, then a representation of the sender and the receiver is constructed as well as the specific relationship between the two (Kapferer 2012). Therefore, questions relating to communicating the brand identity were included in the interview guide. The interview was conducted in English and recorded for the purpose of transcription. The transcription did not include pauses and hesitations, as the purpose of the research study was to examine the perceptions and not how they were cognitively constructed.

Likewise, significant deviations from the interview guide, such as small talk between each interview question, were not transcribed if they bared no conceivable relevance to the underlying research purpose.

3.3.2 CODING

Coding is the ‘critical link’ between data collection and assigning explanatory meaning to this data. The process of coding is a task of data condensation. Coding allows the researcher to retrieve the most meaningful data, gather data chunks that fit together, and add these into analyzable units. The coding process consists of a first- and a second cy-cle of coding. First cycy-cle coding has the purpose of summarizing the data by assigning labels to textual pieces of data, while second cycle aims to create patterns among these labels. There are 16 different categories of coding labels, and multiple categories can be utilized simultaneously (Miles, Hubermann & Saldana 2013).

3.3.2.1 FIRST CYCLE: DESCRIPTIVE CODES TO CREATE AN INVENTORY

The first cycle of coding involved sorting data from the interview by adding descriptive codes. Descriptive codes fo-cus on adding labels that summarizes in a single word or short phrase the topic of a passage of qualitative data. These descriptive codes provide the researcher with an inventory of topics that are ready for indexing and categorization (Miles et al. 2013). In this research study, the descriptive codes were used to summarize the different nuances of how the respondents perceived the brand identity of Wood Wood. This was done in a single word or two. Statements that described the same subject were given the same descriptive label. The result was a list of 26 descriptive codes that summarized how the respondents perceived the brand identity. Examples of first cycle descriptive codes used are

‘sustainability’ and ‘attitude’.

3.3.2.2 SECOND CYCLE: PROVISIONAL CODES BASED ON THE IDENTITY PRISM

The purpose of the second cycle is to create pattern codes. The first cycle coding labels are put into different cat-egories, themes or constructs that provides explanations (Miles et al. 2013). For this research study, second cycle coding was based on provisional coding. Provisional coding refers to when labels are developed prior to conducting the research. However, if the labels lack sufficiency, they can be revised after the data collection (Miles et al. 2013).

The provisional codes were developed in accordance to the six facets of the identity prism; culture, personality, phy-sique, reflection, relationship and self-image. Furthermore, the identity claims were assigned to the respective facets in identity prism, according to the specific questions the interview guide, which covered each facet individually, following the predetermined provisional codes.

3.3.3 FROM INTERVIEW TO IDENTITY PRISM

The interview topics were sorted based on second cycle provisional codes to fit Kapferer’s identity prism. However, applying the uncovered identity claims directly to the brand identity prism proposes two major concerns, both relat-ed to the limitations of the interview approach. First, the uncoverrelat-ed identity claims are derivrelat-ed from one interview with two respondents from Wood Wood’s PR and Marketing department. While both respondents are responsible for articulating and communicating the brand identity, basing the entire brand identity prism on one interview, would result in a low degree of validity. This leads to the second limitation, which concerns the need for consensus within the company to establish the brand identity. Therefore, the validity of the identity claims must be tested, to be rep-resentative of the brand identity. Consequently, the identity claims derived from the interview was tested among Wood Wood employees, to ensure the validity and reliability of the results. Kock, Josiassen & Assaf’s (2016) research methods was utilized. Their research relies on a two-step research design approach, including both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The first step includes qualitative methods for eliciting specific and salient associa-tions. The second step involves testing the elicited parameters and their interconnections through quantitative meth-ods (Kock et al. 2016). The conducted interview constitutes the first step of the research approach, while a survey approach was utilized to test the validity of the identity claims. The survey included all uncovered identity claims and SECOND CYCLE (PROVISIONAL CODES) FIRST CYCLE (DESCRIPTIVE CODES)

Physique

Product Attributes Product Mix Flagship Product

Relationship

Exclusive Limited Service-Minded Welcoming

Reflection Ideal Consumer

Models Self-Image

Special Unique Self-assurance

Culture

Mentality Values Sustainability Lifestyle

Personality

Attitude Contemporary Confidence Cultural Independence

Table 1: Provisional and descriptive codes

scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree). The survey sought to validate the identity claims of Wood Wood by identifying which identity claims achieved sufficient levels of consensus among employees. The sample con-sisted of nine Wood Wood store employees. The sample was selected, since they represent the brand from a consumer point of view. The brand identity prism only includes the core of the brand identity, a threshold of 5 on the 7-point Likert scale was employed to determine whether identity claims should be added to the brand identity prism. Identity claims that scored an average above the threshold were added into the predetermined facets of the brand identity prism. Hereafter, the validated identity claims are referred to as identity traits. The quantitative value of strength derived from the Likert scales was added to the identity prism to indicate the strength of the each identity trait.

A total of 20 identity claims reached the threshold of 5 and were thus added to the identity prism, while six identity claims failed to reach the threshold and was thus ruled out. The 20 identity traits are listed below in table 2.

PHYSIQUE RELATIONSHIP REFLECTION SELF-IMAGE CULTURE PERSONALITY

Streetwear 5,66 Welcoming 6,11 Cool 6 Special 5,44 Subcultural Heritage 5,55 Confident 6 Sporty 5,33 Service-Minded 6 Trendy 5,66 Unique 5,33 Diversity 5,33 Youthful 5,55

Quality 5,33 Cultural 5,33 Self-Assured 5,11 Creativity 5,11 Independent 5,11

Understated 5,11 Personal Style 5,11 Attitude 5,11

Table 2: Brand identity traits

The brand identity prism facets therefore, contains the identity traits stated above, and are illustrated in the in the figure below.