Do your employees think your slogan is "fake news?" A framework for understanding the impact of company slogans on employees

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Lee, L.W. ORCID: 0000-0002-3818-4445, Hannah, D.R. and McCarthy, I.P., 2020. Do your employees think your slogan is "fake news?" A framework for understanding the impact of company slogans on employees. Journal of Product and Brand Management, 29 (2), pp. 199-208. ISSN 1061-0421

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-12-2018-2147

Abstract

Purpose: This article connects the phenomenon of fake news with company slogans. Focusing on the employee audience, the article explores how this stakeholder can perceive and be impacted by different types of slogan fakeness.

Design/methodology/approach: Conceptual article.

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: authentic, narcissistic, foreign, or corrupt.

Research 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 slogans.

Practical implications: Employees can view three types of slogans as fake news (narcissistic, foreign, and corrupt slogans). This article identifies the implications of each type, and explains how companies can go about developing authentic slogans.

Originality/value: This article is one of very few that draws upon the phenomenon of fake news to explore the impact of slogan veracity on stakeholders. While this work also has relevance to other stakeholders, such as customers, employees are an important audience that has been neglected by studies to date. Thus, the insights and implications specific to this internal stakeholder are novel.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Journal of Product and Brand Management

Creators:

Lee, L.W., Hannah, D.R. and McCarthy, I.P.

Publisher:

Emerald

Date:

5 March 2020

Volume:

Number: