Corporate moral branding: limits to aligning employees

Purpose – To engage a critical discussion on the challenges raised for employees as corporate brands increasingly address moral issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper links theories on corporate branding informed by marketing with theories on employee identification informed by critical sociology. Findings – While the move towards corporate branding with a strong emphasis on moral issues provides opportunities for improved employee identification, it may also lead to unintended implications in the sense of uniformity and centralisation of morals and employee demotivation. Research limitations/implications – While this paper provides theoretical analysis of the potential direness of corporate moral brands in relation to employees, no empirical investigations have been carried out to illustrate and analyse such implications. It is of theoretical as well as managerial interest to provide more research to understand this relation better. Practical implications – Rather than imposing a corporate brand with moral and ethical visionary statements, managers engage employees in the corporate moral brand exercise. Originality/value – The paper questions the immediate tendency towards integrating moral issues to the corporate brand based on an untested idea of that this will motivate external and internal stakeholders. Rather the paper suggests that the corporate moral brand may also serve counter‐productive purposes.