No abstract

While “green marketing” has emerged as powerful competitive force, many markets lack clear institutional standards or knowledgeable customers to allow firms committed to sustainable practices to differentiate themselves from opportunistic, green‐washing competitors. Within these contexts we propose a firm‐level lens based on authentic firm reputation as an important, yet poorly understood, competitive force. Drawing on interview data from the architectural design services context we identify the elements that firms use to communicate their own authenticity, as well as discourage green‐washing behavior of peers, and present these elements as the “Diamond” model of authentic green marketing, consisting of: (1) The ability to appear above commercial considerations; (2) The ability to frame production methods as craft; (3) The use of corporate visual identity; and (4) An organization's social network of stakeholders. We conclude by discussing the generalizability and implications of our framework for practitioners as well as opportunities for future research.

Despite the increasing attention Design Management has received from academics and practitioners a definitive conceptualization or a widely‐agreed upon empirical measure of the construct does not yet exist. This paper proposes a new measurement of Design Management based on the informational elements captured in product design briefs. Exploratory Factor Analysis results suggest that Design Management is made up of eleven clusters: F1 Customer Insights; F2 Business Model; F3 Aesthetics; F4 Authenticity; F5 Symbolic/Experiential Value; F6 Functional Value; F7 Promotions/Distribution; F8 Sustainability; F9 Production/Development; F10 Project Management; F11 Risk/Safety. Our analysis describes how these factors show differing effects on measures of firm performance at the product project‐ and competitive advantage‐levels (for example, F1, F3, and F9 are strongly and significantly positively related to both sets of measures while F4, F5, and F8 are more important to the competitive advantage of a firm than to any individual product offering). Our findings are organized and discussed using the Balanced Score Card for Design Management tool made up of (1) Customer Perspective (Design as differentiator); (2) Process perspective (Design as coordinator); (3) Learning and Innovation perspective (Design as transformer); and (4) Financial perspective (Design as good business).

This study empirically examines the role of product design briefs as knowledge-based artefacts of cross-functional collaboration within design-driven new product development (NPD). Contemporary NPD is increasingly seen as a design-driven and knowledge-based activity where information sharing within team-based environments is critical to successful product design and development processes. However, the mere presence of inter-functional structures has not necessarily led to better outcomes for firms. By drawing on a proprietary sample of 80 product design briefs gathered from design-driven product-oriented firms, our results provide insight into how organizations create, codify and communicate knowledge from different functional areas and support flows of knowledge within NPD, specifically by: (1) providing an inventory of 51 information elements commonly present in product design briefs; (2) organizing these information elements into a parsimonious framework of strategic dimensions using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) alongside a widely-established taxonomy; (3) defining differences between information elements as rated by managerial ‘importance’ across three key functional areas of NPD: (a) design, (b) marketing and (c) engineering/ R&D/ development; and (4) providing a theoretic rationale for these differences and underlying strategic dimensions by integrating our findings with relevant literature.

Most research on authenticity has focused on consumer perceptions of the consequences of authenticity (e.g., prestige, production methods, or provenance), leaving the within-firm factors that contribute to an organization's image of authenticity poorly understood. Drawing on Beverland's (2005) proposal that authenticity is based on projecting an image that is "partly true and partly rhetorical" (p. 1008), our paper proposes a conceptualization of authenticity based the competitive advantage (CA) that results from alignment between firms' innovation capacity (IC) and corporate identity management (CIM). Our results show that differences between high-and low-levels of IC interact with CIM (i.e., mission and values, corporate communications and visual identity) to explain differences in CA across firms. Employing data from the architecture context, our findings suggest that when high-IC firms are able to combine their superior creative capabilities with strong CIM processes (i.e., employing 'partly true and partly rhetorical' capabilities to convey authenticity) they are able create a powerful competitive advantage, thereby differentiating themselves from inauthentic competitors, even those who have made investments in similarly high levels of CIM.