Performative corporate brand identity in industrial markets: The case of German prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock

The assumption that corporate brand identity is an internal creation is increasingly challenged by recently published research, which discusses identity as an ongoing social process of co-creation. The majority of the resulting insights relate to business-to-consumer brands and the relevance of brand identity co-creation to business-to-business branding remains largely undiscovered, even though the notions of interrelation between company and stakeholders are more intense in industrial settings. The purpose of the paper is to understand how a company and its corporate culture, behaviour, brand management and communication approach have to change over time to allow for corporate brand identity co-creation. This paper explores the individual case of a world-leading German prosthetic-technology company. Analysing the branding process over the period 1988 to 2018, we identified four phases in the transformation of corporate brand identity from internally governed to a nested system of identities.