Corporate Patriotism as a Corporate Branding Strategy: A Managerial Perspective

Abstract

Corporate patriotism has become an increasingly visible element of corporate branding in markets where national identity shapes consumer behavior and public discourse. Existing scholarship has examined patriotic branding primarily at the product and advertising level through consumer-oriented studies which leaves how marketing practitioners interpret and navigate corporate patriotism at the corporate brand level vastly underexplored. This study addresses this gap through an exploratory qualitative design drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with marketing practitioners across public and private banks in Vietnam, a collectivist and patriotism-intensive context. The findings reconceptualize corporate patriotism as a dynamic configuration that is reflexively navigated rather than a fixed brand identity attribute. Practitioners interpret it as an interior identity formation process grounded in leadership conviction and internal culture from which communicative, operational, and institutional expressions are projected downstream. They navigate it through ongoing negotiation between competing state and market logics across episodic and continuous time horizons with reflexive recalibration in response to institutional expectations, market opportunities, organizational capabilities and cycles of national sentiments. The study contributes to corporate branding literature by relocating corporate patriotism to the corporate brand level by reordering its directionality. It exposes corporate patriotism as a logic-dependent construct shaped by competing legitimacy logics and reframes it as a family of strategic configurations between which firms reflexively shift.