Unveiling the controversies of brand identity management: A holistic framework for global B2B companies through a hybrid systematic literature review and interpretive structural modelling

Corporations that present a distinctive and different brand identity are preferable for customers and the market, create value, and lead in pricing. It helps customers feel the corporation is trustworthy and reliable. Despite the remarkable advantages, the definition of brand identity for global B2B companies needs to be clearer and more complex than the definition of other close concepts. It deals with some problems and causes some challenges for managers. The present study aims to identify the main controversies and challenges in brand identity management for global B2B companies. Accordingly, a hybrid systematic literature review (SLR) and thematic analysis (TA) have been employed to extract the initial drawbacks. Afterwards, the relationships among the extracted themes are identified using an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) to recognise the network of the problems surrounding the brand identity of global B2B companies. Ultimately, the identified themes are also categorised via the MICMAC method (Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification). After reviewing 142 articles, 12, 11, and 9 challenges were extracted as the main themes for corporate, brand, and stakeholder levels. These themes were analysed and categorised into drivers, linkages, dependents, and autonomous challenges. Moreover, three subsystems were presented, covering the causal relationship among the challenges.