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Recruits’ Corporate Brand Co-creation Experiences of the Finnish Military Forces

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Abstract

Co-creation has become one of the recent interests in branding. The purpose of this study is to reveal how the co-creators experience the brand they are co-creating. For measuring the brand co-creators experience, we chose to use the corporate character scale developed by Davies et al. For the empirical context, we chose a transportation arm of the Finnish military forces, a military driving school. The data were gathered via a questionnaire from 264 recruits in Spring 2008. The questions consisted of 49 personality scale statements measured on a Likert 7 scale. The analyses were made with second order confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive graphics and analysis of variance. The study revealed that the corporate character scale is usable in a public, non-profit organisation. The experiences of the recruits on the military driving school are more positive than negative; they consider that it is Agreeable and Competent rather than Ruthless. The study contributes to the existing literature on brand co-creating by revealing how the actively engaging co-creators experience the brand they are co-creating. This might be the first time co-creators’ experiences of the brand have been studied, at least in this kind of context.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Lieutenant Colonel Timo Saarinen for his valuable help in data gathering and to two anonymous reviewers whose valuable comments helped to improve the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marketing, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Mari Juntunen

  2. Department of Marketing, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Jouni Juntunen

  3. Defence Command J4/Ops, Head of Movement &Transportation, Helsinki, Finland

    Vesa Autere

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  1. Mari Juntunen
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  2. Jouni Juntunen
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  3. Vesa Autere
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Juntunen, M., Juntunen, J. & Autere, V. Recruits’ Corporate Brand Co-creation Experiences of the Finnish Military Forces. Corp Reputation Rev 15, 88–104 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/crr.2012.2

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