This paper offers a discursive perspective to studying corporate identity and brand. It extends existing scholarship that adopts alternative approaches to understanding corporate identity, seeing it as polysemic, rather than unitary; and constructed, rather than pre-existing. Using a case study of a contemporary global church that combines religion, marketing and popular culture, it shows how disparate and potentially contradictory cultural resources are combined in corporate branding. Church text and corporate communication materials were collected and analysed to identify the presence and combination of different discourses. Our analysis shows how Christian, market, popular and contemporary spirituality discourses were combined using three discursive strategies which we call: differentiation, spectacularizing and personalizing. The research demonstrates the process of how a corporate brand identity is ‘made’ as well as how disparate and contradictory discourses can be successfully combined. This approach can be practically extended to studying other types of organizations, corporate and non-corporate.

• Jeaney Yip(University of Sydney, Australia)
• Susan Ainsworth(University of Melbourne, Australia)