Corporate & Marketing Communications Division - Dubai Airport

To:

Senior Vice President,

Corporate & Marketing Communications Division

Dubai Airport

For your information please.

I have recently attended a module on organisational and brand storytelling as part of my Masters programme and I would like to share my thoughts from the takeaways of the course.

As custodians of the Dubai Airport brand, I find the VCI (Vision Culture Image) model a very useful tool to assess and align our corporate branding. According to Hatch and Schultz (2001), successful corporate branding is typically based on the alignment between the strategic goals of the top management level (strategic vision), the knowledge and attitude of the employees (corporate culture) and the perceptions of external stakeholders (image). A misalignment of these three factors is in many cases, an indicator for poor brand management and branding.

Even as we continuously make headlines in the news for best airport in the world awards, strong corporate reputation index, and positive brand perception from our customers, I would like to highlight the vision-culture gap, which might have been a blind spot in the corporate branding exercise.

In one of our core values, it states that the company values its people but do the employees feel the same way? We have done our annual Employee Engagement Survey for the third round and the results do not seemed to echo the core value.*

As the saying goes “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”; without alignment of vision and culture, even the most articulate business, communications strategies will not help a company to succeed. As we continually push for excellence, innovation and efficiency, we need to lay a strong foundation with our people where these ideas and core values can grow; the corporate