• Work

• Feedback Cycles

• Reconciling stakeholder interests

Advertising is an important element of business. It allows businesses not only to communicate their products and services, but it moreover is also an opportunity for a company to present itself. It provides firms with a platform to show how they are different from other businesses, what their values are, what they stand for, how they see themselves. This ability to distinguish a company from other that advertising affords, could be especially interesting to family enterprise. A type of business that is indeed regarded as different from non-family businesses. While much research has been done to investigate the workings of family firms and the possible differences with non-family businesses, the presentation of the family enterprise has reserved surprisingly little attention. In this chapter I therefore investigate the presentation of family businesses in their advertising. These companies had to operate and navigated in a context that could prove a challenge to their business type. With changing narratives and attitudes towards family business it is interesting to see how they presented themselves in such a context. Did they change their appearance or hide family connections in periods when family enterprise was regarded as less favourable? Or conversely, did they emphasize their family brand in periods of more positive attention? I will investigate newspaper advertisements of six family corporations in the Dutch foods and drinks sector to see how these family companies presented themselves.

To what degree do family businesses present their family background in advertising and do contextual factors influence this presentation?

• Collected during project

• Longitudinal survey
• Archival
• Text Analysis

No

Online collection of digitised Dutch newspapers

• Structured
• Unstructured

• Dutch

01/01/1955

31/12/1995

The Netherlands

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