Advances in Corporate Branding

In this opening section, entitled “Corporate brands in context,” the nature of corporate brands and the fundamentals of corporate brand management are succinctly delineated.

To me, and I would conjecture to a good many other corporate marketing scholars, policymakers and consultants, one of the most exciting, stimulating and intellectually challenging developments in the corporate world since the mid 1990s has been the stupefying ascendancy of corporate brands as a distinctive institutional-identity type. It is an identity category that enjoys a prominent place in corporate marketing and strategic management owing to their ability to create corporate and shareholder value. In addition, it is an identity category that can be highly meaningful to stakeholders including groups and individuals. Why? Because corporate brand can help individuals define who they are.

As markets continue to mature and competition within industries grows fiercer, companies will not succeed purely on the basis of what products or services they offer. Although these core functions of the business are unquestionably still crucial, other aspects such as company culture and corporate citizenship have increased in relative importance in determining a company’s ability to compete.^1–3 As a result, the success of a 21st century business will be defined as much by who it is as what it does.^4,5 Historically, the identity of a company resulted solely as the consequence of what that company did. Increasingly, the reverse will be true, and the former will impact the latter.

Brands and their management have become a focal point of marketing practice and academic study in recent years. There has been a great deal of controversy and discussion regarding what brands are, what they do, how they can be valued and how they should be managed.^1,2,3 As observers such as Tom Peters⁴ admonish one to ‘Brand, Brand, Brand!’, some corporations are questioning the wisdom of entrusting what may be their most critical assets to anyone but senior managers.⁵ The future of brands has been questioned by some authors,^6,7 but others have sought to reaffirm their centrality,^8–10 implicitly asking, ‘What is the point of marketing without brands?’ Managers are admonished in an astonishing range of articles and popular texts to manage brands, yet most of these exhortations focus on important, but relatively isolated, aspects of overall brand management.

The last two decades have witnessed most major airlines entering into alliances with other carriers. In part, this strategy is seen as an alternative to a formal merger or acquisition. This is because a formal merger or acquisition can be fraught with difficulties. There can be problems relating to national pride¹ and in terms of regulatory restraint. These obstacles, more often than not, are insurmountable. This helps to explain why airline alliances have become prevalent: they are an attractive substitute to a formal merger and acquisition.

The rise of corporate marketing and corporate branding has raised awareness of the crucial role that employees play in corporate marketing and the corporate branding process. The historical analysis of corporate-level constructs since the 1950s by Balmer¹ reveals a number of concepts such as corporate image, corporate identity, corporate branding and corporate reputation. All these different corporate-level perspectives and concepts are synthesised under the ‘corporate marketing vortex’.² The corporate marketing mix of Balmer as shown in Figure 6.1 outlines how the aforementioned concepts can possibly be orchestrated. Table 6.1 also gives a brief summary of each element of the corporate marketing mix. The focus of this paper is on the ‘covenant’ element of the six corporate marketing mix elements. Covenant looks at corporate marketing from the perspective of corporate branding.

The danger of a paper with ‘integrated’ in its title is the automatic assumption it will contain a polemic on the virtues of direct marketing, advertising and public relations working together. Although it is agreed that there are benefits in co-ordinating external communications, this paper is actually concerned with values; with integrating the actions of employees with marketing strategy. The rationale for this is simple and has long been recognised, intellectually, by marketers and their advisors: the reputation of a corporate brand is a result of all forms of interaction with an organisation. Consequently, there is little point in delivering an advertising campaign that bears little relation to the reality of an organisational culture or cannot be supported by the actions of employees. Intellect, unfortunately, has little to do with reality. The world abounds with advertising, and for that matter design and direct marketing, that suggest certain attributes which are all too rarely delivered by the organisation. In contrast, excellent corporate brands marry communications and operations in a credible way, not by employing integrated agencies, but through clearly stated values that unify the way they think and behave. The benefit of this approach is an image of the corporate brand, which recognises our desire for clarity and understanding. As Iris Murdoch says:

‘We see parts of things, we intuit whole things. We seem to know a great deal on the basis of very little … we fear plurality, diffusion, chaos, we want to transform what we cannot dominate or understand into something reassuring and familiar.’¹

Discussion of brands and brand equity have, up until now, been almost solely concerned with consumer markets.^1,2 A number of recent publications have, however, begun to seriously look at the application of the brand concept and that of brand equity to business-to-business (B2B) markets.^3–6 These works reflect the growing consensus that the branding concept is not only useful, but also powerful, in examining and explaining relationships and value creation in all business relationships.

Brand management has evolved from its original focus on product differentiation (for example, Aaker, 1996) to new perspectives that include service brands (for example, Berry, 2000) and corporate brands (for example, Balmer, 1995). This represents the emergence of a new approach that understands brands as social processes that involve multiple stakeholders. This also creates the need to better understand how brand value is co-created together with other stakeholders (Brodie et al, 2009; Hatch and Schultz, 2010; Frow and Payne, 2011). In this respect, there is an opportunity to build an integrated brand value co-creation model (BVCC) (Merz et al, 2009) that can be used in different business settings (Wallström et al, 2008; Payne et al, 2009; Pillai, 2012).

This article advances the brand orientation notion as it applies to corporate brands via the introduction and explication of what the author calls corporate brand orientation. A corporate brand orientation represents a logical development, if not a logical dénouement, of the brand orientation notion introduced by Urde (1994).