The Relevance of Specific Corporate Associations Against Overall Corporate Image for Consumer Behavior

Corporate branding strategies are gaining more and more importance. Recently, a growing number of firms in the fast moving consumer goods sector, which is historically dominated by product brands, communicate their corporate brand actively towards stakeholders (Laforet and Saunders 2005). Therewith, they aim to gain a higher level of awareness in the public domain and to influence consumer behavior directly, not only indirectly by enhancing product image. Former research helps to identify what is associated with a firm (Fombrun et al. 2000; Walsh and Beatty 2007) and how single associations impact consumer behavior, e.g. the impact of social responsibility. However, companies lack knowledge on how to evaluate cross-nationally if their corporate branding strategy works. For them it is necessary to know if corporate branding adds value to a company’s products and if so, how the corporate brand adds value.