Student questions
1 How is the identity approach different from the economic approach?
2 What are the differences between product branding and corporate branding?
3 How can companies benefit from corporate branding?
corporate-wide endeavour. As a consequence the ways in which
companies engage in brand management continue to change. Branding
began as a marketing endeavour to create and manage the relationship
between products and consumers. This might have worked well at the
product level, but it implied that corporate brands often were treated as if
they were giant economy-sized product brands that can be created with
advertising campaigns.
When the term corporate started to receive more attention in corporate
branding, brand management became a multi-functional activity. This
meant that HR, corporate communication, investor relations, and all the
other communication functions joined with marketers to manage the
corporate brand. This ultimately spawned cross-functional task forces and
teams whose job was to co-ordinate all the corporate brand efforts going on
around the company and to bring corporate brand thinking to other projects
and programmes as well. Corporate branding led to such innovations as
employer brands and a plethora of brand activation and renewal
programmes – each designed, orchestrated and led by different groups
within the corporation. Over time, this activity contributed to fragmentation
and confusion as different groups claimed their piece of the branding puzzle
and the resources that came along with them.
In the context of the stakeholder society, a new wave of enterprise
branding is evolving to respond to these gathering forces and balance the
identity conversation by positioning the corporate brand to be the voice, not
just of the company, but of the stakeholders that comprise the enterprise.
This newly emerging framework holds out hope not only that corporate
branding will resolve internal integration problems, but that it will reaffirm
the strategic approach to managing the expectations of those stakeholders
who make up the enterprise of which the company is but a part.
As a result the next generation of brand managers will spend increasing
amounts of time looking at the brand through the eyes of their multiple
stakeholders. Participation in brand community events will feature promi-
nently on their schedules, and every interaction inside the firm and out will
become much more of a two-way communication process. Brand managers
will bring some of these stakeholders into the management process, making
use of their ideas and skills in internal company activities. They will design
new activities that get employees to work alongside even more stakeholders
doing things that give all of their lives greater meaning.The identity approach 79