What Is A Corporate Brand?

By Author: diandian
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Creating a corporate brand--an umbrella image that casts one glow over an array of products--is a relatively new approach to integrating a company's stakeholders. Most major companies, like P&G, have been better known for their product brands than for corporate brands. But an increasing number of companies are discovering just how Replica Breitling much value there is in a strong corporate brand. U.S. companies together can save billions of dollars by using corporate brands to exploit economies of scale in advertising and marketing. Corporate brands make good sense for companies that compete in markets where product life cycles have shortened, making it difficult to recover the casts of continually creating new product brands. Nestle and U-nilever are moving in this direction, each reducing the number of product brands they market.

Many customers are willing to pay more for some badge of identification--say, Apple's rainbow-colored logo-that makes them feel they are part of a community.

A strong corporate brand lets customers know what ...
... they can expect of the whole range of products that a company produces. Take Sony, for example. Its corporate logo of four block letters, whether applied to a stereo, a television, or a computer game, stands for the high level of competence, quality, and care for detail shared by all the products that are sold under the Sony name. A strong corporate brand also helps a company defend itself against outside assault. Consider the Body Shop. When a journalist recently accused the company of lacking integrity in its testing of beauty products, the company overtly appealed to the public by citing its corporate brand, which was firmly associated in people's minds with strong ethical standards concerning animal rights.

The most successful corporate brands are universal and so paradoxically facilitate difference of interpretation that appeal to different groups. This is particularly true of corporate brands whose symbolism is robust enough to allow people across cultures to share symbols even when they don't share the same meaning. A good example is the McDonald's golden arches. One of the most powerful corporate brands ever created, the golden Tag Heuer Replica Watches arched resonate in the hearts and minds of people all over the world--even though different cultures attach different meanings to them. McDonald's promotes and supports these differences of interpretation, breathing life into its corporate brand around the world.