How diverse is corporate brand management research?

Comparing schools of corporate brand management

with approaches to corporate strategy

Introduction
It has been argued that successful corporate branding often stems from a strong coherence
between what the company's top management seek to accomplish (their strategic vision),
what the company's employees know and believe, and how its external stakeholders
perceived the company. Misalignments between these three factors, may indicate an
underperforming corporate brand. It requires greater emphasis on factors internal to the
organization, paying greater attention to the role of employees in the brand building a
corporate brand image. Corporate branding affects multiple stakeholders (e.g., employees,
investors) and impacts many aspects of companies such as the evaluation of their product
and services, corporate identity and culture, sponsorship, employment applications, brand
extensions. while the corporate strategy is the way in which a business strives to create value
,develop a unique selling advantage and capture maximum market share and could earn more
revenues. The corporate brand management and corporate strategy show much resemblance
in their concerns regarding how to adjust an organization within market context.
Concept of strategy and scope of corporate strategy
Corporate Strategy focuses on how to manage resources, risk and return across a firm, as
opposed to looking at competitive advantages in business strategy. A corporate strategy in
which a company acquires or establishes a business other than that of its current
product .Strategy will serve as kind of guidelines for the question in what ways the goals
should be achieved and thus channel managerial actions. The firm strategy links
organizational goals and actions. The nature of strategy is about the decisions of top level
management.
Differences
 Three levels of differences as first different lines of arguments exist on how a strategy
originates second contrasting ideas regarding the relevance of internal resources for a
successful strategy can be traced and third the way of perceiving and analyzing strategy and
developing corporate strategy can be conceptualized from different angles.
Perspective vs emergent strategy
Emergent strategy is a set of actions, or behavior, consistent over time, "a realized pattern [that] was not
expressly intended" in the original planning of strategy. Perspective strategy represents a strategy
that is defined before it is implemented it is actively designed in terms of an objective that
had been set in advance.
Resource based vs environment based development modes
A resourced based strategy( RBS)refers to strategy considers the company’s resources and
their heterogeneity as the source of a company’s competitive advantage.
Rational vs political analysis of strategy
Political analysis draws attention to strategy formation as a continuous process. The strategy
is perceived as a set of rational techniques for managing complex businesses in a changing
environment.
Inventory of current corporate brand management research
Nature and origin of corporate brand management
Corporate branding refers to the practice of promoting the brand name of a corporate entity,
as opposed to specific products or services. The activities and thinking that go into corporate
branding are different from product and service branding because the scope of a corporate
brand is typically much broader. The enhanced level of interest in corporate branding issues
led to a significant degree of fragmentation therefore the corporate brand was regarded as
distinct identity type define a corporate brand as a bundle of benefits that makes a specific
company sustainably different from others. It is described as an expression and image of
organization identity and a promise that a organization made with its stakeholders..
Relevance, scope and concern of corporate brand management
The industries the relevance of corporate brand concept is significant and of organizational
practice and therefore reflects a high degree of brand orientation. Corporate brands have
been described as brands that focus on multiple ,internal and external stakeholders, suppliers
and general public as compared to products brands that mainly focus on customers.
Clustering schools of corporate brand management
Image school/ Behavioral school/ Identity school Strategy school/ Co-creative
school
Market oriented view of the company focusing on the satisfaction of individual and
changing customer needs and wants within brands considered to be an impression in
customers mind ,which arises from perception of brand differentiation. Differential effect of
brand knowledge on a person’s reaction to marketing stimuli which is achieved by marketing
department that is responsible for implementation of integrated marketing communication .
Building a corporate brand is an initiative of the brand owner based on core competences and
characteristics of organization itself . The corporate brand image will develop only over time
based on customer previous and holistic experiences within branded company.
The strategy which has noted that intangible capabilities such as brands .create sustainable
competitive advantage and aims that top management needs to be accounted for such factors
moreover brand strategy is perceived to be the external face of business strategy and
conversely represents the central internal asset of company value on its own.
Conclusions
It is concluded that image school works on the instrumental objective of which an image is
created thus the image will serve to build a competitive advantage.
Behavioral school focuses that the success of CORPORATE BRAND MANAGMENT is
attributed to stakeholders learning of brand associations .
Identity school emphasizes on internal factors while strategy school refer to internal as well
as external factors as source of competitive advantage and the co-creative school fit both the
external and internal value of the criterion.