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Preface: New Frontiers and Perspectives in Corporate Brand Management: In Search of a Theory

Corporate brand management is a topic of growing significance in today’s academia and business. Organizations are increasingly getting attuned to the need to treat their corporations as brands. A significant amount of research has been dedicated to product branding in marketing and management over the years, but corporate branding has been the subject of too little serious research. We intend to address this gap in this issue.According to Morsing (2002), corporate branding means turning the company into a brand and not just branding the products the company sells. Achieving this goal is a challenging managerial process that requires that the company considers what it stands for and how to communicate it. Corporate branding goes deeper than marketing, because it is about communicating the values and identity of the company in a strategic and coherent way. It involves the whole of the organization, and in modern multiproduct companies, corporate brand development is a distinct managerial commitment. Corporate brands such as Dell, UPS, Sony, Samsung, IBM, Microsoft, Disney, British Airways, LEGO, and Orange have received special mention in the nascent literature in this area (e.g., Aaker 2004; Balmer and Gray 2003; Hatch and Schultz 2003). Since 1995, 43 percent of companies surveyed by Troy (1998) have initiated a new corporate branding strategy.Corporate brands can help companies reduce costs, give customers a sense of community, provide a seal of approval, and create common ground among stakeholders (Hatch and Schultz 2001). There is also a trend toward aligning corporate branding with ethical and moral dimensions and corporate social responsibility (Maio 2003). This is particularly important after recent corporate scandals like those of Enron and WorldCom, which led many companies to focus on the management of their corporate brand.