CORPORATE REPUTATION - THE NEW BRAND
CORPORATE REPUTATION - THE NEW BRAND
Monday, 11 June 2007 10:11
The Brandscape Content Team reviews an article by the KLM brand team on corporate reputation. Similarities between the markets they analyse were stirringly similar to local market conditions.
by The Brandscape Content Team We found an interesting article by the KLM brand team on corporate reputation as the new brand management, which basically postulates that “today, brand-building is often less about commercialization tactics, and more about building corporate and brand reputation and organizational integrity.” What was interesting about this is not that it suggests anything you don’t already know, but that it succinctly focuses us and makes us face up to the reality of the day. It is true that as brand builders we are ‘increasingly concerned with inspiring confidence among investors’ as well as taking care of employee interests by trying to ensure that they enjoy working for the company and showing that we care about the communities and environments that we operate in. It is these trends that have seen the growth and dominance of ‘Marketing PR’ and the relegation of above-the-line advertising to a secondary role.
In Kenya this is partly to blame for the diminished adspend that the industry has experienced lately among other reasons. It is also responsible for the growth of the PR Consultancy as these businesses are somewhat better suited due to their structure and expertise to nurture and grow the corporate brand. Leading to an initially uneasy alliance between ad agencies and PR agencies, and then a growing realisation that the ‘lost’ revenues could be recovered through these alliances; a new way to skin the cat, as it were.
The realisation that the goal of attracting and retaining customers can also be achieved by ‘building corporate reputation through the practice of corporate social responsibility’ the zone where as the article goes on to add ‘brand management and corporate strategy cross-over each other and become indistinguishable’ created a revolution of sorts for the industry and forced us to sit up and take notice and think beyond the boundaries that we had imposed on the industry.
The article quotes studies that ‘suggest that corporate responsibility practices greatly improve morale among employees, corporate reputation, and the perception of the brand.’ The article goes further to state that ‘being socially responsible is becoming the expected behaviour for famous brand companies. This behaviour, assuming social and cultural responsibility, marks a rite of passage into a new stage of brand maturity’ in which ‘branded enterprises need to be well-known, but they also must be well regarded to win in the marketplace.’ All of these are good reasons to re-examine our motives and methods and try to see if we are guiding our brands into new stages of maturity, convention notwithstanding.
