Corporate branding: meaning & roadmap

Introduction

Do you want to build a strong brand with your company? Then corporate branding is valuable for your business. This concept and its strategies will help you turn your company into a strong brand. In this blog post we explain what corporate branding is, differences with classic branding and for which companies it is important. We also tell you how to create a successful corporate branding strategy.

What is corporate branding?

Corporate branding is a method for building a strong corporate brand. This form of branding focuses on the brand of your entire company and not just your products or services. Corporate branding is also called company branding.

Corporate branding includes the following elements:

• Corporate identity
• Company name
• Mission and vision
• Company culture
• Offer
• Target
• Distinctiveness
• Logo
• Corporate identity
• Communication, both external and internal

The goal of corporate branding is to achieve brand awareness and a positive perception of your brand among your target audience. This can lead to increased sales, a better market position and greater customer loyalty. It can also help you attract staff because potential employees have a good perception of your company.

Differences between classic branding and corporate branding

Corporate branding requires a holistic approach and goes far beyond and encompasses more issues than branding for products and services. In the book Corporate Branding: Purpose/people/process : Towards the Second Wave of Corporate Branding, authors Schultz, Yun and Csaba provide the following differences between classic branding and corporate branding.

As a company, by the way, you don't have to choose between corporate branding and classic branding. These 2 types of branding can take place side by side within a company.

For which companies is company branding important?

Before you start getting excited about using corporate branding for your company right away, we want to explain what kind of companies company branding is relevant to.

Corporate branding has value for larger companies with multiple products and/or services.

For small businesses, the owner is often the brand. The owner often has personal contact with customers and potential new customers. Even in other communications, such as in the media, the owner will often be the signboard. For small businesses, this can work fine because the owner is in control of the company's image to the outside world.

For larger companies, however, this does not work because there are too many touch points with stakeholders for the owner (or manager) to control himself. Therefore, there is a risk that the outside world may have an image of your company that is not desired. This can detract from your brand resulting in a negative impact for your company and goals. By engaging in corporate branding, you build a strong corporate brand that is supported by the entire organization. In doing so, you also control the image the outside world has of your brand.

Corporate branding examples

There are countless international companies that are successful with corporate branding, but there are also very good examples closer to home.

• Coolblue. Thanks in part to well-designed corporate branding, about which more later, Coolblue managed to grow within 15 years into one of the largest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands and Belgium.
• Heineken. This Dutch beer brand grew into one of the largest beer brewers in the world through successful marketing. In a changing beer market and because of changing perceptions about alcohol, Heineken regularly scrutinizes its corporate branding and then successfully adapts it. Still, it doesn't always go well, as with a poster campaign in 2023. So you see, even big companies sometimes get it wrong.
• Another company that has adapted its corporate branding strategy due to technological changes is the bank ING. In 2020, it launched the new strategy with the global tagline "do your thing."

Corporate branding strategy roadmap

Building an effective corporate branding strategy consists of the following steps:

1. Define your company's brand positioning and brand strategy
2. Build a strong corporate identity.
3. Create a corporate brand manual
4. Evaluate strategy

1. Define your company's brand positioning and brand strategy

The Brand key model is a strategic framework that allows you to define the positioning and strategy for your corporate brand. The model consists of 9 key components:

1. Historical strength
2. Competitive environment
3. Target
4. Insight
5. Advantages
6. Values and personality
7. Credibility
8. Distinctive strength
9. Brand essence

Our article on the Brand key model tells you exactly how to go through the 9 key components. You can also download a brand key model template for your business on our website.

2. Build a strong corporate identity

Now that you have determined the positioning and strategy for your corporate brand, you can determine the corporate identity. Corporate identity is about how a company presents itself to the outside world. It includes the following components:

• Corporate communication. The way a company communicates to customers, consumers, employees and other stakeholders. This includes tone of voice.
• Corporate behavior. The behavior of a company and its employees must be consistent with its mission and vision.
• Corporate design. This includes logos, corporate identity and typography.

Jean-Noël Kapferer's brand identity prism model is very applicable for constructing your corporate identity. This model shows how yourself as a brand owner and customers view your company. The brand identity prism model consists of.

1. Physical
2. Personality
3. Culture
4. Relationship
5. Reflection
6. Self-image

Read our blog post on brand identity for more explanation of this model. In this blog post, we applied the brand identity prism model to Coolblue as you can see below.

3. Create a corporate brand manual

Now you have all the ingredients for creating a corporate brand manual. In it the following, previously mentioned, elements are elaborated.

• Corporate identity
• Company name
• Mission and vision
• Company culture
• Offer
• Target
• Distinctiveness
• Logo
• Corporate identity
• Communication, both external and internal

Want to know what this might look like? Again, we give Coolblue as an example. Coolblue several years ago issued this brand manual used for corporate branding. We again give Coolblue as an example because this company follows a very good corporate branding strategy and has achieved a lot of success with it. In other words, Coolblue shows the value of corporate branding.

4. Evaluate strategy

With corporate branding, you're never done. Among other things, consumers, technology, your competitors and the zeitgeist are constantly changing, so you need to regularly evaluate your corporate branding strategy. A good example of a company that has done corporate rebranding is McDonalds. With increased concerns about healthy lifestyles and obesity, McDonalds had acquired the image of an unhealthy company. So in 2016, the fast food chain decided to embark on a rebranding campaign. In this, it not only updated its offerings, but also started to promote healthy lifestyles and showed greater environmental awareness. In addition, the company modified the packaging of its products. The results were a better reputation and higher sales. You can read more about this rebranding campaign in this blog post.

Good luck building your successful corporate brand.