Branding the Entire Entity: Corporate branding

Over the last 20 years or so there has been a noticeable shift in the strategy of brand management towards the consideration of the whole organization as the brand, as opposed to individual products or services; that is the corporate brand. The word corporate comes from the Latin, corpus meaning the body or the whole. The consideration of the company as the brand makes brand practice appropriate to all manner of organizations, not just profit-making companies but organizations as diverse as charities, non-governmental organizations, universities, sports teams and individual sports stars and places. The literature does not properly reflect this change in emphasis. Open any textbook on branding, for example and you will be regaled by numerous examples of product brands, often the classic fast moving consumer brands (FMCG) that we have enjoyed for many decades, such as Kellogg’s Cornflakes or Mars bars. These brands are still of great importance, of course, and we can all associate with them. However, modern Western economies are service economies. In the UK the contribution of services to GDP has risen from 46 per cent in 1948 to 79 per cent in 2014 (Monaghan, 2014), a change reflected in other major economies. We are no longer manufacturing-led economies so it does seem an anomaly that the branding literature is still so product brand-oriented. Corporate branding addresses this by putting the emphasis onto branding the whole corporate entity.