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Dissertation - Corporate Branding

  
 
Lord Switch
17:54 / 29.09.05
Hello all!
I am usually more involved in the Temple section, but what better place to get help with my 3rd year dissertation than Underground.

Here is a short summary from my dissertation Proposal

Topic : Corporate branding

Recently car manufacturers have been pumping out cars that one can hardly identify without seeing what brand it is. Clothes companies pump out items that look exactly the same, the difference only being a Nike logo or a Puma logo, nothing else. When did the branding pass from being a small logo to become the be all and end all of products, instead of an identifier? I am looking for the answer to

"what the difference is between corporate identity and corporate branding."

---------------
I am looking for opinions, resources, ideas and a discussion. I will probably use direct quotes from the discussions in my Essay.

Now, Go for it
 
 
Red Cross Iodized Salt
19:22 / 29.09.05
How about throwing in a few of your own ideas / theories to kick-start things? Just posting the assigned topic makes it seem like you're more interested in getting other people to do your homework than actually engaging in a discussion.
 
 
modern maenad
07:17 / 30.09.05
In terms of reading, this is so obvious I feel like a fool for even mentioning these books, but No Logo, Naomi Klein and Culture Jam, Kalle Lasn (founder of Adbusters) are good places to start.
 
 
Lord Switch
10:36 / 30.09.05
Well I´m obviously not trying to get other people to do my homewrok for me I would just want people to share their opinions.

No-Logo=yepp got that allready, the other one I haven´t heard of.

Here is some more info about my ideas on the subject:

Does corporate identity still exist today, or do companies stick different badges on the same product and thereby turning it into something it was not from the beginning?

My Sony TV has survived more hardships than any TV should. I own an Adidas judo Gi that would survive a Sumo wrestler hanging from it, yet components are mass produced today and the difference between a Sony TV and a Grundig TV might be that the Sony has its buttons tried out whilst in the factory and the Grundig doesn´t.

One of the reasons I have chosen this topic is an article I read in 2004:

“The modern corporation is far more than simply a building full of people that creates a product or manages resources. It exists in physical space, data space, and in aetheric space. It is a collective of intentional will committed to self-preservation, growth, and profit. It wields language and media to establish its presence and identity in the age of global trade. The corporation is unified in its focus, executes on its desires, and manipulates resources in accordance with its intent. It is in many ways an individual composed of many cooperative cells. Like the human body, the corporation maintains its identity and function in spite of the continuous recycling of its cells. The structure persists by its own will and inertia. The corporation is not bound to any one location. It can move, disperse, and distribute through data networks. It behaves with a single will, informed by the will of the corporate collective, bent towards the same end: maintaining the existence & continued growth of the corporate entity.

The genesis of the corporation was as a representation of the shared interests of a group. Soon it evolved to have the legal status roughly equivalent to a person. It has become an independent entity with the same rights as an individual (or more). Its person-hood reinforces its self-identity and the identity it projects to the world. It wants to appear human and be regarded as such. This is the only way to find intimacy with the consumer; the only way the corporation can generate trust and acceptance. This identity begins with the corporate vision but soon moves into the minds of the consumer culture where it can tap into a deeper level of emotional associations. It is at this point that it has evolved from a business entity into a psychic one.”
/http://www.key23.net/occulture/archives/2004/08/02/the-corporate-egregore/
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:24 / 30.09.05
Let's get back to the fundamentals: What course are you doing? Your dissertation primarily needs to be targetted towards the subject so none of us can really help you until we know the answer to that question.

Clothes companies pump out items that look exactly the same, the difference only being a Nike logo or a Puma logo, nothing else

Do you really think that's true? Have you been into a shop and really looked at what those companies are selling? Browsed the websites? Researched designers who are contributing to the clothing ranges? If you're really going to explore the difference between identity and branding than can you provide a loose description of the practical differences between them now because if there's no real definition than you're going to come out with a 2;2 tops and you're going to be floundering and conflating the two when you have to write this.

Provide me with your course title, your loose definition of your perception of the difference and this thread can crack on and actually get to the heart of the matter.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:55 / 30.09.05
What a terrible, terrible description of the corporation from key23 there. Jesus.

Nina's quite right - I'm not sure that these products _are_ identical. You can say that they are functionally similar, but that's a bit different. The clothes may have different styles, and may well be made in different places using different materials - and the brand may tell you about that, or provide some other piece of useful information.

I'd start from first principles. You talk about a Sony TV and a Grundig TV. Brand is pretty obvious there, but is the corporation? Sony is a corporate entity, buyt Grundig is a brand jointly owned by Alba plc and Beko. So, you've already got a big difference there between corporate brand and corporate identity - the Grundig brand, if anything, conceals the corporate identity of its owner. What's it for? To provide a sense of European continuity and quality to two non-European producers of low-to-mid-market consumer electronics, maybe? Sony, on the other had, ties its brand in with its corporate identity - a product made by the electronics company Sony is also a Sony-badged product.

However, there are also brands within the Sony product range that help to distinguish function and expectation. Take the Walkman brand. This no longer refers to a portable player of magnetic tapes - my portable radio is Walkman-branded. The brand has been extended to communicate certain values within Sony's product offering. If I see the Walkman logo I know that it's a Sony product, that it is a media player, and that its design has been canted towards portability. There's nothing in the Sony brand or corporate identity that specifies media playing or portability - one brand supplements the other. So, to go back to Sony and Grundig TVs, if it is the case that the components that go into them are identical, then the level of testing before they leave the factory can be a part of their brand proposition.

If you're looking for genuinely identical (physically) products, you might want to look at computers. A generic PC built in a garage might have essentiially exactly the same components, amde by the same companies, as an HP Pavillion - so what's the difference?
 
 
skolld
15:17 / 30.09.05
have you looked at Douglas Rushkoff's Merchants of Cool
He has a lot of good things to say about Corporate Identity.
Rushkoff also blogs quite a bit so it wouldn't be out of the question to get some actual feedback from him.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
00:34 / 01.10.05
What a terrible, terrible description of the corporation from key23 there. Jesus.

I take it you understood what it meant then? Because that bit about recycling cells- totally over my head.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
00:38 / 01.10.05
Or rather I don't understand it's specific importance, it strikes me as overcomplicated language to describe an average process within any company that employs more than three people.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
20:43 / 02.10.05
wrt Douglas Rushkoff:

he answered an email query I sent him about "Playing Tomorrow." Strikes me as fairly accessible - and his answer actually addressed my question.

corporate identity is the sum of ideas that a coporation wishes to associate with itself (ie Disney and family, for example)

corporate branding involves the recognition of a symbol or logo as belonging to that corporation, which in turn evokes all of the appropriate identity tags. (ie the mouse ears makes of think of disney makes us think of family).

the brand, or logo, or symbol (often including text) represents a visual mnemonic.

Whether you choose to agree with these or not is your own business.

you may want to check out "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" as a resource book on PR and marketing.

the first thing they sold us was themselves.

ta
tenix
 
 
werwolf
07:05 / 03.10.05
[quote tenix] corporate identity is the sum of ideas that a coporation wishes to associate with itself (ie Disney and family, for example)

corporate branding involves the recognition of a symbol or logo as belonging to that corporation, which in turn evokes all of the appropriate identity tags. (ie the mouse ears makes of think of disney makes us think of family). [/quote]

exactly. i'd have thought that was a no-brainer.
and it also makes perfectly clear how ci and cb are related: cb becomes meaningless or at the best reduced to a name identifier when there's no recognizable ci behind it. on the other hand ci uses cb as one of its primary non.descript channels for communicating its content.
going along with the sony analogy: the sony brand 'vaio' would mean next to nothing if sony had not beforehand already established its ci as technological pioneers (amongst other things and also debatable but that's not the point). the 'vaio' brand can be viewed as plug-in brand to the sony ci.

[i still don't get where you're aiming with your question... and shouldn't this topic be in a forum that has more to do with economics and business?]
 
 
netbanshee
03:54 / 04.10.05
....shouldn't this topic be in a forum that has more to do with economics and business

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say so as it depends on where focus is being applied. From an artist/designer perspective, topics like this land in my lap all of the time. I work at an advertising firm and spend quite a bit of time determining, examining and creating image.

Brand identity (usually considered lifestyle or brand essence nowadays) often surrounds the bigger and more successful names in corporate identity and is sought after by those who don't possess it. I do think that identity is tied quite a bit closer to the performance of a product in the beginning of it's life cycle and then manipulates the language structures and ideas that are created for it over time. Coca-cola's image at one point had to be the sweet dripping stuff that it happens to be, but when faced with limits and competitors, it had to distinguish itself as something greater and other.

One thing I do find interesting is the emergence of brands that try to jump the gun and survive off of image alone. I think that clothing, fashion and luxury items can often represent this way, but the way it looks and the value it possesses supports itself a bit differently or in some cases entirely. I would suggest looking at things like materials, thread count, and availability to help determine any balance in your view. Manufacturing, cost, labor, etc. start to walk down a different line as well.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
16:12 / 05.10.05
when our labour's motivation shifts from

creative expression

to

profitable profit

art dies the most ignoble death imaginable, and is bled to a pale, bland, meaningless husk of itsself.

"Picasso brand cubism!" ask for it by name.

ta
tenix
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:31 / 05.10.05
Yes. It was good of Picasso to give all his work away for nothing throughout his life, thus continuing a tradition of giving art away for free that had persisted throughout time right up until (insert time of the Fall here).
 
 
quixote
02:38 / 15.10.05
This is as far from my field as I can get. So, I realize what follows is a bit off-topic, but I don't know by how much, so if it's total nonsense, my apologies. In I'd like to buy the world a Coke, Ethan Zuckerman talks about a book that deals with the "branding" of nations, and how that makes it easy or hard for them to get or sell various things.
 
 
mikemystery
10:26 / 25.04.06
Corporate identity and corporate branding originally meant the same thing, as in the logotype and logo, corporate livery, sinage.

Basically, marks that show who owns stuff.

It has become a metaphor, and a confusing one at that. Roughly the brand is taken to mean the non-physical emotional characteristics associated with a product. This is why branding is so confusing.

Before you start reading No Logo, it's worth reading "Wally Olins - On Brand", pretty much the definitive work on corporate identity and brands in the traditional sense.

For a decent, albeit corporate, idea of what branding means NOW try "Lovemarks; the future beyond brands" by Kevin Roberts (Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi) it's pretty good.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:32 / 25.04.06
The great thing about "Lovemarks" is that you can use the pages to stem the bleeding from your ears once you've finished it.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
20:44 / 25.04.06
If you can tell us more about that, (with similarly vivid imagery throughout), I would like to read it.
 
 
Fell
02:26 / 26.04.06
Corporate identity: How the public perceives and interacts with a company in all its facets, from the person on the fone to the letterhead to the typeface in the commercials and on the contracts. It's the place where the company comes into contact with us, and proper design can focus all its elements in order to focus on the…

Corporate branding: The effort and focus, almost the "spirit" of any group, in this case a company. It can be thrown astrew if the executives and management don't all share the same passion and goals, or if the colours, PR, and actions of the company don't hold up to what it is the brand stands for. Over time, a brand is defined by its actions. The identity acts to enforce the core of what the brand comes to stand for, but if the company acts out of line or in contrast to what their identity claims, it falls to shambles and all effort was for nought.

Kinda like saying, Does the suit make the man, or the man make the suit. Or as Yves Saint Laurent simply stated: "Fashions fade, style is eternal."
 
 
mikemystery
09:38 / 02.05.06
Lovemarks does go on a bit, but one cannot live on Naomi Klein alone. But I agree that photos of said bleeding would be appreciated.
 
  
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