Brand Identity and Image

It's important to understand the difference between identity and image before going deeper into theory.

Brand identity is how a company wants to be perceived to the world. It stems from their mission/vision and their values.

Brand image on the other hand is how the public view the corporation. 

So in layman's terms, the brand identity is the ideal view of the company and the image is the actual reality. Below are two bubbles which show some keywords related to the identity and image to give a clearer understanding of how they differ from one another.

There are several different models used to help build up and clearly structure the brand identity. David A. Aaker, a marketing professor at the University of California-Berkeley believes that brand management should start with determining the brand identity, which he believes consists of the following elements:

• Brand as Product - Brand as product consists of the attributes, quality or value, uses, users and country of origin
• Brand as Organisation -consists of organizational attributes, local workings and global activities
• Brand as Person - Consumer brand relationship and personality
• Brand as Symbol - Audio and visual imagery

This model is meant to aid in the creation of a comprehensive brand identity. All these elements have to be linked to one another, with the one consistent message and that is what Aaker believes will build a strong brand which people can trust in.


Kapferer was the first person to talk about brand identity and created the brand identity prism. Here there are six aspects of the brand which are evaluated to create a holistic and wholly comprehensive brand. Below you can see the different elements of the famous brand Heineken, there are a lot of similarities between the elements which is key to a strong brand where all aspects have the same core values.

It's important to evaluate how the company's identity and its image differ from one another. There was a case in Great Britain where the Royal Mail had a terrible percieved image when their actual operations were one of the best if not the best in the world with a ridiculously high % of mail sent on time. Let's say it was 95%. The problem was that the percieved image of the Royal Mail was that they never send anything on time or to the right address, so in order to remedy this the Royal Mail decided to increase their already high % by concentrating on better transportation, tracking and any other forms of expensive logistic devices to raise that % as high as they could.

After they had thrown millions of pounds into bettering their already great operations the study was re-conducted and their perceived value was still rubbish. This shows the importance of what the brand Identity is, what they want the people to believe of their company and how the message should be sent across.

Another case was the train connection between London and Paris through the channel tunnel , which took let's say 2 hours and 30 minutes. The railway company decided that they wanted to better their image and they came up with the idea of re-engineering their train tracks in order to get the customers from  A to B faster. Six billion euros was thrown at this project and when they released the new train which was about 30 minutes faster their image didn't really change. Instead of dropping huge sums of money for a minor change they could have installed game consoles into the existing chairs or waiting staff throughout the trip and their image or perceived value would have risen by much more as the consumers would feel they are being pampered.

The bottom line is, it's important to understand the difference and importance of Identity and Image.

Visual Brand Identity

The visual identity of a company is not the brand, the visual identity of a company uses aspects of the company like colors/shapes and makes visual relations to the brand platform, in order to create the one universal message to people that will be in contact with the company.

Visual identity is how you “package your brand”. Your brand platform, or the brand itself, is what the company stands for and its ideals. The visual identity “package” is how you convey these ideas to the public.

For visual identity to be successful there are a few key elements which need to be in check.

1. The visual identity must have personality. Without personality the people that are in contact with the logos or other aspects of the visual branding won’t feel a connection to the image or see the connection between the image and the company values.

2.  Recognisability is crucial to the success of the visual identity. Those glass coke bottles for example, they don’t need the contents in them or a label saying coke yet everyone will identify it as being a coke bottle.

3. Consistency is extremely important. Consistent message and consistent look. People often see change as a bad thing, and this can be seen in logos. For example Google changing the placement of their letter e by a few millimeters caused an uproar.

PBL 2

Storytelling & Corporate Communication

What is corporate communication?

Corporate communication is a set of activities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external communications aimed at creating favorable point of view among stakeholders on which the company depends (Fombrun, 2007). 

Corporate communication is the tool used to keep up dialogue between corporation and stakeholders. It is the link between the corporation and all entities involved in order to achieve its planned objective as the corporation cannot achieve this on its own.

Corporate communication stems from two fields, internal and external communication.

Up until the late 70’s the term public relations was used to describe communication with stakeholders. Corporate communication was turned into a tool when internal and external stakeholders started demanding more information about the company.

The diagram shows how the different forms of corporate communication are divided and linked together. Each of these factors are equally important as they affect the companies image.

Who are stakeholders?

A stakeholder is a person, group or entity that has interest or concern in an organization. Stakeholders are often affected by the organizations actions but it doesn’t necessarily mean they own shares or have any capital invested in the organization. Stakeholders can be creditors, employees, suppliers, owners, unions and the community. This also works vice-versa, all entities that can affect an organization are stakeholders.

Identifying and grouping stakeholders is increasingly difficult as it is relative to the objective at hand. For example an employee with shares may view corporate cost-cutting completely different to an employee without shares (Hutt, 2010). Categorizing stakeholders is essential as too much

 Stakeholder engagement is crucial to a firms success as no firm lives in isolation and while dialogue is not new between stakeholder and corporation, it is rising to be a crucial part of success with respect to business strategy (The Future 500, 2007).

How to communicate with stakeholders?

Identifying the best stakeholders to communicate with is crucial, however actually communicating with them and keeping them involved is another issue. When targeting each of your stakeholder groups you need to identify the following things:

-          Who the stakeholders are and at what level do they need to be involved?

-          What are the needs and interests of each stakeholder?

-          How do you communicate with each stakeholder, what method?

-          Frequency of communication

Communication and transparency however aren’t the only ingredients required for a good relationship between stakeholders and organization.  Ipsos MORI, Social Research Institute wrote a paper where they explained the importance of stakeholders and why the public sector is struggling because of their lack of stakeholder understanding.

Above is a diagram which shows the similarities in companies which have a very strong relationship with their stakeholders. For example Apple and Toyota (2009). A bad company with weak leadership and unclear goals cannot achieve a good relationship with their stakeholders, making communication with them irrelevant. 

Effective storytelling

Storytelling is becoming more important in the corporate world when communicating with stakeholders. The old way of introducing a product and marketing the product by showing off specs and new technology isn't enough to persuade stakeholders to get excited about the business.

Through storytelling, corporations can effectively inspire others by engaging stakeholders' emotions. Stakeholders will remember the story and the objectives connected to it, thus inspiring them to help achieve this goal if the story is well told. Adverts, like the Google advert which reunites two old friends make corporations seem humane and approachable. 

It is however important to have an effective story, one that people can relate to and see value in. This can backfire drastically if the story is off, for example the advert from Samsung which tries to promote their smart watch. It tells a story of how the guy gets the girl because he can do cool things with his smart watch. It is exaggerated which makes it difficult to relate to and this makes the viewer see little value in the product. The situations that are presented in this advert are ones that just wouldn't happen, ever. 

That video is a great example of corporate storytelling gone wrong.

References:

Riel, Cees B.M. van; Fombrun, Charles J. (2007). Essentials Of Corporate Communication: Abingdon & New York: Routledge

Roger W. Hutt, (2010),"Identifying and mapping stakeholders: an industry case study"

The Future 500 (2007), “Stakeholder engagement”