Taking Brand Initiative: How Companies Can Align Strategy, Culture, and Identity Through Corporate Branding Hardcover - 2008 - 1st Edition

Taking Brand Initiative

A corporate brand is one of the most important strategic assets in the corporate portfolio. Companies that manage their corporate brands effectively gain advantage in the highly competitive global marketplace.

Taking Brand Initiative offers a revolutionary approach to corporate branding that looks beyond the marketing value of brands--company-to-customer--and the HR significance of brands--company-to-employee. This approach places the management of brands at the senior level of management as it radiates throughout the organization. In this groundbreaking book, international branding thought leaders Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz explain how a company's brand is just as important to "outsiders"--politicians, suppliers, and analysts--as it is to company insiders. They show how only the corporate brand can integrate all the company's staff functions and provide a vision for competition and globalization.

Filled with compelling examples from such corporate giants as the LEGO Group, Intel, Nissan, and Johnson & Johnson, Taking Brand Initiative shows what makes corporate brands work and explains how enterprise branding can drive business forward. The book details three practical analytical models and tools to improve the effectiveness of any corporate branding effort:

• Assessing Vision-Culture-Image gaps

• Building organizational identity into the brand

• Taking a company through the four cycles of branding

Taking Brand Initiative examines the management practices and processes involved in a full-scale corporate branding effort. The book offers insight and inspiration for the type of corporate brand practices that can transform any organization, aligning its brand with its unique organizational values.