by Linda Caye Murphy

Created on: July 07, 2009

What is a Brand?

The Importance of the Corporate Brand in a Digital Age

While the Internet brought great change to the way ordinary people buy, sell and react, it is no exaggeration to say that the Internet also brought radical, sweeping change to corporations in the how they present and attempt to brand themselves to their various publics. It also increased the importance of the corporate brand to commercial success.

So what exactly is a corporate brand? There are many good definitions, but here's one that I like. A brand is a promise of a positive experience that begins before the relationship is even started. It is an expectation on which buyers are preconditioned to act.

A company's reputation broadens this expectation into positive feelings about a company and a real trust in what the brand represents. This is known as brand equity, or the additional value that the brand name brings to a product above and beyond the intrinsic attributes of the product. This added value is easily measured and quantified through common market-research techniques.

Gaining the customer's attention has always been a goal of marketing, but the challenge is more difficult than ever as customers thanks to the Internet suffer from severe information overload. Basic marketing teaches that where competition for people's attention is fierce, branding increases in value. Suffice it to say, a positive corporate brand identity is a clear competitive advantage, especially in today's digital, global marketplace. And while the recession has certainly slowed commerce across the board, brand equity is even more valuable as suppliers compete for limited customer dollars.

And this is where the corporate brand comes into play. When a customer buys a specific product with a strong corporate brand behind it, he/she is buying the brand-promise of the entire corporation. By leveraging its collective brand identity, a company can have a greater positive impact on all individual product lines. The entire organization needs to think from the customer's perspective. That is, they need to come to any single market segment from one brand identity that has been carefully built and nurtured through clear, consistent, focused external communications.

In bringing their products to market, many large corporations particularly in the business-to-business arena - often get hung up on internal politics such as structure, organization charts or manufacturing and production realities. From the customer's perspective, these things are irrelevant. The cash-strapped, information-overloaded customer wants the best value for the price paid. To the degree that a supplier can increase that value whether real or perceived through branding that supplier will gain a competitive advantage.

A strong corporate image, or brand, will add measurable value to products and services offered throughout the company, across markets and borders alike. It goes back to the old familiar question: What's in a name? In the corporate world, the answer is easy: Everything.

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