Best Practice: Recognising intangible assets: How Boeing uses brand management and measurement as strategic tools
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Recognising intangible assets: How Boeing uses brand management and measurement as strategic tools
Carrie A. Howard is a writer for The Boeing Company who specialises in corporate identity and brand communications. She has written numerous articles for internal and external Boeing publications and has won several awards from the Society for Technical Communication for her work writing and editing corporate identity manuals, style guides and educational and marketing materials.
Received (in revised form): 14 April 2003
Keywords: employee branding, viral branding, brand research, brand education, reputation management, business to business
Anne C. Toulouse and Carrie A. Howard
Abstract For much of its history, The Boeing Company took its brand for granted. That changed in the 1990s, when management undertook a major transformation aimed at expanding the company’s scope, and began to realise the value of the brand as a strategic tool in the transformation. Boeing established a corporate brand management and advertising department to focus and coordinate branding efforts. Using a master brand strategy, the brand management team has worked to create a disciplined approach to branding; educate management and employees about the value of the brand; and implement a brand measurement programme to track brand-building progress through a variety of studies and provide management with an additional tool for developing plans and allocating resources.
Introduction
Anne C. Toulouse The Boeing Company 100 N Riverside MC 5003-0982 Chicago IL 60606-1596 USA Tel: +1 312 544 2915 Fax: +1 312 544 2082 E-mail: [email protected]
For much of its 87-year history, The Boeing Company took its brand for granted. The company’s management recognised the importance of its business and product names — names like Boeing, B-17 Flying Fortress and 747 — and their reputation in the marketplace. But the brand was not viewed as worth investing in; the total advertising and brand management budget in 1999 was just 0.01 per cent of company revenues. In general, the brand was something that just evolved while the company went about the business of building commercial and military aircraft, as was the case with many companies founded in the first half of the 20th century. Company management first recognised the potential value of strategic brand management in the late 1990s, when Chairman and CEO Phil Condit began a major transformation aimed at expanding the company’s scope. Boeing’s close ties to airlines — commercial aircraft accounted for as much as 80 per cent of its revenues — made the company vulnerable to downturns in the aviation industry, and Boeing had to find a way to maintain some stability through those cycles. In response to this challenge, Boeing took on a series of acquisitions in the late 1900s and early 2000s that expanded its scope significantly. In 1996 the acquisition of the space and defence units of Rockwell brought the company enhanced capabilities in launch vehicles and systems.
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