The Company and the Product: The Relevance of Corporate Associations
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Volume 2 Number 1
The Company and the Product: The Relevance of Corporate Associations Nicholas Ind ind.associates, UK
INTRODUCTION The dearth of research on corporate branding has begun to be recti®ed in recent years by both European and American academics. In the past, one had to rely on a mixture of intuition, adaptation and experience in making claims for the value of consistency, branding structures and the relationship between the company and its products. After attending numerous conferences and reading widely, one came to the conclusion that practitioners were high on received wisdom and low on facts. One of the most notable pieces of research in the recent wave of analyses has been Tom Brown and Peter Dacin's work, published last year in the Journal of Marketing: `The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses.' Brown has since followed up this paper with a further article in this journal. The essence of Brown and Dacin's work has been to look at the relationship between what a consumer knows about a company Ð what they refer to as corporate associations Ð and their perceptions of the company's products. Brown and Dacin divided corporate associations into two broad categories: corporate ability associations Ð the company's capability to produce products Ð and corporate social responsibility associations Ð the company's perceived social responsibility. They conducted three studies and found that: Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1998, pp. 88±92 # Henry Stewart Publications, 1358±1988
Page 88
1 What consumers know about a company can in¯uence their beliefs
about and attitude towards new products manufactured by that company 2 Corporate ability and corporate social responsibility associations may have dierent eects on consumer responses to products 3 Products of companies with negative associations are not always destined to receive negative responses. Some of Brown and Dacin's ®ndings are surprising and raise two interesting questions. First, are there credible explanations for their discoveries? Secondly, does practical experience and other research tend to support or undermine them? THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CORPORATE ASSOCIATIONS AND CONSUMER PRODUCT RESPONSES A consistent theme, derived from qualitative research, is that consumers can have surprisingly strong feelings about companies and their products and services Ð either positive or negative Ð which often appear to be based on very little knowledge. Give people free rein on what they think about banks, for example, and it is not long before a diatribe from one individual leads to general condemnation. During 1995 the advertising agency, FCB, conducted 100 discussion groups and concluded that, `all the groups agreed that the banks behave as though they were doing people a favor rather than oering a service.' This capacity to intuit whole things from partial information is given substance
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by the Brown and Dacin research which says, `The results of all three studies indicate that consumers can
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