What is in a Name Change? Re-Joycing Corporate Names to Create Corporate Brands
- PDF / 174,407 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 595 x 765 pts Page_size
- 92 Downloads / 189 Views
Volume 8 Number 4
What is in a Name Change? Re-Joycing Corporate Names to Create Corporate Brands Laurent Muzellec Department of Marketing, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland
ABSTRACT Twenty years ago a corporate name was simply a trade name that described an industry, a service or a product (most often the corporate name was the founder’s patronym). The study reported in this paper reveals that as companies are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of corporate reputation, they are managing their corporate names more actively and treating them as corporate brands rather than merely trade names. Newly created brand names are now consciously designed to evoke associations with a set of core corporate values that typically focus on themes such as life, competence, unity, vision and performance. By focusing on values that are common to most corporations, however, corporate branding may fail in one of its foremost goals, which is to create differentiation. This paper provides an analysis of the corporate re-naming phenomenon and discusses its implications for corporate brand naming.
KEYWORDS: corporate rebranding, identity change
brand,
naming,
INTRODUCTION ‘If all of Coca Cola’s assets were destroyed overnight, whoever owned the Coca Cola name could walk into a bank the next day morning and get a loan to rebuild everything.’ Carlton Curtis, VP Corporate Communications, Coca Cola
Brand names are a fundamental marketing
and strategic device. For strong consumer brands like Coca Cola, the name is arguably the only valuable asset; outside its brand context, the product, mostly made of water, sugar and bubbles is a cheap commodity. For corporations and corporate brands, the name is a prism through which each stakeholder perceives the company. The name might be synonymous with a way of doing business for suppliers, a distinctive in-house culture for employees, an enjoyable experience for consumers, or a steady return on investment for the financial community. Academic articles which have tried to answer the illustrious question ‘what’s in a name?’ often come up with the answer of reputation and brand identity (Fombrun and Shanley, 1990; Perkins, 1995; Aaker, 1996; Tadelis, 1999). This indicates that company names are the receptacle of corporate brand and reputation. A brand name is the basis upon which the brand equity is built (Aaker, 1991) and a corporate name is the vehicle that conveys corporate associations to the customer (Brown and Dacin, 1997; Dacin and Brown, 2002). Additionally, the name constitutes the link between the corporate identity, understood as what the company ‘is’, that is its values and its behavior (Olins, 1979; Dowling, 1996; Balmer, 2001), and the corporate image, which is thought of as the stakeholders’ perceptions of corporate attitudes (Bernstein, 1984; Davies and Chun, 2002). These various perspectives demonstrate
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2006, pp. 305–321 # Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, 1479–1889/06 $30.00
Page 305
What is in a Name Change?
the key ro
Data Loading...
