CORPORATE BRANDING

Corporate Branding



Corporate Branding

Introduction

According to Chernatony (1999), classical models of brand management pay insufficient attention to staff as brand builders, placing more emphasis on external issues such as image. Chernatony (1999), explored the significant contribution from employees and considered the need to align their values and behaviors with the brand's desired values. It clarifies the importance of culture in brand building and discusses how an adaptive, strategically appropriate culture, consistency apparent throughout an organization is likely to be associated with healthy brand performance.

Tesco develops own-brand products, because they believe that it is an essence of retailing. To be successful in this it is important to meet their customers' high expectations of their products. Tesco has its own packaging design department, which consists of packaging technologists and technologists. Brand strategists and theoreticians alike, often claim that the corporate brand should be the most important source of brand equity and have a pure monolithic status in strategy (Ind, 1997; Hatch and Schultz, 2003:12). In reality however, corporate brands are often decapitalized at the level of implementation (Kapferer, 2002:5). Moreover, many corporate brand managers fail to see the whole opportunity spectrum of links between the corporate brand and other brand assets in the portfolio (Aaker, 2004a, b:10). The specific focus will be on Tesco.

Tesco branding

Tesco is the largest food retailer in the UK, holding an estimated 15,5 % share of the total market. Tesco also aims to grow their share in the non-food markets. The two most important factors in Tesco's success are listening to customers and learning from mistakes. Offering their customers quality products for low prices and putting local people first in the way they run their business is also core to their strategy. (Dickson, M. 2001)

Although the concept of brand management has attracted considerable interest amongst marketing researchers and practitioners over the last two decades, much of the branding literature focuses on products rather than services, with the classical models of brand management adopting an external image-building perspective (de Chernatony, 1999). Nevertheless, the domination of service organisations in developed economies and the shift from the importance of image building to linking brands with corporate values, which is more concerned with how managers and staff make brands unique (de Chernatony, 1999), suggest that a new set of principles is needed for services branding.

Tesco is a service company where the customers only have access to the services when they are being done. This fact makes it important for Tesco to strengthen their brand identity and to give the customers and impressions of ownership. Services' distinctive characteristics of intangibility, inseparability, variability, perishability and ownership make them different from physical goods, and writers argue that it is essential for service organisations to adopt an internal perspective when brand building (de Chernatony, 1999). De Chernatony (1999) claim that branding in the services sector is different from branding products, in that the success of a service brand relies heavily on employees' attitudes and actions during the service ...