Keeping the balance between brand stability and flexible adaptation

Corporate branding is more than the campaigns your marketing department comes up with. In fact, corporate branding from an integrative strategic management perspective is a holistic, dynamic process embedded in a business-ecosystem. Corporate branding is no longer understood as a one-way street in which the company itself is regarded as the only active part. It is rather a process that is based on dialogue and mutual understanding. Characterized by interdependencies between strategic vision, the organisation’s culture and the stakeholder images, successful corporate branding requires a dynamic shifting between phases with different emphasis on both internal and external communication.

Business leaders have to face the fact that there is no such thing like a stable environment in which it is possible to predict the future. In the real world, uncertainty prevails, and the best we can do is trying to minimize it. Concerning corporate branding there is one big paradox that needs to be coped with: On the one hand corporate branding is supposed to be stable, functioning as consistent control; on the other hand it is essential that corporate branding remains flexible in order to react to changing market premises. Whether stable and controlled or adaptive and flexible - the goal is to have a healthy balance between these two extremes.

The corporate branding process starts with a strategic vision, which embodies the central idea behind a company. It is crucial that this idea matches the internal values, beliefs and assumptions of the organisation. If that is not the case, a culture-vision gap emerges, leading to a refusal of the organisation to support the ideas of top management. Another crucial aspect is a match between the strategic vision and the stakeholder images (especially those of your customers). If there are problems in this part of the process, the outsiders’ images conflict with the management’s strategic vision, leading to a vision-image gap. Furthermore, an image-culture gap can emerge when the company does not live up to its promises and does not reflect what their stakeholders really want.

The ideal state of corporate branding is reached when there is consistency among strategic vision, the organisation’s culture and stakeholder images. Unfortunately, this ideal state can barely be reached within an unstable (turbulent) environment. As things are constantly changing, it is an ongoing challenge to fill the gaps. In theory that might sound simple, in reality it is not. Filling the gaps requires the ability to use the energy created by the creative tension between the current state of the corporate brand and influencing factors that challenge this current state. If it is possible for an organisation to constantly fill the gaps, it disposes of strong adaptive capabilities.

An effective strategic tool to trigger healthy corporate brand adaption is dynamic automated customer surveying that measures the value of the corporate brand live and across all touch-points between company and customers (inbound calls, email, face-to-face meetings). Short reporting intervals in combination with the accessibility of the results by nearly all the parts of your organisation not only allows you to paint a dynamic picture of the development of your customer-relationships, but also shows you what is going on in your organisation. Through that you get to know:

By having a closed loop feedback system, you are able to identify gaps in your corporate branding process and can take the right measures to fill them (see figure). Based on the survey results it will be possible for you to actively manage your corporate brand using internal and external communication. Filling the gaps does not only prevent you from loosing brand value (the power to differentiate yourself from competitors), but also puts you in the position to spot opportunities. Furthermore, brand adaptation goes hand in hand with self-reflective processes that enable you to see your organisation from a more holistic perspective making it possible to anticipate future dynamics of your industry.

The following graphic shows you how constant multi-channel customer surveying can improve the cyclical process of corporate brand adaptation (MODIFIED Corporate Branding Tool Kit introduced by Majken Schultz (2005) in the Book “Towards the second wave of corporate branding” Copenhagen Business School Press)