Corporate identity L 6 Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2015 A corporate identity is the overall image of a corporation or firm or business in the minds of diverse.

Corporate identity

L 6

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2015

A corporate identity is the overall image of a corporation or firm or business in the minds of diverse publics, such as customers and investors and employees.

It is a primary task of the corporate communications department to maintain and build this identity to accord with and facilitate the attainment of business objectives. It is usually visibly manifested by way of branding and the use of trademarks.

Corporate identity comes into being when there is a common ownership of an organizational philosophy that is manifest in a distinct corporate culture — the corporate personality. At its most profound, the public feel that they have ownership of the philosophy.

Corporate identity helps organizations to answer questions like “who are we?” and “where are we going?” Corporate identity also allows consumers to denote their sense of belonging with particular human aggregates or groups.

In general, this amounts to a corporate title, logo and supporting devices commonly assembled within a set of guidelines. These guidelines govern how the identity is applied and confirm approved colour palettes, typefaces, page layouts and other such.

Corporate identity is often viewed as being composed of three parts:Corporate design (logos, uniforms, corporate colours etc.)Corporate communication (advertising, public relations, information, etc.)Corporate behavior (internal values, norms, etc.)

Corporate identity is the way corporate actors (actors who perceive themselves as acting on behalf of the company) make sense of their company in ongoing social interaction with other actors in a specific context. It includes shared perceptions of reality, ways-to-do-things, etc., and interlocked behaviour.

Corporate actors construct different identities in different contexts.

Differentiation. In today’s highly competitive market, brands need to have a clear differentiation or reason for being. What they represent needs to stand apart from others in order to be noticed, make an impression, and to ultimately be preferred.

Relevance. Brands need to connect to what people care about out in the world. To build demand, they need to understand and fulfill the needs and aspirations of their intended audiences.

Coherence. To assure credibility with their audiences, brands must be coherent in what they say and do. All the messages, all the marketing communications, all the brand experiences, and all of the product delivery need to hang together and add up to something meaningful.

Esteem. A brand that is differentiated, relevant and coherent is one that is valued by both its internal and external audiences. Esteem is the reputation a brand has earned by executing clearly on both its promised and delivered experience.

Corporate visual identity plays a significant role in the way an organization presents itself to both internal and external stakeholders. In general terms, a corporate visual identity expresses the values and ambitions of an organization, its business, and its characteristics. Four functions of corporate visual identity can be distinguished.

First, a corporate visual identity provides an organisation with visibility and "recognizability". For virtually all profit and non-profit organisations, it is of vital importance that people know that the organization exists and remember its name and core business at the right time.

Second, a corporate visual identity symbolizes an organization for external stakeholders, and, hence, contributes to its image and reputation (Schultz, Hatch and Larsen, 2000). Van den Bosch, De Jong and Elving (2005) explored possible relationships between corporate visual identity and reputation, and concluded that corporate visual identity plays a supportive role in corporate reputations.

Third, a corporate visual identity expresses the structure of an organization to its external stakeholders, visualising its coherence as well as the relationships between divisions or units.

The corporate identity structure, they merely provide an indication of the visual presentation of (parts of) the organization. It is therefore better to describe it as a "corporate visual identity structure".

A fourth, internal function of corporate visual identity relates to employees' identification with the organization as a whole and/or the specific departments they work for (depending on the corporate visual strategy in this respect).

Identification appears to be crucial for employees, and corporate visual identity probably plays a symbolic role in creating such identification.

The definition of the corporate visual identity management is:

Corporate visual identity management involves the planned maintenance, assessment and development of a corporate visual identity as well as associated tools and support, anticipating developments both inside and outside the organization, and engaging employees in applying it, with the objective of contributing to employees' identification with and appreciation of the organization as well as recognition and appreciation among external stakeholders.

Efforts to manage the corporate visual identity will result in more consistency and the corporate visual identity management mix should include structural, cultural and strategic aspects. Guidelines, procedures and tools can be summarized as the structural aspects of managing the corporate visual identity.

Further, it seems to be important that the organization communicates the strategic aspects of the corporate visual identity. Employees need to have knowledge of the corporate visual identity of their organization – not only the general reasons for using the corporate visual identity, such as its role in enhancing the visibility and recognizability of the organization, but also aspects of the story behind the corporate visual identity.

Corporate colours (or company colours) are one of the most instantly recognizable elements of a corporate visual identity and promote a strong non-verbal message on the company's behalf.

Organizational identity refers broadly to what members perceive, feel and think about their organizations. It is assumed to be a collective, commonly-shared understanding of the organization's distinctive values and characteristics. Organizational identity as that which is central, enduring, and distinctive about an organization's character. Corporate identity differs from organizational identity in the degree to which it is conceptualized as a function of leadership and by its focus on the visual.

The concept of image

Image is not what the company believes it to be, but the feelings and beliefs about the company that exist in the minds of its audiences.

The external foundation of the image concept (Bromley, 1993), pointing to the different external images held by various constituencies (e.g. customers, suppliers, regulators, special interests).

For example, image was defined by Dichter as "the total impression an entity (organization) makes on the minds of people"

Organizational image is a holistic and vivid impression held by an individual or a particular group towards an organization and is a result of sense-making by the group and communication by the organization of a fabricated and projected picture of itself.

Such communication by the organization occurs as top managers and corporate spokespersons orchestrate deliberate attempts to influence public impression (Barich and Kotler, 1991).

Image is also influenced by the everyday interactions between organizational members and external audiences (e.g. the doctor treating a patient, the sales clerk helping a customer, the consultant offering advice to a client).

Furthermore, the image formed by a particular group within the external audience can be affected by the intentions and influences of a wide range of actors including other groups.

Organizational culture

Organizational culture involves all organizational members, originates and develops at all hierarchical levels, and is founded on a broad-based history that is realized in the material aspects (or artefacts) of the organization (e.g. its name, products, buildings, logos and other symbols, including its top managers).

The concept of organizational culture includes material aspects central to the marketing-based concept of corporate identity.

The relationships between culture, image and identity form circular processes involving mutual interdependence.

Culturally embedded organizational identity provides the symbolic material from which organizational images are constructed and with which they can be communicated.

Organizational images are then projected outwards and absorbed back into the cultural system of meaning by being taken as cultural artefacts and used symbolically to infer identity: who we are is reflected in what we are doing and how others interpret who we are and what we are doing.

Organizational identity in turn has a number of external influences.

First, organizational identity is communicated to the various constituencies of the external environment who form organizational images, at least partly in response to identity-based communications.

The forms and means of such communication may differ, ranging from unplanned appearances by top management in public media, to a conscious strategy for external corporate communication involving design management, corporate advertising and public relations.

Direct contacts between insiders and outsiders are contextualized by the organizational culture, as everyday organizational behaviour is assumed to be influenced by local sense-making and interpretation. Thus, insofar as organizational members interact with "outsiders", there will be an influence of both organizational culture and identity on image beyond that carried by top management and other corporate spokespersons.

Organizational image involves externally produced meaning-making about the organization but, as noted above, this has an influence on internal processes of identity formation.

The organizational members are also members of external groups (e.g. consumers of the organization's goods or services, environmentalists, media watchers), it is likely that image and identity will be compared and these comparisons communicated within the internal symbolic context of the organization,

The culture, identity and image system in ways that are somewhat similar to model with two important differences.

First, culture is not another variable to be manipulated, but rather it forms the context within which identity is established, maintained and changed and corporate attempts to manipulate and use it are interpreted, assessed and ultimately accepted, altered or rejected.

Second, top management is as much a symbol of corporate identity as any other device top managers use to influence what employees and other constituencies perceive, feel and think about the organization.

Managers need to take charge of their symbolic selves and learn to be reflexive about their statements, behaviours and external images.

They need to become aware of how others interpret them and their organizations and react to this feedback in strategic ways, albeit with the understanding that image management will not be enough.

Reputation

Reputation may be considered as a component of identity as defined by others.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organisations, institutions and communities.

Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual.

At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations).

It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

Reputation as a socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns properties of agents, namely their attitudes toward some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance.

Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to spread. Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts also for the transmissibility and therefore for the propagation of reputation.

In fact, reputation is a highly dynamic phenomenon in two distinct senses: it is subject to change, especially as an effect of corruption, errors, deception, etc.; and it emerges as an effect of a multi-level bidirectional process.

Reputation is also how others know and perceive you as an individual.

Reputation proceeds from the level of individual cognition (when is born, possibly as an image, but not always) to the level of social propagation (at this level, it not necessarily believed as from any specific agent) and from this level back to individual cognition again (when it is accepted).

Reputation is the sum of impressions held by a company's stakeholders. In other words, reputation is in the "eyes of the beholder". It need not be just a company's reputation but could be the reputation of an individual, country, brand, political party, industry.

But the key point in reputation is not what the leadership insists but what others perceive it to be. For a company, its reputation is how esteemed it is in the eyes of its employees, customers, investors, talent, prospective candidates, competitors, analysts, alumni, regulators and the list goes on.

Many businesses have public relations departments dedicated to managing their reputation.

In addition, many public relations firms describe their expertise in terms of reputation management. The public relations industry is growing due to the demand for companies to build corporate credibility and hence reputation.

Although many companies will say company reputation is the job of the CEO, managing reputation is a daily function and can best be given to an individual in the organization.

Building reputation through stakeholder managementThe stakeholder theory says corporations should be run for the benefit of all "stakeholders," not just the shareholders. Stakeholders of a company include any individual or group that can influence or is influenced by a company's practices.

The stakeholders of a company can be suppliers, consumers,employees,shareholders, financial community, government, and media.

Companies must properly manage the relationships between stakeholder groups and they must consider the interest(s) of each stakeholder group carefully.

It becomes essential to integrate public relations into corporate governance to manage the relationships between these stakeholders which will enhance the organization's reputation. Corporations or institutions which behave ethically and govern in a good manner build reputational capital which is a competitiv advantage.

A company's reputation is an asset and wealth that gives that company a competitive advantage because this kind of a company will be regarded as a reliable, credible, trustworthy and responsible for employees, customers, shareholders and financial markets.

Reputation is a reflection of companies´  culture  and identity.

Also, it is the outcome of managers' efforts to prove their success and excellence. It is sustained through acting reliably, credibly, trustworthily and responsibly in the market. It can be sustained through consistent communication activities both internally and externally with key stakeholder groups.

This directly influences a public company's stock prices in the financial market. Therefore, this reputation makes a reputational capital that becomes a strategic asset and advantage for that company.

Corporate strategy

To define strategy as “how an organization creates and captures value in a specific product market.”

The strategy is about how to create and capture value in a specific product market. This highlights the importance of defining clearly the organization and product market that are the focus of strategy.

Symbolism and Corporate Identity

"There is no accounting for people's perceptions. Some see a logo or anything else that's seeable, the way they see an inkblot. Others look without seeing either the meaning or even the function of a logo. It is perhaps this sort of problem that prompted ABC TV to toy with the idea of "Updating their logo" (1962). They realised the folly only after a market survey revealed high audience recognition. This is to say nothing of the intrinsic value of a well-established symbol. When a logo's design is irrelevant: quality, not vintage nor vanity is the determining factor. 'A logo, after all, is an instrument of Pride and should be shown at its best." - Paul Rand

Design in Modern Economy

From the earliest Paleolithic cave painting to the latest piece of electronic graphics, visual images have existed to communicate ideas. We learn language by applying words to visual experiences and we create visual images to illustrate verbal ideas.

A combination of various messages, icons, symbols, identities, brands, packaging, advertising strive to seek our attention. All these elements form the fundamentals of design in the modern world of marketing communications.

Today as the electronic media business continues to change not only is there often more competition, but also approaches to marketing have become increasingly sophisticated and market segments more demanding. It is to bring here a check and balance between statements and perceptions that design is used as a strategic tool to enhance marketing communications.

Essence of Corporate Identity

A corporate identity programme is as broad and as vast as the term itself. Its application in terms of its usage are multi-tiered and multi-dimensional. Design bridges what is projected and how it is perceived. A good identity thus develops relationships with the society in which it operates. It commands respect & gets people's attention.

Identity of a company emerges around its business ideas and aspirations. It is a proven means of condensing complex reality into a single visual statement. One that can be effectively controlled, modified, developed and matured over time.

A logo is a flag - a signature, it derives its meaning from the quality of the product or group it symbolises.

The role of a logo is to point, to designate in as simple manner as possible. Simple ideas and simple designs have proven to be the most effective.

Identity is monolithic and its development of identity is based on the 'pictogram approach', its design exploration was based on arriving at a single visual statement that represented the entire idea behind that symbol.

A symbol that enjoyed a solid reputation with its audience, stakeholders and employees.

Essentially any brand image is a marriage between the visual & verbal.

Corporate Graphics: Logo Applications and Flexibilityin the use and influence of Internal Communications equally by means of Corporate Graphics to create a working environment that is based on the hallmark of professionalism and on the concept of 'brand conviction'.

The idea is to create a relationship between the organisation and its people and encourage excellence and inculcate a spirit of achievement.

As an organisation that lays great emphasis on Human Resource, its training and development, it plans and executes cohesive and integrated communication designed specially for its people to share the sense of pride and joy in Brand Stewardship.

This, of course, is in addition to numerous events and occasions that it holds to allow social, cultural and sporting activities as one big team.

The identity is carefully built to expand over time and incorporate secondary elements.

Corporate Band is used to give all its Print and Collateral Materials a distinctive look and feel.

The brand is derived out of Parent colours and takes inspiration from the 'Traditional Colour Band' .

The house colours are used to create originality and relevance. The band also uses text to highlight core-programming bouquet of News, Infotainment and Entertainment.

CORPORATE IMAGE AUDIT

Corporate image is a strategic asset that creates competitive advantage and favourable climate for the survival and development of an organisation.

For escaping negative consequences of uncontrolled image and shooting up opportunities of positive image, systematic measuring of corporate image is necessary.

Corporate image is an important organisational resource that enables to create, strengthen and sustain competitive advantage.

There could be used a corporate image audit for measuring and evaluating corporate reputation. It is an integrating system of evaluating corporate image and effectiveness of corporate image management in an organisation.

The objective is to propose guidelines of corporate reputation audit, including appropriate principles, methods, stages, actions and consecution of examining corporate image. Such an audit will allow an organisation to:

•measure corporate image and evaluate it as well•identify current or future problems of the image

• examine process of managing reputation and indicate weak points of it;

• prepare recommendations for correcting, modernizing, renewing and supporting reputation.

The methods applied for preparing guidelines of corporate image management are as follows:

• logical and comparative analysis of scientific literature;

• analysis of secondary data of reputation institutes and other private agencies.

The first and most important precondition for the success of corporate image audit is organisation’s owners, managers and employees perceiving necessity of managing corporate image systematically. Having enough resources for measuring and evaluating audit and implementing, the audit recommendations are necessary as well.

For assuring high validity and success of corporate image audit, preparatory work is necessary. The preparatory work of corporate image audit helps to match methods of image measuring and evaluating to a particular organisation and peculiarities of its strategy and practice.

The first task before starting the audit should be choosing a qualified and competent auditor. An auditor should be requested to be able to estimate an organisation’s image and every matter related to it independently and objectively.

The audit can be:

•External – carried out by independent external auditor or auditors’ organisation. •Internal – carried out by an auditor or department of the organisation that is going to be audited.•Combined – carried out by both external and internal auditors.

The objective is to propose guidelines of corporate reputation audit, including appropriate principles, methods, stages, actions and consecution of examining corporate image.

Such an audit will allow an organisation to:

•measure corporate image and evaluate it as well;

•identify current or future problems of the image;

•examine process of managing reputation and indicate weak points of it;

• prepare recommendations for correcting, modernizing, renewing and supporting reputation.

• The methods applied for preparing guidelines of

corporate image management are as follows:

• logical and comparative analysis of scientific literature;

• analysis of secondary data of reputation institutes and other private agencies.

The proposed guideline of corporate image audit is based on fundamental principals of methodic of management, marketing, technologies, logistics and other non-financial audit.

Thank you for your attention.