A Guide to Bringing Corporate Branding to a Company

A Guide to Bringing Corporate Branding to a Company

For many people, corporate represents offices with tall glass buildings and cabins with glass partitions. It also represents men and women dressed in crisp formal clothing wearing I-cards and giving presentations in conference rooms.

By definition, corporate refers to a large company or group. There is a reason why people associate the word corporate with large buildings and modern offices.  Corporate is a term used for big companies, groups, and organizations.

A company becomes corporate when it grows large enough. Google in 2002 was an upstart, as was Facebook in 2005 and Amazon in 2000. In 2020, they are all big corporate tech companies ever-expanding their influence on the average person.

The dream of every entrepreneur is to one day create a corporate company. There are some corporate companies we know that have a better presence in the market than others. This is because these companies are able to communicate and market their brand to the general masses more easily. For instance, both Apple and General Electric are corporate, but the former is more widely popular because of more intensive brand marketing.

Corporate branding is not some new concept. Large companies realized long ago that public perception is an important side of doing business. Businesses that do well and stand their ground through thick and thin are usually those that people grow to know and respect over the years.

What is Corporate Branding?

So what is corporate branding?

As the term itself implies, efforts made by a company to make its brand known in the market is called branding. When this company happens to be a large company, the process is known as corporate branding.

For big companies, corporate branding is important for several reasons. The publicity a corporate can get on account of having a strong branding game is immense. In most cases, this publicity is absolutely free because most in the industry tend to look up to large corporate companies.

Second, being a corporate without actually having a good public presence is also not ideal, especially if the corporate belongs to a B2C segment. The space voided by a corporate company without any real brand game can be taken up by a rival and used against the business interests of said business.

Moving forward, we will cover some of the steps branding professionals must follow while bring corporate branding to a company.

Bring Consistency to Messaging

What does consistency in messaging really mean?

A corporate brand has many outlets which it uses to communicate with the public. Besides its own social media profiles and website, a corporate company may also have PR spokespeople to handle media relations and communications.

Consistency simply means to have the same tone and style in all these communications.

Every brand has a style of its own. Apple is known for its own style of communicating with its audience, while Microsoft has another. Brands tend to be known by their special style and tone of communication.  The first step in effective corporate branding is setting up a certain messaging format and style with the outside world to portray and unified and coherent image of the company.

Create a Style Guide

A style guide refers to the template used by a company while publishing content through any number of mediums.

You might have noted that most companies have a letter head on their official document. Why is this important?

A letter head tells people that this paper and the underlying content inside has come directly from your company.

The role of a style guide is to bring consistency in written content put out by a company. It comprises of the content layout, choice of font, color, size of font, spacing, and other formatting details.

Loyalty Marketing

Apple has loved more by its customers than Nokia or Samsung is by its base of customers.

Why?

Apple manages to keep its base of customers happy. Others companies are not able to do so at the level Apple can.

This naturally helps Apple maintain a solid brand image in the market. Loyalty marketing refers to a set of techniques used to invoke and inspire loyalty amongst the customers. This is done to ensure three things – number one, the company retains its user base, number two, the loyal users serve as brand ambassadors and unpaid affiliates for the brand, and number three, the brand manages to create a positive spin around its name.

To accomplish loyalty marketing, a brand has to offer its existing base of customer personalised benefits and advantages it doesn’t hand out to everyone.

Giving loyal customers special perks is amongst the oldest tricks in the book to create loyal customers.

Study Rivals

A corporate is likely to share its market with a handful of other competitors. At such a high level, the tiniest of changes in strategy can change the way a business operates when compared to its competitors.

In order to improve corporate branding efforts, another key trick lies in emulating the good things a rival does and shun the bad things.

Big corporate often have the same work culture and type of professionals working in their offices. The only differentiation that comes up is in how each corporate interacts with the world outside its bubble. Studying rivals helps as it gives branding professionals working for a corporate a good idea about what they have to do to set their corporate client on the right path.

Differentiation is often the key when it comes to corporate branding and studying how rivals behave helps in this regard.

In Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the basics of corporate branding. We also cover how corporate branding can be used to enhance the presence of the brand in the market.