Contemporary Thoughts on Corporate Branding and Corporate Identity Management

Abstract

Corporate branding theorists view incongruency between the company and its consumers as undesirable and that it can have detrimental consequences for performance outcomes. However, the proposition of negative performance implications of corporate brand misalignment is yet to be empirically supported. This paper seeks to overcome this limitation through: 1) conceptualization and operationalization of misalignment in terms of the profile deviation; and 2) an empirical test of the performance impact of misalignment. The results of this study generally support the proposition that deviation from the manager-construed profile (referred to as a corporate perspective) has significant and negative implications for customer satisfaction and loyalty, thus raising the strategic importance of the alignment of corporate and consumer perspectives within corporate branding. An organization engaged in corporate branding in the Australian automotive industry was chosen as a unit of analysis.