Taking Up the Challenge of Corporate Branding: An Integrative Framework

Abstract

This study develops an integrative framework that refines and extends current understanding of corporate branding by highlighting its underlying processes and thereby offering guidance to companies on developing their corporate brand. The proposed integrative framework features a reassessment of the critical position of organizational identity in corporate branding. It also explicitly highlights the central role of an organization's construed and intended images in the design and implementation of a credible and successful corporate brand proposition that can foster stakeholders' organizational identification with and support of the organization. To complement our conceptual work and its theoretical propositions, we present an illustrative case study that contextualizes our framework and examines corporate branding practices at the furniture retailer IKEA and the challenges it faces. As a whole, this study helps unravel the key processes at play in corporate branding practices within a more manageable framework.