What is corporate branding?
Corporate branding is the brand of the company itself: its name, identity, purpose, values and reputation, presented to every audience that has a stake in it. Customers are one of those audiences. So are employees and recruits, investors, partners, regulators, the press and the communities where the company operates. A product brand persuades a shopper; a corporate brand has to earn trust from all of them at once.
Some companies are their product brand. Others sit above a portfolio of products with their own names, and the corporate brand is the endorsement behind them. Deciding how those layers relate is the job of brand architecture.
Why it matters
Why corporate branding matters
Corporate reputation shows up in hard costs: the cost of hiring, the price of capital, the patience of regulators, the benefit of the doubt in a crisis. A clear corporate brand makes a company easier to join, easier to invest in and easier to defend. A neglected one leaves the company described by its critics, its competitors or whatever the last headline said, which is rarely flattering and never complete.
It matters internally too. Employees are the corporate brand's first audience and its most credible messengers. People who understand what their company stands for explain it better to customers, recruit better colleagues and stay longer, and a corporate brand that makes sense to its own staff is far easier to make convincing to anyone else.
In practice
How corporate branding works in practice
- 01
It starts at the top, with leadership agreeing what the company is for and what it wants to be known for. That becomes a positioning, a narrative and a set of core values, then an identity system: name, mark, typography and voice that work in an annual report and on a recruiting page alike.
- 02
The most effective expression is often film. A brand film can carry a company's purpose to employees, investors and the public in a few minutes, and it reaches all of those audiences without needing a different version for each. Around it sit the ongoing channels: the careers site, executive communication, events and the company's own editorial.
At RIOT
Corporate branding at RIOT
Corporate brands need to be felt as well as understood, and that is where our films come in. We made the brand spot "For the Pursuit" for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and "The Future, In Focus" for News Corp. Each had to speak for a large organization in a single voice, which is the central problem of corporate branding, solved in a few minutes of film.
Watch out
What people get wrong about corporate branding
Writing for the boardroom. Corporate brands drift toward language like "leading provider of integrated solutions", which is true of thousands of companies and memorable for none. The other mistake is treating the corporate brand as a logo project. A new mark on an old reputation changes nothing until the company's story and behavior change with it. A third is speaking to one audience only, usually investors, and forgetting that recruits, customers and the press are reading the same words.
