By Liz Olsen, Senior Strategy Director, Siegel+Gale

Liz Olsen, Senior Strategy Director, Siegel+Gale

What’s the power of a corporate brand?

In the wider world of branding, corporate brands often receive less of the limelight, compared with the better-defined, promoted and resourced product brands that go to market. This is true for consumer audiences as well as large swaths of the B2B world, such as technically differentiated sectors like enterprise software and hardware, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and medical devices. 

The corporate brand is coming into its own of late though, increasingly important and powerful in the wider marketplace. In the ever-more connected world we inhabit, it offers a broader storytelling opportunity no matter who the business is or what it does.

A wide(ning) audience

Corporate brands reach a diverse audience of stakeholders, from media to investors to business partners and suppliers. Crucially, they also provide an identity for employees across the parts of the business, the grounding for creating shared mindsets and a cohesive, strong organisational culture. Even for companies that operate business units fairly separately, the corporate brand offers the opportunity for a more consistent overall identity for people on the inside, who may move around roles, building knowledge across the business – which benefits the business as well.

Customers have historically been more focused on product brands, especially in end consumer-facing industries. But even in FMCG, the corporate brand is becoming elevated, acting as a quality seal or stamp of approval for increasingly educated consumers who are receptive to a more portfolio-level brand story.

An ability to unite 

An impactful corporate brand provides guidance, a north star often rooted in a more overarching corporate purpose or vision as a firm. Its higher-level brand story, reflecting the business’s goals, acts as a lens through which different parts of the business, and their products, can communicate. The corporate brand thus provides direction for how product and service brands under its remit should act. This remit may include much flexibility, with the aim not of limiting owned brands, but keeping them from clashing or conflicting in message, tone, and look and feel.

Doing it well

  1. Unilever

The consumer product behemoth has always operated as a clear “house of brands,” creating distinctive, standalone product brands across categories of operation, and even for multiple products within a category. It has thus built and acquired a stable of power brands that consumers know and love. 

More recently though, the company has made a clear shift to create more meaning around the Unilever brand itself – for employees, as a talent magnet, as a responsible corporate citizen. The corporate logo has been showing up more conspicuously on products themselves, catching the eye of consumers who increasingly read labels for beauty and other personal products – to look for particular ingredients, understand provenance and more.

2. SAP

The software giant deploys a plethora of product, service and platform brands across a sophisticated capabilities ecosystem, acquiring and creating new parts of the offer regularly. This led to the brand system becoming complicated though, so via the company’s vision to become more brand-led and the most innovative in their peer set, SAP set about to rationalise its brand and product architecture, simplifying to create a more understandable portfolio that truly expressed a corporate-level narrative of being the world’s most innovative cloud company.

Stronger, clearer use of the corporate brand with a vision to “Help the world run better” aimed to increase consideration across the portfolio while simplifying the overall go-to-market strategy.

3. Tetra Pak

Tetra Pak is a European multinational food packaging and processing company, classically known for its high-quality packaging solutions. The brand has been acting as a quality seal for many years in this capacity, but in the last year has also seen a surge in its usefulness to businesses and customers, a renewed appreciation for getting foods safely to customers who have had to adapt purchasing/shopping behaviours considerably.

Brand communications, around a tagline that Tetra Pak “protects what’s good” are focusing evermore on the company’s vision to “make food safe and available, everywhere,” a message which has also resonated strongly with employees in creating a pride and mindset that drives day to day work. Industry initiatives and wider partnerships around sustainable, traceable packaging also elevate the corporate brand. Tetra Pak has seized a time of high relevance to customers both business and end-consumer, demonstrating that its meaning and usefulness extends far beyond product branding in an important role in our world.

Don’t underestimate ‘the pull of the corporate’ today, as a focal point for employees, partners, customers, investors and more. These stakeholders play multiple roles in their day-to-day lives and interactions with a brand as well, creating a chance of resonance of the overall corporate story to become memorable. Behind every good product is the business that created it, and that is the opportunity of the corporate brand today – wide reach, the ability to unite and tell a strong brand story.