Investigating the links between a corporate brand and a customer brand

Corporate brand management aims to establish a favourable disposition towards the organisation by its various stakeholders. This paper presents a new holistic perspective to integrating the areas of corporate branding, corporate identity management and corporate communication with the customer. Theory in these areas provides several yet unanswered questions. The aim is to bridge this gap and advance an understanding of the application of marketing and management theories in these three areas. The aim of this paper is to investigate the concepts and constructs that combine the corporate brand and the customer brand and to develop a conceptual framework. The conceptual framework suggests that aligning the company, the stakeholders and the customers is important as it is the entire corporation that is being branded. The context of the conceptual framework is looked upon in terms of the alignment between strategic vision, brand identity and brand knowledge. To get a balanced picture of corporate branding, the paper provides theoretically based knowledge on how the concepts and constructs of corporate and customer brands can be linked. The conceptual framework will form a basis for an auditing method. The limitation of this paper is that it is only the conceptual framework that is introduced here.