CORPORATE IDENTITY, IMAGE, AND REPUTATION

IDENTITY, IMAGE, AND REPUTATION:

A company’s identity is the visual manifestation of the company’s reality as conveyed through the organization’s name, logo, motto, products, services, buildings, stationery, uniforms, and all other evidence created by organization and communicated to a variety of constituencies. Whereas Image is defined by the constituencies how they values a particular organization.

Given how every industry today faces global competition and companies are trying to manage the limited resources, and organization’s identity and image might be the only difference that people can use to distinguish one company from the next. That is why people prefer Nike shoes than Shoe from Puma does not matter whether they are cheaper.

It is increasingly acknowledge that intangibles assets are the backbone of 21st economy. Brands and corporate reputation are increasingly recognized as some of the most important intangibles that form the backbone of the post-modern economies. Intangible factors help to create brands and corporate reputations which provide the lasting competitive advantage and have become important determinants of organizational performance and value.

For example, diverse firms such as Procter & Gamble, for example, have very distinct division between the brands (Tide, Ivory, to name a few) versus Procter & Gamble as an organization. General Electric, on the other hand, carries a consistent corporate identity across multiple products and divisions, such as GE appliances and even GE Financial Services.

CORPORATE IDENTITY:
Many companies, such as McDonald's and Electronic Arts have their own identity that runs through all of their products and merchandise. The trademark "M" logo and the yellow and red appear consistently throughout the McDonald's packaging and advertisements. Many companies pay large amounts of money for an identity that is extremely distinguishable, so it can appeal more to its targeted audience.

Corporate Identity is often viewed as being composed of three parts:

Corporate Design (logos, uniforms, etc.)
Corporate Communication (commercials, public relations, information, etc.)
Corporate Behavior (internal values, norms, etc.)

Corporate Identity has become a universal technique for promoting companies and improving corporate culture. Most notably is the company PAOS, founded by Motoo Nakanishi in Tokyo Japan in 1968. Nakanishi fused design, management consulting and corporate culture to revolutionize CI in Japan.


Brand Image and Corporate Reputation in the Pharmaceutical Industry:

The issue of corporate versus brand reputation is particularly pressing in the pharmaceutical industry. With the advent of DTC (direct to consumer) marketing in the 1990s, pharmaceutical brands began to develop a more interactive relationship with the end user. At the same time, through the 1990s firms such as Merck, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer began to manage broader portfolios of brands both within a therapeutic area as well as across multiple therapeutic areas. Lilly, for example, has blockbuster drugs in mental Health (Prozac, Zyprexa, Cymbalta), Urology (Cialis), Women’s Health (Evista, Forteo) and Diabetes (Humulin and Humalog Insulins, Actos and Byetta). In developing this portfolio, pharmaceutical firms have needed to understand the costs and benefits associated with linking brand and corporate identity across brands and with various stakeholders including consumers, doctors, and the FDA and other governmental bodies.