Corporate Identity

Two Schools of Thought

In scrutinizing the area or corporate identity, it is important to realise that corporate identity is a multifaceted construct. As such, corporate identity can be associated with the following two schools of thought:

An organization's outward identification refers to the multiple ways an organization communicates its essence—real, envisioned, or desired—with its key stakeholders. This includes a plethora of planned and unplanned forms of communication. Historically, emphasis has been accorded to symbolic communication, especially corporate visual identification (company logos) along with sensory identification. This entry focuses on visual corporate communications. The field of integrated corporate communications grew out of those earlier developments.

An organization's essence encompasses those identity attributes that imbue an entity with distinctiveness via a set of inimitable characteristics. In their totality, these identity anchors offer penetrating insights into, among others, an organization's purposes, activities, markets and geographic presence, constituencies, philosophies, corporate style, and organizational form. This identity perspective is viewed as a central tenet of corporate marketing since corporate brands, communications, reputations, and a stakeholder association with an entity need to take account of an organization's defining attributes.

Outward Identification

Institutions have long been concerned with communicating identity and ideology via integrated visual and symbolic communication. From the earliest times, brand marks were used to indicate ownership and provenance. One important means through which we comprehend the world is via symbolism [Page 291]and logos. In addition, we should not lose sight of the importance of verbal identification: Company names are, invariably, the most powerful forms of outward identification from organizations.