Taking Brand Initiative : How Companies Can Align Strategy, Culture, and Identity Through Corporate Branding

This book breaks new ground in looking past the "usual suspects" in branding and identify the corporate brand as the key to balancing "differentiation" and "belonging". Looking beyond the marketing value of brands--company-to-customer--and the HR significance--company-to-employee--this book places the management of brands at the senior level of management and organizational development. The author explain how the brand is just as important to a company's "ousiders"--politicians, suppliers, citizens, analysts--as it is to insiders. The book also shows how only the corporate brand can integrate all the company's staff functions and provide a vision for compeition, globalization, etc. The book provide three cutting-edge analytical model to help gauge the effectiveness of any corporate branding effort: The Vision-Culture-Image Model The Cycle of Branding Model The Organizational Identity Model

Mary Jo Hatch is professor emerita at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.

Majken Schultz is professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

Hatch and Schultz co-founded the Corporate Brand Initiative, which is funded by the LEGO Group and sponsored jointly by Nissan, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, SONY, Boeing, Telefónica, and ING.