The resurgence of the corporate brand

While the corporate brand has always been an inimitable asset, the past few years of marketers needing to constantly defend their impact and budgets has led to self-examination, and a renewed interest in harnessing corporate brands to their full potential. It’s led to hard questions: what is our corporate brand really for? How is it driving value above and beyond the portfolio brands? Can it justify expense when we need to drive measurable sales?

We believe the corporate brand is entering a new age, with renewed attention, and greater stakes. It’s no longer a nice-to-have, but an essential for enterprises to thrive. 

Here's why.

Often the greatest story never told, corporate brands are the totality of what a company stands for and what it uniquely delivers. More expansive than products and services sold, they define a company’s role in the world and shape its engagement across stakeholders, from employees to investors. Because they can’t be measured through sales alone and can feel abstract, understanding their true potential and value is not always immediately obvious.
 
A corporate brand makes Apple greater than iPhone, General Motors more than Chevrolet, and Meta more than Facebook.

Corporate branding is more critical than ever to achieving long-term success. It can lift your entire portfolio, help you gain credit for bigger impact, attract talent and investors, and more. It can transform separate assets and businesses into collective momentum—making your company one investors want in their portfolios, and a place where talent wants to be, and customers want to do business.
 
Getting there, of course, takes great business strategy, operational excellence and talent. It also requires winning hearts and minds, so people are on your side, wanting you to succeed and believing in what you make possible. This is the unique power of corporate branding. Unlike any other asset in your toolbox, it gives you a singular opportunity to tell the bigger story of what’s possible when you’re at your best, the larger scale impact that you have, and your aspiration for the future.

Corporate brands have long faced an identity challenge. They’re connected and separate from the business. They don’t have direct customers, but investors care about them. They write paychecks, but sometimes their own employees don’t know them well. They may even share a name with a portfolio brand. All of which can make it tough for executives to say exactly what their corporate brand is and why they should bother investing time and energy into it.
 
But the why is quite easy. Ignoring your corporate brand means leaving value on the table. In an era of increasing transparency, audiences consider your bigger story—and decide if they want to be a part of it. When all else is equal—be it in a purchase decision, job decision, partnership or investment—corporate brands help tip the coin in your favor with a halo of positive goodwill. Leave it unattended and undefined, and the coin toss is not in your favor. At worse, stagnation and lack of interest sets in, or even possibly calls for divestment. Considering that only half of Fortune 500 companies stay on the list for 10 years, you need to pull all the levers you can.

With increasing choice and rise in mimicry, brands need to be about more than price or performance to be a Go to Brand in people’s lives. Our ongoing Brand Aperture® research continues to affirm that brands that create stronger meaning– building emotional connections and enabling a sense of progress– drive preference. These ‘Go to’ brands achieve revenue growth at 5x faster rates than brands that don’t create meaning, and are also better insulated from downside risk, seeing lower declines in shareholder value relative to their industry indexes during tumultuous times like Covid [Brand Aperture Study, 2021].
 
The smartest organizations pull all the levers to help drive stakeholder perceptions in the right direction. Corporate brand is one of those levers, creating a halo effect across the portfolio, regardless of brand architecture. In our reseaerch, we've commonly see a 10 percent perception lift in desired attributes for portfolio brands when stakeholders are aware of the corporate brand relationship.

For example, more than ten years after creating the CVS Health corporate brand, people working across the healthcare ecosystem still call out the company’s big move to stop selling tobacco products—building belief in their purpose of helping people live their healthiest lives. Respected corporate brands help tip the coin toss in your favor– and across your portfolio.

At any time, enterprises face pressures or are undertaking critical strategic initiatives—AI, sustainability, strategies for cross-sell, the need to consolidate corporate functions, etc.—that can test an organization’s ability to thrive. Having a clear focus and inspiring ambition increases the chance of success. This is where a strong corporate brand can help. It can elevate a bigger narrative and provide the scale, efficiency and stature beyond the scope that any individual portfolio brand can achieve alone. 
 
Take sustainability as an example. Today, it can drive 10 percent of B2B brand choice, and we can expect that to increase over time. However, individual portfolio brands can struggle to gain recognition of their impact. Aggregating at a higher altitude, the corporate brand can tell the bigger, bolder story of impact across the portfolio. For instance, Ecolab serves a multitude of industries with dozens of solutions to protect people and vital resources. They ladder up their aggregate impact with their eROI (Exponential Return on Investment) measure, tracking outcomes for individual clients that add up in to staggering enterprise-wide triple-bottom-line results.

In an industry as commoditized as steel, Nucor transformed their corporate brand to be the clear choice for steel in a global, sustainability-minded marketplace centered on the big brand idea of “Build for Good.” The result is a dynamic blueprint for the enterprise, galvanizing 20,000 employees around a renewed vision and amplifying industry leadership. The corporate brand owns a bigger story that lifts across its portfolio.

People want to work for companies that are esteemed and meaningful—to be proud of who they work for as an extension of who they are. A corporate brand can bring purpose, stature and scale to help break through as an employer of choice across its portfolio. It’s why people want their resumes to read ‘Proctor & Gamble’ over an individual portfolio CPG brand. Building brands with employees pays off. In our Brand Aperture® Engage research, we found 25 percent revenue growth among companies whose employees feel a strong sense of connection, progress and enablement to their brand.

Known as a talent destination for general management, Danaher amplified their corporate brand to build powerful focus and meaning around a clarified role in driving health and life science innovation. By telling a bigger story that transcended their portfolio brands, and by using Danaher more broadly as an employer and talent acquisition brand, the intent was to become a true career destination for the best scientific, technology and engineering talent.

Employers are increasingly a transparent public part of people’s identity, and a part of their social media. A strong corporate brand can help an organization become a talent magnet, boosting reputation across portfolio companies to become a "resume builder." Every edge in the war for top talent counts, especially as the job landscape undergoes its next transformation by AI.

A refrain we typically hear from Investor Relations or analysts is that brand “doesn’t matter, as long as the company delivers.” While financial performance and a solid business strategy is paramount, you need more to compete for investment today. To win investors’ wallets, you also need to win them over.

Regardless of how rational they claim to be, they are still people. They need to understand and believe why your enterprise together is greater than the sum of its parts—or you may even risk pressure to break up. A stronger corporate brand with a coherent story that connects across the portfolio helps affirm your reason for being and builds confidence in your future. Your corporate brand helps frame your investor story—your why, how and vision for the future become clarified and aligned to how you drive ongoing performance.

If you don’t have a corporate brand strategy, you are missing a unique opportunity to unlock value and get credit for your greatest story. And worse, you are likely letting others write it for you.  From helping drive preference, owning bigger impact, efficiently attracting talent, and competing for capital, your corporate branding is a foundational, critical asset.