As we approach the 20th Anniversary of what is arguably the first academic article featured with corporate brands as its theme, the Journal of Brand Management (JBM) is featuring two topical articles on corporate brands: corporate brand Management and corporate brand orientation by the Business School’s Professor of Corporate Marketing, John Balmer. (John Balmer was the author of the 1995 Journal of General Management article “Corporate Branding and Connoisseurship” and held the first chair in corporate brand management.)
In the first JBM article, published in 2010, entitled “Explicating corporate brands and their management: Reflections and Directions from 1995”, Professor Balmer provides an overview of the insights contained in his seminal article on corporate brands and corporate brand management (published in the Journal of General Management) and notes the influence of the legendary brand practitioner, Stephen King, to the area, and makes reference to literature on how corporate brands differ from product brands and why the CEO is, de facto, an organisation’s corporate brand manager.
The second JBM article is topical, since 2014 marks the anniversary of Dr Mats Urde’s brand orientation concept (Mats Urde is a member of the JBM editorial board). In the article John Balmer formally introduces the corporate brand orientation and also pays tribute to the work of Urde and other scholars working in the brand orientation field.
Linking the brand orientation notion to the corporate brand domain is, Professor Balmer argues, a logical dénouement of the brand orientation notion. Linking the brand orientation notion with corporate brands is timely as we celebrate the 20th anniversaries of the foundational articles of both domains. Making these commentaries freely available to a wide public is a fitting way to mark this most significant anniversary.
Full text of Corporate Brands and their Management from the JBM
Full text of Corporate Brand Orientation from the JBM