IMPORTANCE OF CORPORATE IMAGE
The growing significance of managing corporate identity is underscored by a 1989 survey in Britain by Market Opinion Research International, which found that 77 percent of the leading industrialists questioned believed that the importance their firms attached to developing and promoting their corporate identity would increase in the near future. Research a year later by CBI and Fitch Consultants corroborated this finding and the experience of the 1990s strongly suggests that this expectation has materialized.
The overriding reason for the burgeoning concern for corporate identity is abundantly clear. We live in a time of immense environmental complexity and change, and consequently corporations have been forced to significantly alter their strategies to better compete and survive. Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures represent a major dimension of corporate change over the past several decades. Consider the extreme example of the Greyhound Corporation. For most of this century, Greyhound was the largest busing company in North America. In the 1970s, however, the company initiated an aggressive acquisition/diversification and by the late 1980s was competing in five different industries (it even sold off most of its busing operations). To signal this metamorphosis to its external audiences, the company belatedly changed its name to the Dial Corporation and completely revamped its corporate communications.
The acceleration of product life cycles is another vital dimension of the turbulent business environment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the electronics industry. Personal computers can become outmoded in the period of less than a year. In the audio segment of the market, tapes replaced records and, in turn, were replaced by compact discs, which may in the future be superseded by digital audiotapes. Companies with strong corporate images, such as Sony Corporation and Casio, obviously have an advantage in such dynamic markets because their name adds value to their products by reducing uncertainty in the eyes of distributors, retailer$, and consumers.
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