Corporate identity: the concept, its measurement and management

Corporate identity: clarifying the conceptThere are divergent views within the literature as to what is meant by corporate identity.In this article the authors refer to three main developments in the area which variously equate corporate identity with graphic design, with integrated corporate communication and last, with a multidisciplinary approach which draws heavily on organizational behaviour.Each of the three approaches has tended to follow a separate line of development and it would appear that the literature on each of the three strands has started to reach maturity.Increasingly, writers are drawing on several of these strands and this has led to a multidisciplinary approach.The characteristics of each of the three aforementioned strands will be discussed in the next section. Corporate identity: the graphic design paradigmOriginally, corporate identity was synonymous with organizational nomenclature, logos, company housestyle and visual identification.Many corporate identity practitioners had (and have) their roots in graphic design and understandably a good deal of importance was assigned to graphic design.The authors contend that graphic designers have been hugely influential in two regards, in that they articulated the basic tenets of corporate identity formation and management and succeeded in keeping the subject on the agenda of senior managers.Of note are North American practitioners who were the first to create managerial interest in the area and include Selame and Selame (1975), Margulies (1977), Carter (1982) and Chajet (1992).They were followed by UK design and communications consultants such as Olins (1978, 1989), Bernstein (1986), Jackson (1987), Ind (1990) and Pilditch (1970) and then by German (Birkight and Stadler, 1980), Dutch (Blauw, 1989) and French (Hebert 1987) practitioners.The role of symbolism is now assigned a greater role and has grown from its original purpose of increasing organizational visibility to a position where it is seen as having a role in communicating corporate strategy.Notable with regard to the latter is Olins (1978) who classified visual identity into three main types