نام تجاری شرکت به عنوان اتحادیه نام تجاری Corporate Brands as Brand Allies

Introduction About two decades ago, Balmer (1995) introduced the notion of corporate brand management. A corporate brand is a name, logotype or trademark defining the organisation that will deliver and stand behind the offering (Balmer and Gray, 2003; Aaker, 2004). It is a covenant between the organisation and its stakeholders (Balmer, 2003). Corporate brands deliver additional and different information from product brands. Product brands provide information about product performance to consumers. Corporate brands, in contrast, communicate organisations’ values, culture, and ethos (Balmer, 2013); thereby eliciting key associations among stakeholders (Brown and Dacin, 1997), differentiating the organisation from competitors, and enhancing loyalty among stakeholders (Balmer and Gray, 2003). Thus, corporate brand management has become an important topic for managers and a promising research context for marketing scholars. Managers today are interested in creating and maintaining well-established corporate brands and reaping the synergistic effects and opportunities that arise from such investments (Saunders and Guoqun, 1996). Strong corporate brands “can be bought, borrowed, sold and, in certain circumstances, be shared among a variety of organisations” (Balmer and Gray, 2003, p. 992). Consequently, a recently observed marketing tactic consists of including a corporate brand in a brand alliance between one of the corporation’s product brands and another entity. A brand alliance involves the combination of two or more brands to achieve a strategic objective (Rao and Ruekert, 1994; Simonin and Ruth, 1998). It is a mutually beneficial arrangement between a focal brand (typically incapable of eliciting favourable consumers’ evaluations by itself) and a well-known reputable brand ally capable of eliciting favourable consumer evaluations and transferring them to the focal brand (Fang et al., 2013; Gammoh and Voss, 2013). For example, Dairy Queen recently advertised its Blizzard of the Month, which featured Rolo brand candy blended in. The name of Rolo’s corporate parent, Nestlé, was displayed in a small typeset above the much larger Rolo brand name. Managers add the brand ally’s corporate parent’s brand to the brand alliance with the hope of increasing the total transfer effect on the focal brand.