Page 85 - Corporate Communication

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74 Mapping the Field

the more authentic and deeper values that uniquely define the company need to be
elicited and drawn out as they truly are the icing on the cake.This often comes down
to a soul-searching exercise that senior managers and communications professionals
should engage in (see Table 3.3) aimed at producing and triggering the attributes and
values of the organization that are perceived as authentic, characterize it, are unique to
it and set it apart from other companies in its sector.Wal-Mart is a case in point.Its vision
of ‘giving working people the opportunity to buy the same things previously available
only to wealthier people’ is wonderful, but is just a generic aspect of its positioning and
pricing strategy, and is not the one specific feature that is differentiating or hard to imi-
tate by rival firms.What is unique to Wal-Mart, however, is its core values of ‘commu-
nity’ and ‘partnership’ that lie at the root of its founding and has propelled its success.
Community and partnership are values that are meticulously carried through in its stores,
advertising campaigns, employee ownership schemes and supply chain management.
Wal-Mart has,for instance,changed the role of their suppliers into partners with them in
their stores, thereby cunningly shifting inventory responsibilities back to the suppliers.

Box 3.3 Case study: corporate identity in the financial sector

Banks and the financial services industry as a whole have traditionally been characterized
by generic and monolithic identities, where the image of the industry and the generic
identities of banks (with perceptions of integrity and professionalism) were generally
seen as imparting more value to the products and services than any brand could possi-
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bly achieve. Historically, such a choice for a generic and monolithic corporate identity
reflected the conjunction of historical forces, product characteristics (product differenti-
ation is difficult in the financial service industry as services are easily copied) and envi-
ronmental influences to which financial organizations are subject. However, because of
the problems facing the banking industry as a whole in the 1980s (e.g. staff redundan-
cies, poor customer service and lending decisions of dubious integrity), banks around the
globe claim to have since put greater effort into redefining their individual corporate
identities and brands as part of a search for differentiation in the marketplace.
Yet, when taking a closer look at corporate identities in the banking sector, it seems
that banks have made little progress in developing truly differentiating corporate iden-
tities in terms of the values that they proclaim and the images projected. With the
exception of niche players such as the Co-operative Bank (United Kingdom) and Triodos
Bank (the Netherlands), which follow their own distinctive ethical positioning strategies,
all the major banks still maintain monolithic identities and communicate a range of
values that are not distinct but are commonly proclaimed by every professional firm.
Citigroup, for instance, the global industry leader that is based in the US, has recently
decided to realign all business units and products under its monolithic Citigroup
umbrella. In May 2001, Sanford Weill, CEO of Citigroup, announced that as the brand
name ‘Citigroup’ has become strongly established in the corporate and institutional
marketplace and that many of their clients now use ‘Citigroup’, regardless of the business
with which they may work, greater efforts were being put into having a ‘more unified
brand’. Such a unified Citigroup brand, it is believed, strengthens the ‘common culture’
within the group, clarifies its image in the marketplace, and will deliver economies of
scale as ‘marketing and advertising campaigns can be leveraged across the company’.