Corporate Reputation and Brand Architecture: the Debate

This paper argues that for organizations with a branded identity structure investing in corporate reputation is not a waste of scarce resources, but a wise strategic investment that earns significant present and future economic and non-economic returns for a company. In the global market of the 21st century, corporate reputation provides a number of intangible benefits: it permits stakeholders to asses a firm's ability to deliver valued products; it indicates past interactions with a firm's stakeholders; it improves a firm's ability to recruit and preserve its primary stakeholders; along with delivering tangible (financial) benefits by enhancing a firm's ability to do better than its competitors, thus expanding its profits and revenues. These tangible and intangible benefits of favorable corporate reputation are present regardless of the brand architecture type, such that strategic investment in corporate reputation must be executed equally for all three categories of brand architecture.