ABSTRACT
This paper aims to explain the development, relevance and ascendancy of key, corporate-level constructs such as corporate image, corporate identity, corporate reputation and corporate brands over the last half century. In scrutinizing key developments in the round since the 1950s, the author concludes they can either be regarded as weathervanes or signposts. The attention given to key corporate-level concepts at various times since the 1950s is significant, since these weathervanes focused on the saliency of key concepts, but this has been underpinned by what the author calls the ‘magnetism of monomania’. As such, scholars, practitioners and teachers have variously focused their attention on corporate image, then corporate identity, then corporate reputation and, more recently, corporate brand management. The importance accorded to individual constructs, or signposts, may be seen as providing enduring routeways into the broad territory and are viewed as an interrelated network of constructs. In their totality, to the author this represents an organizational-wide gestalt that supports the notion for the need for an overarching philosophy; what he calls corporate marketing (Balmer, 1998). Corporate marketing is a marketing and 4management paradigm which synthesizes practical and theoretical insights from corporate image and reputation, corporate identity, corporate communications and corporate branding, among other corporate-level constructs. The approach adopted in this paper is that of the quadrivium a traditional classical, four-part approach to the acquisition of knowledge, where I: (1) show how organizations can be faced by apocalyptic scenarios through a failure to accord sufficient attention to one or more dimensions of the corporate marketing mix; (2) explain why the emergence of corporate-level constructs such as corporate image, identity, branding communications and reputation represent, both individually and collectively, the advent of corporate marketing; (3) detail the various integrative initiatives in corporate design, corporate communications and identity studies which, together with the incremental augmentation of the marketing philosophy, find their natural dénouement in the epiphany of corporate marketing; (4) describe the 6 Cs of the corporate marketing mix and reflect upon possible future directions in organizational marketing.
