Chapter 2. Literature Review
2.1 Stengel 50: the World’s 50 Fastest Growing Brands
1Based on 10 years empirical research involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel and Millward Brown developed the list of the world’s 50 fastest growing brands and the study formed the backbone of the Book GROW: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies.
‘Stengel 50’ – the world’s 50 fastest growing brands– is the list of fifty brands, which built the deepest relationships with customers while achieving the greatest financial growth from 2001-2011. Former Procter and Gamble marketing officer Jim Stengel and brand consultants Millward Brown conducted the research and found a cause-and-effect relationship between a brand’s ability to serve a higher purpose and its financial performance. The list includes numerous brands with strong reputations for sustainability like Hermès, VISA, and Samsung Electronics.
Stengel had implemented research activities over a long period of time and explained in this book about the results of the secret to grow company into a first-class.
The 4 profound finding of the Stengel’s study are as below:
Brand ideals drive the performance of the highest growth businesses.
The highest growth businesses are run by business artists, leaders whose primary medium is brand ideals.
Business artists excel in similar practices that constitute an operating system for generating and sustaining high growth.
The brand ideals of the highest growth businesses center in one of five fields of fundamental human values.
The researchers found out the most successful brands were built on an ideal of improving lives in
1 Stengel Jim. GROW: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, (Danvers: Crown Business, 2011.
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some way, irrespective of size and category. And they also uncovered that this ideal is a source of inspiration externally among customers, as well as a guide for internal employees.
The analysis also discovered that the company centered their businesses on ideals had a growth rate triple that of competitors. In addition, investment in ‘the Stengel 50 ‘ companies over the past decade would have been 400% more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. (refer to figure 2.1)
How Ideals Impact the Consumer Mind
According to the study, the 50 brands have ideals touch on five fundamental human values.
Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, security, and vitality.
Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, from challenging the status quo to redefining categories.
Based on Stengel 50 listing, Samsung Electronics was one of the 50 companies with ideals that can be classified as a brand that “Inspiring exploration”. According to the Stengel, Samsung’s brand ideal is “exist to inspire imagination and enrich life in a world of unlimited possibilities.”
The vision and business philosophy of Samsung electronics is all about inspiration and creativity, which is also in line with Stengel 50’s value classification. This will be explained in-depth in chapter 5.1. Through variety corporate branding activities, the company seems to be successfully inspiring external shareholders to join them in exploring the digital world.
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2.2 Bringing the corporation into corporate branding
In the European Journal of Marketing Vol. 37(Jul. – Aug., 2003) pp.1041-1064, Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz published the paper, Bringing the corporation into corporate branding.
The paper began with the brief introduction of transformation in marketing emphasis to corporate branding. The authors emphasized that in the era of sophisticated customers and complex markets, differentiation requires positioning the whole corporation. While arguing marketing as support for the shift to corporate branding, Ackerman(1998); Balmer (1995, 2001a);
de Chernatony (1999, 2001; Ind, 1997) described that the corporate branding brings to marketing the ability to use the vision and culture of the company explicitly as part of its unique selling proposition. In addition, Balmer (2001a) noted the importance of corporate branding to a
multiplicity of stakeholders such as customer attractiveness, staff motivation. Parallel to this shift, de Chernatony (2001) also argued for the importance of strategic vision to branding, as a means to integrated brand building.
Despite great emphasis on related arguments for creating a more comprehensive and coherent framework for analyzing who the company is and what it stands for to multiple stakeholders, these authors did not relate these contributions to the concept of corporate branding.
Therefore, the authors described corporate branding as an organizational tool and introduced a framework of corporate branding model – simultaneous interplay between vision, culture and image. According to the authors, this mix of underlying factors requires companies to address the organizational implications of shifting to corporate branding in an organizationally integrated, cross-functional way.
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Figure 2.3 Successful corporate brands tap the attractive force that draws stakeholders to the organization
Source: Mary Jo and Majken Schultz, Bringing the corporation into corporate branding, (European Journal of Marketing Vol. 37, Jul. – Aug. 2003) pp.1041-1064.
https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560310477654
The authors showed the example of use of model by examining the stages of development of British Airways in the creation of its corporate brand. The paper concluded that corporate brand management is a dynamic process with continuously adjustments of vision, culture and image. In this paper, the authors did not specifically describe how to simultaneous interplay underlying elements, but they suggested an approach to corporate branding that is
organizationally integrated and cross-functional, hence the thesis that it is important to bring the corporation into corporate branding.