Corporate brand portfolio management

Thesis (M.M. (Strategic Marketing))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits Business School, 2016Many organisations consider their brands strategic assets and want to manage them accordingly. The adoption of a corporate brand strategy is one way in which organisations show their commitment to being a brand-focused business. Organisations do however often find it difficult to translate the theory on corporate branding into practice. There are a number of reasons for this; in essence, brands are not always created equally due to the fact that organisations often inherit brands through mergers and acquisitions, each bringing with them a different degree of equity and strength to the brand portfolio. Aligning and strategically managing the brands in the portfolio is the end goal, but before that can happen, a good understanding of what each brand contributes to the brand portfolio and how best each brand can be leveraged to ultimately support the growth of the corporate brand is required. This is followed by identifying who is responsible for managing the changes in the portfolio and communicating them to the stakeholders. The research explored the above process and entailed conducting a literature review on the evaluation and analysis of corporate branding and corporate brand management and the basis on which brand decisions are made and the scope of their influence. This was followed up by in-depth interviews with ten purposefully selected, information-rich participants within Tsogo Sun, a pre-selected organisation that comprises a multi-brand portfolio, with the aim of gaining information on their understanding of corporate branding and corporate brand management in practice. iii Following the interrogation of the data, it was confirmed that corporate branding in practice cannot always follow the strict approaches proposed by the theory, resulting in a gap between the literature and the practical solution required in order to be suitable for organisational implementation. The result of the research proposes a framework that aims to address this gap with the intent that the application thereof would make decision-making pertaining to branding easier and keep branding on a strategic level within an organisation.DM201