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Corporate Image and Identity

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Submitted By frenchii187
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What is ”Corporate Image” and “Corporate Identity”
– and why do people talk so much about it?
Dominique Bouchet
Professor, Department of Marketing
University of Southern Denmark,
Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark www.bouchet.dk – dom@sam.sdu.dk – Fax: + (45) 65 33 19 13

Image, identity and culture are concepts occupying the minds of companies and organizations of our time, because things must be connected in a world where every institution’s or person’s role and place are renegotiated almost everyday.

Companies’ increasing concern about their image, identity and culture must be seen in relation to a number of changes that influence their roles and opportunities. Today, the information we receive is no longer scarce; actually the amount of information is drowning us. This abundance has created much confusion. Demand and supply for information are disoriented and, thus, become increasingly dependent on the guidelines and criteria for sorting information in order to reduce confusion. Orientation is less and less a matter of gathering information and more and more a matter of sorting and connecting. The company’s consumers, stakeholders and employees are all influenced by this development.
Further, more and more people are now concerned about things other than material goods. For example, what we eat and how we should handle waste have become central issues for consumers and employees.
The ecological concern and political consumption make the news. At the beginning of the new millennium, the most fundamental motive for consumption is changing in the affluent part of the world: For the single individual it is to a still lesser degree a matter of satisfying basic needs or achieving material advantages and more and more a matter of being able to act in line with his or her deeper values and to gain greater independence, manage

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