Corporate identity and consumer marketing: A process model and research agenda

The paper reviews the state-of-the-art in corporate identity (CI) literature and offers new directions for the application of corporate identity in consumer marketing. The authors expand the conventional understanding of the corporate identity-image management process by unveiling the 'black box' of the process of translating corporate identity to consumer responses and performance based on analysis of consumer psychology, i.e. consumer identification and image-congruity. Moreover, the authors also argue that the potentiality of application of corporate identity in consumer marketing research has not been fully recognized. What follow in the paper are future research directions and a research agenda grounded in the positive/normative, micro/macro, and specialized/integrative taxonomy. This paper expands the traditional corporate identity domain, which mainly focused on strategic marketing and corporate issues, by incorporating the consumer marketing perspective.