As corporates proceed to develop new product brands, changing market and consumer situations throw up the need for re-looking at age-old branding strategies and corporate beliefs. Increased competition, more informed consumers, changing global scenarios and economic conditions have brought into focus the need for developing strategies to increase value for the consumer, thereby increasing organizational profitability. Organizational investments in corporate brand identities have increased manifold over the recent years. Realizing the value of corporate brand identities has made big corporates make sizeable investments to enhance their brand images. Allowing new product brands to contribute to these brand images now appears to be important. At the same time, when corporates are strengthening their brand images, individual product brands seem to lose out when consumers fail to link the individual products and the corporate brand images. Organizations will gain from recognizing the consumer as a significant dimension while formulating brand management strategies. This paper attempts to study the ability of individual consumers to associate a product or service brand with the corporate associated with the same, thereby stressing the need to build brand awareness. This was done by conducting a study using a product brand pool as a research instrument, where consumers were asked to classify the brand on the basis of the corporates producing those brands. The results were further used to calculate a consumer brand association score. This score was considered as representative of the consumer's state of relationship with the organization and was used to create consumer clusters for segmentation to aid purposeful consumer targeting.

Organizations are witnessing a shift from product branding to corporate branding (Aaker, 1996; and Keller, 2003). The general aim of corporate branding is to build a sustainable bond between the branded company and its customers through a clear value proposition (Schultz and de Chernatony, 2002). While not exactly dealing with the product features, it transports a well-defined set of corporate values (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000). It is vital for organizations that "consumers relate a product or specific brand to the parent organization. This can be achieved through appropriate brand management." This paper attempts to study the ability of consumers to associate a product or service brand with the parent organization. We do this by calculating a consumer-brand association score and further try to analyze the causes for variation in the score across several brands. We further try and establish a link between brand name typology and the ability of the consumers to link a singular product brand to the corporate brand. The paper further explores profiling of consumers for an Indian corporate, ITC. ITC's corporate strategy is aimed at creating multiple drivers of growth anchored on its time-tested core competencies: unmatched distribution reach and superior brand-building capabilities. There appears potential for capitalizing on the vast consumer base available, by formulation of appropriate targeting strategies for higher rates of consumer conversion.

The corporate brand is viewed as an important profile builder for corporations, it can imbue a corporation with a distinctiveness that is not readily matched by competitors. It can be one of an organization's most coveted and cherished assets. For customers, it serves as a guarantee of expectations, much like an informal contract (Balmer et al., 2006). A brand is a set of perceptions which form the differentiation among the brands (Aaker, 1991). Brand perception determines the expectation the customer has of a brand, an expectation that presents the customer's feelings towards a very specific experience that is promised by the branded product. Hence, it is vital for organizations to establish a link between the corporate brand name and the individual product brand. The corporate brand equity should be able to capitalize on the individual brand equity and vice-versa. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent brand association is coherent with corporate brand identity and to extract the brand name typology which gains maximum recognition from the consumer in the context of establishing a link between individual product brand and the corporate brand. Corporate brand identity is special because it explicitly and unambiguously represents an organization as well as the product. This can help contribute to the brand management process in organizations.

Brand Management Journal, Effective Brand Management, Corporate Branding, Corporate Brand Management, American Marketing Association, Organizational Strategy, Marketing Theory, Brand Association, Product Applications, Brand Communication, Corporate Portfolio, Consumer Decision-Making, Consumer Brand Awareness, Consumer Brand Association.