As far as a companies communications programme is concerned it has to sum up what it is the company stands for. To do this it may employ the help of public relations companies, or use paid advertisements (or both) to get the right exposure. If the public has negative perceptions of a company or an organisation it can be very difficult to remove this image from the publics mind. It may be the case that the image the public has of a company may be a very limited view of what it is they do, in which case they may want to raise awareness within the public or within their particular market. An example of this is the Samaritans, who for the first time in its 50-year history are re- branding its image. This is because research found that although 90% of the public was aware of its existence, very few could actually describe what it was that they actually do.
An organisation that’s recently changed its corporate identity is the Royal British Legion. It was seen as outdated and old-fashioned and didn’t have much relevance in today’s society. It was felt that the organisation would fade away with the last survivors of the Second World War.
What it did was to hire Corporate Edge, a public relations company to carry out research into why it had these negative and out of date perceptions. It was also given the task of reviewing the Legions image with the view to coming up with ideas for changing this image and re-positioning the organisation in the 20th century.
What they found when they carried out research was many people had the impression that the Royal British Legion was an organisation for old men, getting together to talk about the war. That it was seen as a relic from the past, and that didn’t provide any real function.
This, Corporate Edge found out, was far from the truth, as in reality the Legion is “a large, modern organisation which provides a wide range of vital support services to all current as well as former members of the armed forces and their families”. What Corporate Edge had to do was somehow get this image across to the public.
In looking at the organisation and what it could do to change it, it was revealed in research that a lot of the negative perceptions associated with the Legion were rooted in its traditional Lions Head symbol. To change this they would have to come-up with a new symbol that reflected what it was doing today. This led them to look at another symbol or badge that is associated with the British Legion, the poppy. This they felt had much more of a public appeal.
In taking up a modern redrawn version of the poppy as a replacement for the old logo, Corporate Edge changed the symbol or brand of the organisation. This gave the organisation the basis on which to re-position itself as “the modern, relevant, successful and growing organisation that it was”.
Along side this re-branding the organisation undertook some high profile initiatives to get its new image into the publics perception. The new branding was seen as a crucial element in the re-positioning of the British Legion and has resulted in “a dramatic shift in the external publics perception accompanied by significant increases both in membership and donations”.
