企业品牌建设：一个方法论.doc

毕业论文（设计）外文翻译题目：企业品牌建设初探一、外文原文标题：Corporate Brand Building: A Methodology原文：BRAND BUILDING VS REPUTATION MANAGEMENT The author has always found the term reputation management a little limp. It does not pass the cocktail party test. If someone asked at the metaphoric cocktail party What do you do? The author would not imagine saying Oh . I manage reputations. Put bluntly, as a client and not a consultant it would seem wasteful to pay good money for someone to manage my reputation. It sounds like something to be done for oneself-not left to some-one else. And it docs not sound espe-cially dynamic. On the other hand, paying someone to build my brand sounds altogether more energetic and useful.That is one of the reasons why the authors company evolved its strapline from PR solutions to marketing pro-blems to building corporate and pro-duct brands. The other is that it better expresses what the firm now does as a consultancy: corporate as well as mar-keting PR. The identity shift did, how-ever, present two problems.First, we did not want to alienate clients who did not see their organisa-tions as brands. Much of our business is in the public sector. We do not yet live in a world where government bodies see themselves as brands (although with the reinvention of the Labour Party it may only be a matter of time). Putting the corporate before product in the strap helped. The term product brand leads on to consumer PR, which is only part of our work.Secondly, it begged the question - if we are a brand-building PR firm, then how exactly do we build brands - especially corporate brands? We needed to package what we were already doing across the firm in differ-ent ways into a best practice methodol-ogy available to our staff.What follows is based on internal seminar presentations about this methodology. WHAT ARE BRANDS FOR? What job of work do brands do? David Ogilvy famously and suc-cinctly pointed to the power of emo-tion as the only sustainable differentiator in promoting a company, recognising that people buy with their heart as much as their head. At the risk of teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, it is reproduced because of its critical importance:A company with a price advantage can be undercut. A company with a performance advantage can be outflanked. But a company with an emotional difference can potentially demand a premium forever. It is this emotional difference that makes the brand. As well as command-ing a premium, the brand:- Creates a strong sense of identity for staff and customers alike (eg the Co-operative Bank) - creates consistency across diverse products and services (eg Body Shop) - builds a deposit account of goodwill to help it weather crises (eg British Airways) - enables credible extensions into new product areas and new sectors like the super-elastic Virgin.A corporate brand goes beyond price and performance to secure the loyalty of its stakeholders.For example, Asdas controversial and high-profile pricing campaigns on books, pharmaceuticals and now luxury-branded goods express its posi-tioning as a consumer champion. The message that comes through the cam-paigns is not so much our prices are cheaper as we are taking up cudgels on your behalf against artificially high prices.WHAT IS A CORPORATE BRAND?Some people make a distinction between corporate brands and product brands, and some think of brands only as product brands. But the author believes there is little practical differ-ence between corporate and product brands, especially when it comes to building them.A brand is a set of associations in the mind of the consumer. If we agree with Ogilvy, a good product brand offers the consumer positive associations based on emotion as much as on reason. Individuals share or aspire to the values behind that brand. They buy the brand because of what it says about them. Assuming they can afford it, they buy their beloved Mercedes because they like the associations (and enjoy the drive).Actually, they are not buying a brand at all, they are buying a car. The brand is intangible - it is in their mind. It is equally intangible whether the brand is attached to a product or to an organisation. Plus, with many brands - Mercedes is a good example - the product brand and the corpo-rate brand are virtually indistinguish-able. If it was rumoured one day that Mercedes were launching a three-wheeler, we would expect it to have similar qualities to their four-wheelers. It is this equality of intangibility that makes it possible to build a brand around a firm (corporate brand) as readily as around a product (product brand). But corporate brand building is more complex and more challenging, because products are objects, while organisations are people. The authors firm sees a corporate brand as made up of three elements: vision, values and style. Vision is as much a giving thing as a seeing thing: the contribution a firm makes to its staff , its customers, its industry, its local and possibly global community. The acid test is to ask: if the firm disappeared overnight, would anyone notice or care? The author believes the world would take notice and mourn the demise of a firm like Apple , for instance, incomparably more than a host of its lesser rivals. Apple is not just respected and appre-ciated. It is loved because of its mission to create products which empower and delight people. Values are what the firm stands for - its principles, expressed through policies and practices. These are defined as much by what the firm does not do as by what it docs. The extraordinary overnight success of the Co-operative Bank, for example (which woke up one morning, threw out its tired, old-fash-ioned wardrobe and replaced it with a new set of natty designer threads), is down to a solemn promise to customers not to invest in regimes and industries which oppress the human spirit. It reinvented itself, drawing deep from its heritage of social responsibility, refor-mulated so as to be relevant to modern times. What is crucial here is that it is impossible to separate the association of ethical banking from the Co-operative Bank brand. The brand positioning is not some kind of corporate sales pro-motion (often a waste of money, as some of the sponsors of the 1998 World Cup discovered). It has become part of the organisations identity. Vision and values are expressed in how the firm conies across in its com-munication and through its people and its style. Very often this is the trickiest bit. One the one hand it requires iden-tifying and grooming the right heroes to communicate vision and values as spokespeople in the media. The right people are not always the most senior people. On the other hand, it requires ensuring that everyone, not just the chosen heroes, understands the vision and values and communicates these appropriately in contact with external audiences, especially customers. In communicating its corporate brand proposition, a firm is making a promise to its audiences. It must deliver behind the promise, or be pilloried for incon- sistency and betrayal. People will judge a firm far more on their personal experience face to face or on the phone than on what they read about it in the newspapers. This means checking that policies, products, practices, systems - in fact, the firms entire operation - are set up to support it, before going public. The difficulty in large firms is that internal and external communica-tions (let alone operations, sales and marketing) are all too often the pro-vinces of different departments and power structures. The advent of com-munication directors with responsibility across all communication has to be a step in the right direction.HOW DO WE BUILD THE BRAND? The authors firm has developed a four-stage approach, under the headings: - reconnaissance - strategy - fulfilment - evaluation. Stage 1: Reconnaissance Effectively, this is a SWOT-plus analy-sis that uses information from internal and external sources, including desk and survey research, to agree: - goals: where is the firm going, what is it trying to achieve - current position: where is it coming from, how is it perceived and how does it stack up against the competi-tion - vision, values and style: what is its contribution, what are its values, how should these affect style of communication - issues: what relevant (and media-friendly) issues are there in the public domain that can be exploited to create a debate and that can be owned- preferably exclusively - by the firm to build its corporate brand through association?Stage 2: Strategy At the heart of strategy is a campaigning theme in which the firm sets out to make a contribution to the world on one or more of the relevant issues that have been identified. This is not about saying, but doing: taking action to right a wrong, or to make life better for its stakeholders. This may include the submission of a researched report to a relevant author-ity, calling for some kind of action, perhaps even a change in the law.For example, when the insurer Direct Line first went into the home insurance sector in the early 1990s, having become market leader in the very dif-ferent motor insurance sector, it her-alded its arrival with a submission to the Office of Fair Trading attacking banks and building societies practice of tieing in insurance products to mortgage agreements in order to earn commission on the insurance. Entitled A billion pound burglary, Direct Lines report achieved substantial cov-erage, giving it the high moral ground in the new sector before it actually launched its product. It also implied home insurance would be cheaper from Direct Line, as there would be no com-mission to pay. In defining strategy, thought is given to how the campaigning theme will actually be exploited, typically through a three-part focus:- Third parties: who else should be involved? Third parties may be: Westminster, Whitehall, Brussels; allies and alliances (eg with other firms); associations (eg trade bodies, unions); pressure groups - media: national, regional, trade , consumer, broadcast, new media and Internet - policies, products and practices: putting the firms own house in order and ensuring staff are on board to ensure the firm delivers the promise made in the campaign and that there are no disappointments for stakeholders or inconsistencies that could attract negative media attention. Stage 3: Fulfilment This means the execution of strategy and involves: - planning: audiences, objectives, messages, tactics, schedule, budgets - implementation: carrying out campaign initiatives - monitoring: of coverage, compe-titor activity, legislative develop-ments which may help or hinder the campaign and corporate brand positioning.Stage 4: Evaluation Evaluation is obviously tailored to cli-ents requirements and may include some or all of the following: - coverage: level and quality of media coverage achieved- Output: client satisfaction with performance against pre-agreed targets - outcomes: changes in audience perception of the brand and/or changes in audience behaviour - objectives: progress towards agreed campaign goals and recommenda-tions for the next phase of corporate brand-building activity.CONCLUSION Corporate brand building means creat-ing emotional associations between a firm and its audience to achieve sustain-able competitive edge. For this to happen, the firm must have a vision (its contribution to the world over and above making products and making money) and values which have relevant appeal. Vision and values must be so integral to the firm that it is difficult to think of the firm without making the association with its vision and values. If this is achieved, the firm can be said to have a strong corporate brand. The brand is built through cam-paigns in which the firm expresses vision and values by taking action in the public arena - with third parties, via the media and in its products, poli-cies and practices - for the benefit of the outside world, especially stake-holders. In this sense, corporate brand building may sound like altruism, but it is really enlightened self-interest. It strives to see the world from the audi-ences perspective, rather than, selfishly, just from the firms point of view. (This is another reason, by the way, the term reputation management should be killed. It emphasises the firms-eye view of the world.) It may be asking too much of CEOs under pressure to deliver short-term profit to take a leaf out of JFKs book and ask what they can do for their country, rather than what their country can do for them. But, they might check how much they are already paying out, for example, on sponsor - ships, corporate hospitality, advertising and PR, to see if some of the funds might be better invested in building a powerful and sustainable point of dif-ference into the very fabric of their firm.出处：Francis Hallawell. Corporate Brand Building: A Methodology. Journal of Communication Management J. 1999. 3 (4), pp. 381-386.二、翻译文章标题：企业品牌建设：一个方法论译文：品牌建设与声誉管理作者总是发现“声誉管理”这个术语有点站不住脚。它没有通过鸡尾酒会的测试。假如有人在隐喻意义下的鸡尾酒会上问作者“你的工作是什么？”作者不能想象自己会说“哦，我是管理声誉的”。 直截了当地说，作为一个客户而不是顾问，付钱请人做“声誉管理”似乎是一种浪费。 这听起来应该是由自身去完成的事情而不是去请人来做。 而且这听起来也不是特别有概念。也就是说，雇人“建立自己的品牌”听起来更加让人觉得有概念和有所用处。 这也是为何作者公司从它的“营销问题的公关解决方案”捆绑式发展到“企业和产品的品牌建设”的原因之一。 另一个原因是它更好地阐述了什么是一个公司现下需要的咨询：公司以及公关营销。 这一转变却存在两个问题。 首先，我们不想疏远那些没有将自己组织看做品牌的客户。 我们大多数的业务是在公共领域。 我们依旧生存在政府机构将其自身视为品牌的社会中（尽管工党的重新产生只是一个时间的问题）。将“公司”放于“产品”之先对于捆绑式服务有所帮助。 “产品品牌”这个术语衍生出客户公关，它也是我们工作的一部分。 其次，它重复了一个问题倘若我们是一个品牌建设的公关公司，确切地要如何去做尤其是公司品牌？我们需要对我们应当已经存在的不同方式包装成最好的实践方式供员工使用。 以下是基于内部研讨会讲义所总结的方法论。 什么是品牌？什么是品牌的具体工作？David Ogilvy 精简地指出情感力量是唯一一个能宣传公司持续的区别， 他认为在客户购买行为中，理性因素和感性因素同等重要地影响客户购买。 在此班门弄斧，反复强调，是因为它的重要性：“公司的价格优势可以被削弱，性能优势可以被超越，但是情感差异可以永久地产生潜在溢价需求。”就是这个情感差异成就了品牌。除了能带来溢价需求以外，品牌还能为公司带来以下利益：-能够在像客户和员工等人上产生强大的标识意识（比如the Cooperative Bank）-创造产品和服务的差异性下的一致性（如 Body Shop）-建立一个存款账户以便应对危机（如British Airways）-能够使可信扩展到新领域和行业，比如 超弹性Virgin 公司。 一个公司的品牌在确保利益相关者的忠诚度上超越价格和性能所能做到的。例如，Asda对于书籍，医药品和奢侈名品的备受争议的高利润定价活动体现了其活动定位在客户群上。 该活动所传达的信息中“我们的价格很优惠”不是重点，而是“我们在通过人为地高价来提高你们的身价”。 什么是企业品牌？有人在企业品牌和产品品牌之间做了一个区分，另有人认为品牌只是产品品牌。 而笔者认为，企业品牌和产品品牌存在一些实际差别，尤其是谈论到如何构建时。 品牌是客户头脑中的一个联想的集合。 倘若我们同意Ogilvy所言，那么一个好的产品品牌能够为客户在情感和合理基础上提供正面的联想。客户个体分享或者激发了品牌所带来的价值。 他们购买品牌是因为品牌蕴含的价值。 事实上，他们根本不是在购买一个品牌而是在购买产品。品牌是无形的，它存在于客户的意识中。不论是一个企业的品牌还是产品品牌，品牌终是无形的。 而且，许多品牌-Mercedes是一个很好的例子-其产品品牌和企业品牌实际上是无法区分的。假如有一天我们谣言说Mercedes要上市三轮车，我们将期待其拥有它生产的汽车的质量保证。 正是由于这种等价无形使得公司去创造一个品牌（企业品牌）就像为产品创造品牌一样容易（产品品牌）。但是企业品牌建设会更加复杂和具有挑战性，因为产品是实物而企业是人组成的。 笔者公司认为企业品牌由三个因素组成：视觉，价值和体系。“视觉”是一个给予并能看到的东西：公司为其员工，客户，产业，当地以及可能的社区所做的贡献。 严峻的测试问题是：如果该公司消失，是否有个人注意或者在意？笔者相信，像Apple这样的公司的消失，全世界会注意到并为之难过远多于很多弱于其的竞争对手们。 Apple不仅仅被众人尊重和欣赏。 它被人所爱是因为它因赋予和取悦人们的使命。“价值”是一个公司所代表的通过政策和实践体现出来的原则。这些被定义为什么是公司不能做的和能做的。 比如一夜成名的，极其优秀的the Cooperative Bank （一夜之间产品做出整体更新），对其客户做出一个庄严的承诺表明其不会投资于压迫人类精神的制度和行业。 该公司通过加强传统的社会责任承担，与时俱进来彻底改变自身。非常重要的一点是，将品牌联想从the Cooperative Bank分离出来是不现实的。 品牌定位不是某种公司产品的促销（通常是金钱的浪费，被某些1998年世界杯的投资者所发现）。它成为了企业的一种标识。 视觉和价值体现在公司如何将其贯穿在交流中，被人们多感知和如何与其体系相呼应。 通常，这是最难的。 也就是说着需要识别和训练合适的“英雄”去进行视觉和价值的沟通，如同一个媒体发言人。最佳人选并不是都是资深者。 另一方面，公司需要确保每个人，并不仅仅是选定的交流者，都理解视觉和价值的与外界人员的适当联系尤其是客户。公司在信息传达过程中等于对其听众做了一个承诺。 公司必须对其承诺负责否则将因不一致和背叛而被听众嘲讽。个人的亲身经验，不论是面对面或者是通过电话联系客户用来更多评判一个公司而不是从报纸中所得到的信息。这意味着，公司的政策，产品，实践和体统-实际上是整个公司的运作系统-用来支撑其运作的，在其公诸于世之前要进行确认。难点在于，大的公司的内外部交流（更不用说操作，销售和营销活动）通常因为不同部门和权力结构而有所差异。必须选择正确的方向来任命一个能够负责全方面沟通的管理者。如何建立企业品牌？笔者公司已经建立了一个四步骤方法：-勘查-策略-实施