Corporate brand: The company-customer misalignment and its performance implications

Fit or co-alignment between company and customer perspectives is an important theoretical proposition in corporate branding theory. Utilizing three corporate brands in the Australian automobile industry, this research conceptualizes co-alignment as profile deviation and examines the effects of deviation from the company-specified corporate brand on customer loyalty and satisfaction. Management practice tells us that organizations invest significant resources to encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty. From the comparison of congruence models, this study demonstrates that in addition to the quantum of spend, alignment of company and customer corporate brand perspectives can be an important source of customer satisfaction and loyalty. The ideal corporate brand, as specified by senior management was used as a benchmark. The corporate brand construct included corporate associations, corporate personality and customer benefits. The results, which were robust across three corporate brands, generally support the hypotheses of negative performance impact of company-customer misalignment. However, positive performance implications of customer deviation on corporate personality suggest that the effects of misalignment are complex and that it is useful to explore corporate brand dimensions individually. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.