Module 1 treated a brand as a set of memories held by customers. A corporate brand widens the audience: the organisation itself is branded, and it is judged by employees, suppliers, investors, regulators, journalists and campaigners as well as by buyers. Fellwise's name appears on every product, so its corporate and product brands are effectively the same, a branded house in the architecture terms you met earlier. Anything that damages trust in the company therefore touches every jacket.

Three terms are often used interchangeably, a confusion Balmer (2001) likened to a fog. Corporate identity is what the organisation actually is: its strategy, culture, structure and behaviour as well as its name and visual identity. Corporate image is the set of perceptions a person holds at a given moment, shaped by the latest advert, news story or service encounter. Corporate reputation is slower and cumulative. Fombrun (1996) treated it as reputational capital, built by consistent behaviour over time. Reviewing 54 well-cited articles, Walker (2010) defined reputation as a relatively stable, issue-specific, aggregate perception of an organisation's past actions and future prospects, compared against some standard, and argued that different stakeholder groups may therefore hold different reputations of the same firm. An organisation can be admired by customers for product quality and distrusted as an employer.

That finding shapes measurement. Published rankings and commercial reputation trackers survey the public or business audiences on dimensions such as products, workplace, governance and citizenship, and they are useful for benchmarking. They also have known weaknesses: Brown and Perry (1994) showed that ratings in Fortune's "Most Admired Companies" survey were heavily coloured by firms' previous financial results, a financial halo that has to be removed before the ratings say much about anything else. For most organisations a more useful tool is a reputation snapshot built from several sources, such as a short survey of each key group, media and social analysis, employer review sites, complaint data and the brand tracker, and reported group by group rather than as a single score.

Freeman (1984) defined a stakeholder as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organisation's objectives. The definition is deliberately broad. That is its strength and its practical problem: almost everyone qualifies, and no communications team can talk to everyone at once. Stakeholder mapping is the discipline of deciding who needs attention, of what kind and when.

Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) proposed that managers give priority to stakeholders according to three attributes. Power is the ability to impose one's will on the organisation through coercive, financial or normative means, including media and public pressure. Legitimacy is a claim that is socially accepted as proper, such as a contract, a legal right or a moral stake. Urgency is the degree to which a claim is time-sensitive and critical to the stakeholder. Salience rises with the number of attributes held. Groups with one attribute are latent (dormant, discretionary or demanding); those with two are expectant (dominant, dangerous or dependent); those with all three are definitive. The model is dynamic, and its authors stress that the attributes are socially constructed rather than fixed facts. A dormant group acquires urgency when an issue breaks, and a campaign group with a well-timed report can move from demanding to dangerous within a week.

The older power–interest grid, adapted from Mendelow (1981) and popularised in strategy textbooks, is simpler and widely used in practice. It plots stakeholders by power and interest, giving four strategies: manage closely (high power, high interest), keep satisfied (high power, low interest), keep informed (low power, high interest) and monitor (low on both). It is quick to draw, but it misses legitimacy and timing, which is exactly where corporate communication problems tend to start.

Both tools need critical handling. Salience describes whom managers do attend to, not whom they should: groups with little power, such as local communities or the natural environment, may have strong moral claims and a weak voice. Twenty years on, the model's authors traced how widely it has been extended and contested (Wood et al., 2021). A map is a judgement, so record the evidence behind each score and revisit it whenever an issue moves.

Employees are the stakeholders most often forgotten in corporate communication plans, and the ones customers meet most. They deliver the brand promise in shops, on the phone and in the warehouse, and they carry the organisation's reputation to friends, recruiters and social media. Welch and Jackson (2007) argue that internal communication has too often treated employees as a single public. Their internal communication matrix separates four dimensions: line-manager communication about each person's role; team peer communication; project peer communication; and internal corporate communication, from senior leaders to all employees, about the organisation's direction and goals. The last dimension is the one a corporate communications team owns most directly, and its aims, such as commitment, a sense of belonging and an understanding of why things are changing, differ from those of a team briefing.

Employer branding applies brand thinking to the employment relationship. Ambler and Barrow (1996) defined the employer brand as the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment and identified with the employing company. Backhaus and Tikoo (2004) developed the idea into a framework: employer brand associations shape an employer image that attracts potential recruits, while the same brand, working through organisational identity and culture, builds the loyalty of current staff. Many organisations summarise the offer as an employee value proposition.

The critical test is consistency between promise and experience. An employer brand that advertises purpose and flexibility while staff experience the opposite is quickly exposed on employer review sites and social media, and it damages the corporate brand along with it. Internal audiences also need to hear significant news before, or at the same time as, the outside world; staff who learn about a restructuring or a controversy from the press are unlikely to defend the organisation. How employees behave and speak when things go wrong will matter again in Module 6. A good internal plan therefore sets objectives for each employee segment, chooses channels that reach deskless as well as office staff, and builds in two-way listening rather than broadcasting alone.

Purpose and sustainability now sit at the centre of many corporate brands, and they are where corporate communication meets the law most directly. Delmas and Burbano (2011) define greenwashing as the intersection of poor environmental performance with positive communication about it, and trace its drivers to lax regulation, market pressure, organisational incentives and individual biases. Vague green claims expose the brand to regulators, campaigners and journalists at once.

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority's Green Claims Code (CMA, 2021) explains how existing consumer law applies to environmental claims through six principles: claims must be truthful and accurate; clear and unambiguous; must not omit or hide important relevant information; comparisons must be fair and meaningful; claims must consider the full life cycle of the product or service; and claims must be substantiated. The CMA warns that terms such as "green", "sustainable" or "eco-friendly", especially without explanation, are likely to be read as promising a positive environmental impact. In March 2024 it secured undertakings from ASOS, Boohoo and George at Asda to replace vague terms with specific ones. The stakes rose with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024: since 6 April 2025 the CMA can itself decide that consumer law has been broken and fine a business up to 10% of global turnover, without going to court. Advertising claims are also policed by the ASA under the CAP Code.

In the EU, Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. Member States had to transpose it by 27 March 2026, and its rules apply from 27 September 2026. It bans generic claims such as "eco-friendly" unless the trader can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim (a narrow test met, for example, by the EU Ecolabel). It also bans sustainability labels not based on a certification scheme or set by public authorities, claims about a whole product that are true of only one part, and claims, based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment (such as 'climate neutral' or 'carbon positive'). National wording varies, so check the transposing law in each market. In the US, the FTC's Green Guides, last revised in 2012, likewise advise against unqualified general environmental benefit claims, but they are guidance rather than binding rules, and a review opened in December 2022 had not produced final revised guides by September 2026; some US states, notably California, write the Guides into state law, so they can have binding effect there. This lesson is educational, not legal advice.