Lego Company2009-01-0119

Corporate Branding: Lego Company

1. Brand Hierarchy:

Brand Hierarchy reveals an explicit nesting of all brand names by displaying the number and

nature of common and distinctive brand name elements across firm’s products. An effective

brand hierarchy provides a structure to the brand family, allowing consumers to "fill in the

gaps” and establish expectations and perceptions of the entire brand family based on what they

know about one or some of the individual brand levels.

2. Challenges faced by Lego brand in 2002:

Lego faced major challenges of brand positioning towards customers due to the lack of

integration of vision, culture and image. It resulted in fluctuating financial performance, and

even more competitive and rapidly changing marketplace brand fragmentation presented top

management with dual challenges of maintaining a focus on the substance and distinction of

Lego Group heritage. Alignment and elaboration of the brand vision for individual business

areas and markets was also a challenge.

3. Why did company’s management decided to shift to corporate branding? Was this the

best branding strategy for the company?

The company decided to shift to corporate branding to overcome brand fragmentation due to

brand extensions into software, lifestyle products and accessories and to maintain distinction of

LEGO company heritage as it was becoming weak due to increasing innovation and expansions

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Lego Company2009-01-0119

The fragmented character of the Lego brand was partly due to the organizational processes

involved in managing the brand and also there were organizational challenges to the Lego brand

related to vision, culture and image. The corporate branding process aligns strategic vision,

organizational culture, and stakeholder images which were necessary for the strategic alignment

as well as alignment between consumers and employee understanding of the brand. . But the

company should have capability to find balance between global vs. local, centralization vs.

decentralization and heritage vs. relevance.

4. Explain the Vision-Culture-image (VCI) Model.

This model defines a successful corporate branding process as the alignment of strategic vision,

organizational culture, and stakeholder images. Strategic vision is the central idea behind the

company that embodies and expresses top management’s aspirations for what the company will

achieve in the future, while organizational culture refers to the internal values, beliefs, and basic

assumptions that embody the heritage of the company and are manifest in the ways employees

feel about the company they are working for. Finally, corporate images are the views of the

organization developed by its external stakeholders.

5. Compare BAV with the CBBE Model:

There is a lot of commonality between the basic BAV model and the CBBE framework, as the

five pillars that make up the foundation of BAV model related aspects to the CCBE model.

BAV CBBE

Differentiation Superiority

Relevance Consideration

Energy Judgment

Esteem Credibility

Knowledge Resonance

Brand awareness and familiarity are handled differently in the two approaches. But in the

hierarchy they come different in these two models In CBBE model awareness is a necessary first

step in building brand equity but in BAV model familiarity sees it as the last step in building

brand equity but it treats it in a more affective manner- almost in a warm feeling or friendship

sense.

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