Identity Building

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Tuesday's lecture. I am planning on doing some extra reading though as it sounds like from other comments that I missed an interesting lecture on the application of formative research and real world examples. In reading Engelberg's articles on brand identity and identity building, I was amazed at how much thought and research goes into proactively planning an identity for an organization. I liked the strategy of writing down the mission statement and then replacing the name of your organization with a different one and comparing the similarities and differences. Sounds like the key is to be as unique as possible to distinguish a valuable market niche to fill. So much strategy is involved with developing an identity since a lot of it deals with the audience and stakeholders' perceptions. Once again, I am seeing the great value in formative research as one needs to conduct identity research to best fit the brand and identity with the mission statement.