H & M Brand Identity Analysis

3.4 Brand identity vs brand image
The brand identity should be corresponded with its brand position and value: to be a fashion company with social responsibilities which provides good-quality products. They want people to link H&M with fashionable and sustainable urban lifestyle. According to Aaker (1997), brands identity can be combined with ‘big five’ dimensions of human personalities. There are five dimensions of brand identities: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedess. For H&M, I think they are cheerful, up-to-date and successful which means they have sincerity, excitement and competence in their brand personality. They are charming but not upper class, so sophistication should not be included. The low quality is always

Branding Strategies overview
Every brand need branding in purpose of establishing emotional connections with customers, adding value to brand, building customer loyalty and increasing profit(Posner,2011). There is no exception to H&M.
5.1 Corporate branding
Corporate branding is defined as a practice for a company to communicate the brand value, promote products in one name and enhance the esteem and loyalty of the group (Ind,1997; Balmer and Gray, 2003; Wikipedia,2012; Xie and Boggs, 2006). The company can benefit from corporate branding by marking denoting ownership, building image, associating symbols with key values, constructing individual identities and consuming pleasurable experience (Balmer and Gray, 2003). When customers buy one product from this brand and feel good, then they will seek other products of that brand which means corporate branding makes loyalty. It is estimated that Coca-Cola has a total value of 142 billion U.S. dollars, of which 84 billion U.S. dollars is due to the goodwill of the corporate brand. However, it is also pointed that brand need to have a distinct definition because the public will pay attention to its design and logos(Ind,1997). One shoddy product under the brand or any mistakes in promotion and public relation may cause bad effect and irreversible damage to the whole company(Crystal,2017). For example, United Airline was involved in a PR storm due to improper reply to the incident that a passenger was forcefully driven away from the overbooked airline. Then the company’s stocks got a drop and there were intense online pressure with boycott threats (Karanja,