Corporate Brand Platforms:
COMMUNICATED CORPORATE COMPOSITION

What are the defining principal parts, and how do they relate to one another to achieve the corporate purpose? Recognizing many audiences’ need to understand the company’s basic composition, this statement explains the company in terms of its organizing concept and/or its components.

More precisely, the question is “to best support our positioning, how do we want people to understand our composition?” It is really communicated composition that matters, which may differ from legal, reporting or accounting structure.

The Composition statement provides the strategic platform for unit branding and naming, the unit signature system, product endorsement, and other such aspects of sub-corporate identity.

A useful Composition statement may emphasize convergence in the parent brand, as in the Dow Jones illustration. Most often, it will simply list four or five basic areas of competence that support the overall purpose. Or it may anticipate evolving specializations, as in the Celera Genomics instance. These examples:

• Dow Jones
  "Although historically we are formed of strong, freestanding businesses, today convergence and coherence are more important to us than division. Our purpose is best served by an open flow of ideas, skills, people and information throughout Dow Jones."
  
  
• Celera Genomics
  “Today we are one team, wholly focused on decoding the genome. As we learn more, we expect to divide into more specialized teams, each a global leader in a human health field.”