Companies are encouraged to be less hierarchical, to devolve responsibility, to encourage teamwork and co-operation rather than internal competition. Today, the emphasis is on flexibility, adaptability, surviving in markets which are in a constant state of flux. In the 1990s, value-for-money is a priority and businesses are being urged to function in very different ways. No one believes that we are about to witness a rerun of the corporate identity boom of the late 1980s, when companies constantly buying each other up would regularly revise their identities and had money to spend on doing so. ‘Identity is moving back on the boardroom agenda,’ confirms David Allen, managing director of Sampson Tyrrell, a London-based identity specialist. Others are finding that the identity system they bought a few years ago is now too complex for their recession-ravaged structure. In such cases, an improvement of image is a matter of priority. The excesses of the 1980s – strategic blunders, directors who turned out to be crooks, environmental disasters and workforce redundancies – have made some company names synonymous with bad news in the minds of the public.
Now that the economic recession seems to be coming to an end in the US and parts of Europe, corporate identity consultants report that business is booming.