Authentic Organizational Partnerships: Organizational Brands, Names, the Columbus Children’s Hospital, and the Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center

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In an earlier post, I mentioned that authentic organizations might find it hard to find appropriate partner organizations, because the qualities of the company you keep are often inferred to be the qualities of your organization itself. And now, in the news , is a great example of this very problem: The Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center.

Just imagine it: The Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center: what could this organization look like? (Click on the name for  a great image at The Consumerist).

Would the surgeons, nurses and staff members of theAbercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center look something like this?

Or This? 

Like many consumers, I’ve received the messages from A&F advertising . I know what the salesclerks at A&F stores look like

and what the employees of A&F Corporate look like .

Let’s dispense with the argument that the Trauma Center’s name doesn’t matter. Of course it does. If organization names didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be an entire industry and scientific practice devoted to finding the best name for a company. If the name of this particular trauma center didn’t matter, then why would A&F have paid 10 million dollars for it?

Names matter because they are symbols of the organization itself. The name is shorthand, an abbreviation for the organization’s identity. The name symbolizes the qualities that define who the organization is and what the organization stands for. Names convey identity.

Organization names, brand names and product names convey identity. An organization’s name summarizes, distills and conveys the qualities and attributes that help to define the organization’s identity, and the name carries the image that the organization tries to project.

Without knowing the organization directly, we can surmise that the name “Columbus Children’s Hospital Emergency & Trauma Center” carries with it qualities and attributes like “professional” “helping” “skilled” “urgent” “highly reliable” “caring” and so on. Likewise, the A&F brand name carries a carefully crafted image — a set of perceptions about who the A&F brand serves, what their customers ought to be like, who organization is, what that organization stands for, and what the kind of experience outsiders will have when interacting with A&F as an organization.

The Abercrombie & Fitch organizational identity / brand identity doesn’t fit a medical organization.

We don’t need to know Abercrombie & Fitch’s actual organization identity; for our purposes as non-members we can just consider what we know about the organization in total. This includes both A & F’s brand images and their corporate reputation. As a corporation, they have a reputation (whether accurate and deserved, or not) for being somewhat racist in their hiring and staffing decisions for a a certain form of hipness, and a marketing savvy. The A&F brand is known for homoerotic and “sex drenched images” images in their advertising and in their stores.

It’s also important to note that A&F has regularly been criticized from just about every direction for the sexualized content of their marketing campaigns, and for seeming to ignore the effect that this content might have on young adults, especially girls . Questions raised by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood about the appropriateness of attaching the Abercrombie & Fitch brand name to an organization that serves young children are completely on target.

We should also consider how A&F’s brand images might influence the way that employees perceive the Trauma Center itself. Attribute transfer: Shared names => shared associations => shared attributes The partnership between the Trauma Center and A&F creates the opportunity for “attribute transfer”, the process though which we attach the attributes of one object to another object when these objects are consistently presented together. When one organization gives, loans, rents or sells its name to a partner, they create a constant association between themselves and the partner. This association leads observers to attach the attributes of partner to the organization – it takes on some of its partner’s public image and reputation.

When the A&F brand name is applied to the trauma center, the A&F attributes are transferred from the brand to the A&F Trauma Center.

One could argue that employees are aware that the Trauma Center is not the same as Abercrombie & Fitch, and one could argue that customers and employees consciously distinguish between the two entities. Perhaps that’s true, much of the time. It’s the rest of the time where this association is a problem, because it’s the unconscious process of association that matters more.

Attribute transfer happens whether we are conscious of it or not. Moreover, this is such a robust psychological process that it’s hard to resist. Thus, despite the fact that Trauma Center employees know they’re working in a hospital and not in a shopping mall, at a subconscious level there is pressure to attach the A&F attributes to the Trauma Center itself.

Example of Attribute Transfer

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All this makes for fun graphics-but what does it create for organization members?? Organization names influence how employees think of their organization.

Organization members consciously and unconsciously use their organization’s name as a symbol for the organization’s values, qualities, and attributes. When Children’s Hospital employees think of the Trauma Center, the name symbolizes “professional”, “highly reliable” and “caring”. Every time they see the organization’s name, they are reminded of these attributes.

Now, think of the attributes that employees will be reminded of at the “Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center”. Every time they see the name “Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center” — on the front door, on the paperwork, on their id badges- employees will be reminded (1) of the attributes that A&F stands for, and that (2) these attributes are now associated with the Trauma Center. As psychological theory explains, over time the A&F Trauma Center members will come to think of these attributes when they think of the organization itself. They might come to expect the A&F Trauma Center to display these attributes. And, employees might even expect themselves and each other to display these attributes.

The Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center illustrates what might happen when two very dissimilar organizations form a partnership. For the organization with the new name, the name can represent a discordant mash-up of its own identity with the attributes of the other organization.

Because an organization’s name conveys who the organization is and who it wants to be, organizations need to consider the identity effects of even the simplest elements of the partnership, like new names.

It’s hard to imagine that administrators of the Children’s Hospital thought through the potential identity effects of selling their naming rights — they treated the name change as though all it would do was ‘recognize A&F’s financial support. Instead, what the new name recognizes is the inauthentic connection between A&F’s identity and what defines the Columbus Children’s Hospital.

Tagged as: attribute transfer, authentic partnerships, cobranding, Columbus Childrens Hospital