Building a corporate brand in the digital age: imperatives for transforming born-digital startups into successful corporate brands

For startups, building a corporate brand in the digital age is an important strategic imperative and today requires different brand management strategies from the traditional ones in the past. Entrepreneurs and managers would strongly benefit from a deeper understanding of how to successfully ride the digital wave and transform their born-digital startups into corporate brands. By studying the successful story of the OneDay Group, an Italian corporate brand that originally grew out of a blog, this paper provides five imperatives that can be used by entrepreneurs and marketing managers in the digital age for the creation and development of a born-digital startup, and transforming it into a competitive corporate brand. Specifically, it defines, explores and explains the novel construct of born-digital startup corporate brands. The present work makes a theoretical and practical contribution to the startup literature, the corporate brand literature and the co-creation literature.