Create a green brand for industrial areas

[Autom. eng. transl.] A fundamental starting point to tackle the issue of creating a green brand for industrial areas concerns the very essence of the term "brand": can any company be considered a brand in itself? The intervention will present a series of possible reflections on this aspect, often considered superficially as a given fact, to trace some useful parameters for the definition of the creation of "green brands" for industrial areas. A trap in which one often risks falling is to consider the brand as a label, a verbal or visual form juxtaposed or rather “glued” to a given product or service, but putting the true nature of a brand in the background: the its intangible scope, its being idea, project, vision, set of values. The brand is, therefore, definitely something more than the product in which it will incarnate and, even better, it is prior to the physicality of the products as well as to any of its intangible communication manifestations (such as the brand, the spot, the website) or material ( such as packaging, product design, point of sale ...). This unique dimension also involves a second reversal of the traditional logic with which one looks at the world of the brand: if it is true that the brand is a symbolic instance, then it should be such for the employees of a certain company, even before the consumers. A brand strategy, then, to be effective and impactful, should have its place of origin in the corporate management, to then approach the marketing and communication sector as well as that of human resources. This is why we propose to use the term internal branding to better define contemporary brand worlds. A dimension that is linked to the strategies of valorisation of human capital and which will prove very useful to outline the strengths of the green brands of the industrial areas. A final factor of innovation shows that it is not only the companies that produce goods and services that can aspire to become brands: even for companies that operate in the so-called business-to-business markets, it is possible to adopt a branding strategy. The well-known marketing guru Philip Kotler has recently affirmed this sort of Copernican revolution: in his latest works he has investigated how we can work effectively in this sector with concepts such as promise, perceptions (everything we see, feel, we read, we know, we think ..), experience, benefits, values. We are then faced with a series of pieces that highlight the current logic of operation of a brand as a "super-partes" entity: above the physical product, above the various communicative discourses, above the structure of marketing & communication, above the human resources sector, above the world of goods and services as well as above that of business to business ... A perspective that allows us to consider as not only possible, but extremely interesting the application of one branding look also to the world of industrial areas. Going even more specifically, our intervention will try to indicate not so much the specific content dimensions of a "green brand" of the industrial areas, an unquestionably relevant theme, but more generally the projects and the symbolic constructs potentially underlying it. In this regard, four progressive steps will be proposed for the construction of a green brand for the industrial areas that, as we shall see, will build a "virtuous circle" similar to the one present at the base of the same green orientation as a whole.