Impact of Organizational Brand-Building Strategies on Organizational Brand Equity: A Moderating Role of Brand-Oriented Leadership

Abstract

In this era of competition, branding is an essential marketing tool for organizations to compete in today's dynamic markets. Organizations should realize the importance of employee-based brand equity from the perspectives of customer branding and financial performance. Employee-based brand equity plays a crucial role in building organizational brand equity. This study conceptualized a model that helps the practitioners to build employee-based brand equity and organizational brand equity. This study examines the role of organizational brand-building strategies and brand-oriented leadership in promoting employee-based brand equity and organizational brand equity. This study collected data from the employees of various beverage companies in China. This study analyzed data through partial least square structural equation modeling using Smart PLS 3. This study found a positive direct association between organizational brand-building strategies and employee-based brand equity. However, according to the results, no direct association was found between organizational brand-building strategies and organizational brand equity. This study also confirms that organizational brand-building strategies indirectly promote organizational brand equity through employee-based brand equity. Moreover, this study demonstrates that brand-oriented leadership directly influences employee-based brand equity and organizational brand equity but negatively moderates the relationship between organizational brand-building strategies and employee-based brand equity. No moderation was found in the relationship between organizational brand-building strategies and organizational brand equity. Finally, the practical and theoretical implications of this study are discussed.

Brand Building in Mexican Small Business: Empirical Evidence

“…In the literature it has been established that the central objective of any organization is the construction of long-term relationships with internal and external collaborators (Alreck & Settle, 1999), for which firms carry out various efforts and activities to communicate to their collaborators the importance of building your brand for creating competitive advantages (Wei, 2022). In this sense, Vallaster and Lindgreen (2011) considered that managers, employees, and customers of companies are the three fundamental actors on which the brand of their products or services will have to be built, while Alreck and Settle (1999) established that firms require the implementation of an effective plan of the activities involved in brand building of their products or services, particularly because comprehensive internal work is the basis for the creation of a successful brand.…”

“…King and Grace (2006) proposed three types of activities that should be planned in brand building strategy of companies: improving service quality, consumer satisfaction, and brand loyalty, which are considered by various researchers and academics as essential components to frame employee behaviors in brand building process (e.g. Vallaster & Lindgreen, 2011;Wei, 2022). In contrast, King and Grace (2009) proposed four basic aspects that should be considered for building a successful brand: information generation, knowledge dissemination, openness, and human factor.…”

“…Therefore, the brand allows firm, particularly small and medium-sized firms (SMEs), to create industrial barriers against their main competitors, as well as improve industrial competitiveness and financial performance (Anees- Ur-Rehman et al, 2018). Furthermore, companies' efforts to build a brand that facilitates the achievement of their objectives should be part of their daily activities (Ferná ndez-Ruano et al, 2022), essentially, because the build solid brand is careful as an excellent indicator of a sustainable organization (Wei, 2022), and can be used from a multidimensional perspective by firms (Hasni et al, 2018). Therefore, brand building strategy can act as a driver for creating a balance between companies' brands (Lin & Siu, 2020).…”

“…Therefore, brand building strategy can act as a driver for creating a balance between companies' brands (Lin & Siu, 2020). However, brand building is one of the topics that has been rarely analyzed and discussed in marketing literature (Wei, 2022), and there are still relatively few studies published by researchers and academics that analyze brand building in SMEs (Lin et al, 2019). sample of 300 firms, estimating the research model through Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) statistical technique (Hair et al, 2019), with the support of EQS 6.4 software.…”

“…It is important to establish that it is essential to analyze SMEs for two basic reasons, on one hand, because they are the largest number of existing companies in Mexico and, on other hand, because they contribute more than 50% of GDP and employment at the national level (INEGI, 2023). Furthermore, given the lack of theoretical and empirical knowledge in the marketing literature on the importance of brand building in SMEs (Wei, 2022), the main contribution of this study is the provision of robust empirical evidence of brand building of products or services in SMEs in an emerging economy country.…”