Internal Branding Löhndorf, Birgit; Diamantopoulos, Adamantios
Journal of service research : JSR,
08/2014, Letnik:
17, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Prior research acknowledges employees' crucial role in building strong service brands, yet empirical research on how to turn employees into brand champions remains scarce and has been largely ...approached from an internal branding perspective. Drawing on social identity and social exchange theories, this study takes a broader organizational perspective to link internal branding outcomes (employee-brand fit, brand knowledge, and belief in the brand) and employees' perceptions of organizational support to a range of employee brand-building behaviors, with organizational identification as the key mediating mechanism. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of employee data from a major retail bank reveal organizational identification as a strong motivational force for employees to become brand champions, largely mediating the effects of internal branding outcomes. When organizational identification is low, perceived organizational support (as a quality indicator of employees' exchange-based relationship with the organization) constitutes an alternative, external motivator of on-the-job brand building behaviors; when organizational identification is high, perceived organizational support boosts employees' voluntary participation in brand development and positive word-of-mouth. These findings highlight the managerial relevance of the employee-organization relationship for turning employees into brand champions and show how organizational identification can be stimulated by means of internal branding.
Within the context of the airline industry, this study offers an integrated approach measuring the effects of internal brand communication, brand-centered training, transformational leadership, brand ...ideology, and internal brand communities on job satisfaction and work outcomes. It further explores the role of job satisfaction as a mediator between internal branding and work outcomes. Following an analysis of 485 responses, we find that leadership, ideology, and communities positively influence job satisfaction, which in turn affects intention-to-stay, team performance, and brand commitment. Job satisfaction is also found to mediate the relationships between internal branding (i.e., transformational leadership, brand ideology, and internal brand communities) and work outcomes. These findings highlight that appropriate branding strategies can enhance airline development through employee satisfaction.
•Fiver components of internal branding and three work outcomes were investigated.•Leadership, brand ideology, and internal brand communities influence job satisfaction.•Job satisfaction impacts intention-to-stay, team performance, and brand commitment.•Airline branding strategies enhance work outcomes through satisfied employees.
•This study examines how to promote employee voice behavior through the lens of psychological ownership of the brand in the hospitality industry.•This study is one of the first efforts to construct ...and empirically validate employee brand psychological ownership in a hospitality context.•It demonstrates employee psychological brand ownership is a significant contributor to their voice behavior.•It further identifies three routes that lead to employee brand psychological ownership and their relations to their voice behavior.•Investment of self is identified as a particularly important factor contributing to employees’ psychological brand ownership and voice.
Employee voice has been regarded as an important organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Within the hospitality industry, employee - customer interactions present opportunities to identify issues and propose change-oriented suggestions (i.e., voice) that can improve performance. Because of the risky nature of voice and potential loss for the voicing individual, employees need to be strongly motivated to overcome such barriers to speak up. Given the central role that the hospitality brand plays in guiding employees’ attitudes and behavior, we consider employees’ brand psychological ownership as a strong motivator for voice. Results from this research suggest that employees are more likely to initiate voice when they develop a sense of ownership toward the brand, invest ideas, time and effort into building the brand, as well as possess sufficient knowledge and skills to deliver brand-aligned performance.
We extend the marketing literature on internal branding by developing a theoretical framework to explain the processes whereby brand orientation affects in- and extra-role employee brand-building ...behavior from the theoretical perspective of the attention-based view. The results of a survey of 314 UK-based nonprofit organizations show that brand orientation leads to the development of internal branding mechanisms, which in turn fosters in-role employee brand-building behaviors. We also find that internal branding mechanisms mediate the effects of brand orientation on extra-role employee brand-building behavior, as there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between internal branding mechanisms and extra-role employee brand-building behaviors. Furthermore, our result shows that the inverted U-shaped relationship between internal branding mechanisms and extra-role employee brand-building behaviors flips to a concave upward curve when strong interfunctional communications exist.
•Brand orientation leads to the development of internal branding mechanisms (IBMs).•Employee brand-building behaviors (EBBBs) consist of in-role and extra-role EBBB.•IBM positively affects in-role EBBB.•An inverted U-shaped relationship between IBM and extra-role EBBB•Interfunctional communication moderates the effects of IBM on in- and extra-role EBBB.
This article explores the relationship between internal reputation management, HRM, and employee voice. Drawing on qualitative data from 25 medium-size and large Norwegian organizations, we find that ...organizations pursue a desired reputation through a single, official corporate voice by discouraging prohibitive employee voice through technocratic control and coercive HRM practices. The emphasis on technocratic control and coercive HRM occurs despite the widely held belief in reputation and branding literatures that employees should be committed corporate ambassadors who enthusiastically promote their organization's desired reputation and deeply believe in the images they convey to internal and external stakeholders. The findings contribute to studies on reputation management by linking internal reputation management, HRM, and employee voice, pointing out “people management” aspects of reputation management and highlighting important organizational and employee-based consequences.
To improve the effectiveness of corporate events, organizational leaders and meeting planners are increasingly looking for new approaches to involve attendees in active participation and cocreation ...of desired outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how a co-created message delivered during the corporate event served the role of effective internal brand communication. Signaling theory and service-dominant logic were the foundation for the research framework, supporting the argument that if value was co-created during the corporate event, it positively influences the goals established by event organizers. Research was conducted using online selfadministered questionnaires collected from 235 employees of a US-based hotel chain, attendees of the annual corporate event. Results revealed that when a strong corporate message was evaluated as co-creation it positively affected attendees’ internal word-of-mouth (iWOM) intention and perceptions of the brand’s competitive service advantage. Message strength was influenced by attendees’ views of leadership authenticity. Repeat event attendees’ message evaluation was affected by leadership authenticity continuity, while first-time attendees’ evaluation was influenced by leadership authenticity uniqueness. The study introduced and tested a novel framework focused on the effectiveness of event messaging based on co-created value appraisal. It is one of the first studies to focus on annual corporate events as an effective tool for co-created corporate communication. Managers should strategically utilize corporate event messaging delivered by authentic leaders to empower employees as ambassadors of the brand and focus on the importance of message strength to co-create value between the organization and employees.
•Feeling trusted is an important antecedent of internal branding.•Internal branding mediates the linkage of feeling trusted and brand-aligned behaviour.•Self-efficacy moderates the linkage of ...internal branding and brand-aligned behaviour.
Although the mechanism of internal branding is related to both organizational factors and employees’ personal factors, the existing research mainly focuses on organizational factors. Thus, the literature on the formation and function of internal branding from the employee perspective is scarce. In this multisource study, we applied self-categorization theory to test the relationships among employees’ feeling trusted, perceived insider status, self-efficacy and taking-charge behaviour within the framework of internal branding. Data from 169 employee-supervisor dyads from the hotel industry in Northwest China revealed that employees’ perception of feeling trusted is an important factor that causes them to internalize their hotel employer’s brand and categorize themselves as “insiders” who regard the hotel brand as part of themselves and present brand-aligned behaviour to achieve brand success. In addition, employee self-efficacy is an important boundary-level variable that facilitates the transformation of brand internalization to brand-aligned behaviour. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Higher education (HE) institutions need to adapt to the global environment but the complex nature of HE highlights the role of marketing and the internal market in realizing the brand identity, ...creating a challenge for developing a shared brand meaning. This research explores how employees co-create brand meaning through their brand experiences and social interactions with management, colleagues and customers. Using a phenomenological approach, the findings highlight that brand meaning commences from historical, superficial brand interactions. Employees then develop brand meaning further through a series of brand interactions and social interactions. Bridging the internal branding and the co-creation literature, this study conceptualizes the evolving, co-created nature of employees’ brand meaning in the experiential brand meaning cycle. This study extends Iglesias and Bonet’s (2012) work and illustrates the function of employees as readers and authors of brand meaning, emphasizing the crucial role of brand co-creation in guiding employees’ brand promise delivery.
With corporate social responsibility (CSR) becoming increasingly important, this research forms a nexus for strategic CSR and internal brand knowledge through the conceptual development and empirical ...validation of a model. The research methodology is based on an online survey administered via a temporal data collection approach (i.e. two-wave). The findings substantiate that internal branding constructs that characterise the employees internal CSR experienced. The internal CSR experience is also shaped by individual factors, such as employee awareness of CSR, perception of the sincerity of the CSR brand and subjective knowledge of CSR. The findings demonstrate the precedential effect of the internal branding constructs on employee performance outcomes (CSR involvement, organisational attachment and organisational citizenship behaviours). The integrity of the model is substantiated by partial least squares (PLS) testing. The study provides scholars and practitioners with empirical evidence of CSR as an internal branding tool to improve brand alignment and employee performance.
Recently, internal branding has gained relevance in the marketing literature because researchers recognize that corporate brand management not only implicates external actions but also an internal ...approach that involves employees. Despite the growing interest, there is no consensus among authors about antecedents, dimensions, and outcomes of internal branding. In this sense, this paper aims to explore the conceptualization of internal branding and to offer opportunities for future research. The study is a systematic literature review that uses a specific database. The contributions of each article were extracted, organized, and processed following systematic procedures. This review defines internal branding as a cross-functional process that involves both marketing and human resource departments. It focuses on managing the brand internally through brand-centered human resource management, internal brand communications, and brand leadership, with the aim of achieving brand outcomes among employees (brand understanding, brand identification, brand commitment, brand loyalty, brand citizenship behaviors) so they can build brand equity in front of external stakeholders. Although a lack of consensus had been established, the literature evidenced similarities that gave rise to the conceptualization proposed in this study. Nevertheless, the discussion about internal branding is still open because there are several issues to investigate in this field.
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