For several years, corporate branding has received increased traction in marketing literature. And the increased attention was particularly profound in the mid-1990s. To a great extent, there is a general agreement on how to perform the corporate branding process. Moreover, participants of a corporate branding process will have diverse perceptions of organizations. Each of the stakeholders’ – employees’, consumers’, and managers’ – fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of organizations may be incompatible. Corporate branding loses much of its intentionality unless managers realize stakeholders have different worldviews and opinions of organizations. To make corporate branding successful, acknowledgment of such diverse attitudes is instrumental (Balmer and Gray, 2003; Hulberg, 2006).
Firms should understand that internal brand knowledge (IBK) may not directly result in high service performance levels of employees. Instead, they should embrace the culture of self-driven positive brand-connection attitudes that motivate employees to engage in brand citizenship behavior (BCB) and customer-oriented behavior (COB) that are consistent with their sense of self. Internal branding efforts are essential in improving employee performance in service marketing. While internal brand knowledge (IBK) is vital to transforming brand vision into brand reality, it is not brand knowledge entirely but its integration with other brands- and customer-related aspects that drive superior employee performance. Ngo et al. (2019) propose that internal brand knowledge results in higher levels of employee brand identification (EBI). Such a title encourages employees to engage in both employee-related and brand- and customer-focused behaviors (i.e., brand citizenship behavior [BCB] and customer-oriented behavior [COB]), which in turn contributes to employee performance (Ngo et al., 2019).
Employer brand is a comparatively new competitive human resource management strategy. Even though its popularity is high among practitioners, the availability of lesser academic research on the topic attracts further interest from management professionals and experts. A comprehensive perspective of employer branding claims that the employer brand comes from benefits provided by employment. The study also tried to find a relationship between employer branding and employee performance and believes that employer branding has many benefits to employee performance via various ways, such as organizational exchange and organizational identification approach.
(Xia and Yang, 2010).
Corporate branding requires increased emphasis on internal brand resources to present a coherent brand identity to stakeholders. Chernatony’s (1999) identity-reputation gap model of brand management conceptualizes brand building as reducing the gap between brand identity and brand reputation. Chernatony (1999) also identified critical internal factors that affect the leverage of brand resources to enhance brand performance. Employees play a crucial role in the brand-building process. Managers can further leverage their brand potential by striving to achieve greater congruence among brand team members and between the team and other employees. Therefore, corporate marketers must adopt a planning perspective that incorporates both internal, pan-company marketing and the traditional, external perspective to ensure synergy between employees’ actions, optimizing consumers’ satisfaction. Organizations also need to pay attention to the composition of their brand teams and be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. The increasing heterogeneity of brand teams under corporate branding should enhance the resources of the brand team but will require greater emphasis on integration to arrive at congruent brand perceptions. Organizations will need to consider the appointment of new members to the brand team carefully, considering the team’s composition and whether new and existing members will be able to work together. Chernatony (1999) reviewed mechanisms to assist the brand team in surfacing their perceptions and resolving any inconsistencies, which can help to create a coherent brand identity. Organizations should then consider initiating internal programs to communicate the brand’s identity to employees (Harris and de Chernatony, 2001).
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Mujeeb Patla 