What drives employees' brand internalization? Building a brand climate in service organizations

Sharing economy has been the buzz word in recent years. Businesses such as Airbnb has risen up to be a top lodging provider although it doesn’t own any properties. One key attractiveness of Airbnb is the “localness” of... [ view full abstract ]

Sharing economy has been the buzz word in recent years. Businesses such as Airbnb has risen up to be a top lodging provider although it doesn’t own any properties. One key attractiveness of Airbnb is the “localness” of the staying experience. Meanwhile, major hotel companies are building new brands such as boutique brands that emphasize providing authentic local experiences to guests. However, given the unique characteristics of service products, the extent to which guests perceive the uniqueness of a service brand highly depends on employees’ actions during service encounters. Current internal branding literature emphasizes the importance of employees internalizing the brand to deliver authentic brand experiences to customers as well as elicit extra-role brand building behavior. Such brand internalization may include employees perceive sufficient brand knowledge and skills, perceive the importance of role relevance, and perceive there is a fit between their personal values and brand values. However, how to achieve these employee psychological states remains unclear. That is, what can organizations do to promote these desired employee brand perceptions? Based on a thorough review of organizational behavior literature and internal branding literature, it is suggested that the establishment of a brand climate where employees perceived their brand supporting attitudes and actions are encouraged and supported by the company’s practices and policies is necessary. This brand climate is expected to be affected by two sets of factors. The first set is organizational factors such as internal service quality, leadership, and Human Resource Management. The second set is employee factors such as their work engagement. To validate this conceptual relationships and to offer practical advice to service brands, we have designed a two-wave data collection targeting service employees from three industries including hotel industry, restaurant industry, and airline industry. The two-wave data collection design is to decrease the impact of common method bias resulted from self-reported surveys from the same source. It is expected that this study will identify the relative roles of the organizational factors and employee factors in building a strong brand climate, which in turn, promotes employees’ subsequent appropriate brand perceptions and coveted brand performance.