TQM and brand-building by Chinese original brand manufacturers: impact on business performance

Abstract

To gain competitive advantage, original brand manufacturers (OBMs) need to understand how operations and marketing cooperate to achieve performance. Doing so can guide OBMs to make appropriate actions to develop their operational and marketing capability, and foster collaboration between the two functions. Using data collected from 560 Chinese OBMs, the authors investigated the joint impact of total quality management (TQM) initiated by operations and brand-building undertaken by marketing on product quality, brand performance and customer satisfaction and loyalty. The results revealed that the two efforts interact and generate gains that individual efforts cannot realize. Not only their interaction generates additional value to product quality, the results also broadly substantiated the authors’ hypothesis that TQM and brand-building take different paths to affect customer satisfaction and loyalty. In total, although brand-building, as matter of inputs, may impose stronger influences on the performances, OBMs should not neglect TQM, as investing in both is critical to the firm’s long-term success.

Keywords:

• OBM
• TQM
• brand building
• RBV
• resource-dependence theory
• social control theory

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The work described in the paper was supported by a Major Program of National Science Foundation of China (Project No.71090403/71090400), a Joint Program Grant of NSFC (70931160446) and Hong Kong Research Grant Council (HKRGC: N_CUHK461/09) and was also supported by the Institute of Supply Chain Integration and Service Innovation, South China University of Technology.

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been amended. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2013.861243)