Internal brand orientation: conceptualisation, scale development and validation

ABSTRACT

Internal branding is increasingly acknowledged as a potential route to acquiring sustainable competitive advantage. However, to date no systematic attempt has been made to operationalise from an organisational perspective all imperatives for achieving brand internalisation. To address this omission, we introduce internal brand orientation as a new construct that provides a measurable and more succinct picture of internal branding. Following the literature in measurement theory, we report a series of complementary studies and develop a scale which comprises two dimensions: top management brand commitment and shared brand values. The new scale demonstrates strong psychometric evidence of reliability and validity, facilitating future research in the area. Findings can be used as a guidance by business executives in their effort to turn employees into brand ambassadors and motivate everyone in the organisation towards brand supportive behaviours.

KEYWORDS:

• Brands
• internal branding
• coordination
• scale development
• empirical study
• orientation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor-in-chief, the associate editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful guidance during the review process. The authors would also like to thank Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki and Karolos-Konstantinos Papadas for their valuable comments and wish to acknowledge the continuous encouragement provided by †Paulina Papastathopoulou.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term is coined as an extension of ‘brand orientation’ which appeared in 1994 by Urde, in order to describe an approach in which all organisational processes revolve around the development and maintenance of strong brands over time.

2. The name of each dimension is coined in the context of this study in order to effectively represent what literature is describing.

3. Taking into account that each company may have a different brand portfolio strategy (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000), respondents were asked to answer the performance questions having in mind either the corporate/master brand (in case a ‘branded house’ architecture was followed by their company or a single master brand was used for all offerings with only descriptive sub-brands), or the average brand performance of the different brands offered by the company (in case a ‘house of brands’ architecture was followed, where an independent set of stand-alone brands are used for the different offerings of the company).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lamprini P. Piha

Dr Lamprini P. Piha is a Research and Teaching fellow at the Department of Marketing and Communication of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Greece. She is also a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Economics of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She obtained her PhD in Branding from the AUEB and has been awarded several state and private scholarships for exceptional performance throughout her studies. Her current research interests revolve around brand building and management, brand orientation, marketing strategy, services marketing and destination branding. Additionally, she works as a marketing consultant. She is the corresponding author and can be contacted at [email protected].

Dr George J. Avlonitis is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Marketing and Communication at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Greece. He has served as president of the European Marketing Academy-EMAC (2008–2010) and chairman of the Global Sales Science Institute-GSSI (2010–2012). He has presented various works in United States, Canada and Europe and has published more than 190 articles in international conference proceedings and the most prestigious international scientific journals of marketing, including Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, etc. He is also on the editorial board of multiple international journals and has received several times Best Paper Awards.