When the brand is your bread and butter: review, synthesis, and directions for future exploration of salespeople-brand relationships

Abstract

Brand relationships influence human attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. While past research has generously explored this idea in the customer context, less research has explored the role brand relationships play in the context of frontline employees or salespeople. While much of the customer literature can be used to inform our understanding of salesperson-brand relationships, there are nuances of being an employee, and specifically a salesperson, that have left many research questions unanswered. Consequently, a state of the literature in this domain is warranted to better understand how future research can grow this critical stream. The current research identifies, reviews, and synthesizes 52 salesperson-brand relationship articles. A comprehensive summary of common brand constructs (e.g. brand identification, brand attachment) is employed and supplemented with a social network analysis. To encourage more research in the salesperson-brand domain, we then summarize common themes that pervade the literature and identify a plethora of future opportunities in both established domains (e.g. brand relationships increase effort) and new frontiers (e.g. exploring the dark side of salespeople-brand relationships).

Keywords:

• Brand
• brand identification
• brand attachment
• salesperson
• review

Notes

1 For detailed explanations of social network terms and centralities see Table A1 (Web appendix), Borgatti, Everett, and Johnson 2018, and Iacobucci et al. 2017.