Khanyapuss Punjaisri

Exploring the Influences of Internal Branding on Employees' Brand Promise Delivery: Implications for Strengthening Customer–Brand Relationships

ABSTRACT Internal branding is increasingly seen as a doctrine to ensure employees’ delivery of the brand promise by shaping employees’ brand attitudes and behaviours. However, few studies, if any, have been conducted to understand the internal branding process from the viewpoint of employees who are the end receivers. Therefore, this study aims at exploring employees’ perceptions toward the internal branding process. It identifies the relevant mechanisms and describes how internal branding affected service employees. The challenges of its success are uncovered and discussed. Finally, managerial implications and future research directions are provided.

Aligning employee service recovery performance with brand values:the role of brand-specific leadership

Abstract This study investigates the effects of brand-specific leadership on employees’ brand-aligned service recovery performance (SRP). In order to do so, we empirically test a conceptual model of relationships between brand-specific transformational leadership (TFL) and transactional leadership (TRL), trust in leader and in corporate brand, brand identification, and SRP from employees’ perspectives. It is the first study to incorporate trust in corporate brand into the framework. Results from a study of 246 customer-contact employees show that brand-specific TFL has a positive impact on all variables studied, while brand-specific TRL is ineffective in fostering brand-building behaviours. More specifically, brand-specific TFL’s effects on employee SRP are mediated by trust in the leader, trust in the corporate brand, and brand identification. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

How Do Different Service Employees Deliver the Brand to Consumers? An Abstract

An important aspect of service employees’ performance is related to their ability to demonstrate brand-congruent behaviour, given that customers’ brand experience is a function of their encounter with them (Akdeniz & Calantone, 2015). An extensive amount of work in the area examines how frontline employees affect customers’ experience with the brand (Xie et al., 2014), and scholars examine a variety of organizational, interpersonal and intrapersonal factors which affect employees’ ability to deliver the brand consistently (e.g. Dean et al., 2016). Much of the published work espousing the importance of employees assumes that employees share a common understanding of their role, despite evidence showing that individuals may frame their work quite differently and have different motives when it comes to fulfilling various work-related objectives. Second, current internal branding conceptualizations view employees as a homogenous group of stakeholders who respond to the firm’s internal branding efforts in an unvarying way (Punjaisri et al., 2009). These assumptions are inaccurate, as interpersonal variations among individuals need to be taken into account when examining each employee’s ability to meet existing brand delivery standards when interacting with customers (Di Mascio, 2010). Without accommodating these intrapersonal variations into existing internal branding frameworks, managerial insights cannot be uniformly applied to entire service staff.

Exploring How Young Consumers’ Processing Snack Packaging Cues: An Extended Abstract

Obesity has become one of the most significant nutritional problems facing global populations. One of the interventions implemented by policy makers in an attempt to encourage consumers to adopt healthy dietary choices is nutrition labelling (NL). Still, such developed countries as the UK are facing the rise of an obesity rate, with young adults aged 16–24 being a high-risk category (Mintel 2013). Crisps and chocolate are some of the major energy-dense snacks that cause obesity (Astrup et al. 2006), when coupling with over consumption and lack of physical activity. This study seeks to understand how UK young adults’ perceptions towards snacks and snacking affect the role of brand cues and NL in their decision-making process. Of specific focus are energy-dense crisps and chocolate, which are easily accessible, portable and inexpensive. Previous consumer research in NL studies has predominantly adopted experimental research design to examine the role of external information and internal characteristics in influencing consumers’ use of nutritional information (NI), product evaluation and food intake. Yet, existing studies have clearly omitted the potential role of brand in a snack-buying decision, because the branding literature has long considered brand as heuristic (Keller 2008). Adopting the phenomenological approach, this study aims to offer a holistic understanding of the meaning young adults associate with snack, and the interplay between internal characteristics and external information involved in consumer information processing (CIP) within a snack-purchasing decision.

An Investigation into the Driving Mechanisms of Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement has received a lot of attention as an innovative strategic approach to managing consumer–brand relationships (Brodie et al. 2011; Hollebeek 2011; Kumar et al. 2010; Mangold and Faulds 2009; Van Doorn et al. 2010). The beneficial effects of an engaged consumer base are believed to be numerous and include enhancement of viral marketing activities (Harvey et al. 2011), increased brand support through product recommendations (Brodie et al. 2013), greater brand exposure in consumers’ social networks, and finally potential prospect acquisitions (Kumar et al. 2010). Despite the established relevance of consumer engagement particularly in brand-supporting behavior, extant literature mainly addresses the conceptualization of consumer engagement (Brodie et al. 2011; Hollebeek and Chen 2014; Van Doorn et al. 2010; Kumar et al. 2010), investigating the consequences of engagement (Bowden 2009; Chan and Li 2010; Gruen et al. 2006; Gummerus et al. 2010; Hollebeek 2011). What remains under-researched however are the driving forces of consumer engagement, surging the necessity to work in this direction (Bolton 2011; Verhoef et al. 2010). This research comes to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework that includes various content characteristics and empirically testing it using four brands that have a social media presence.