Internal and External Brand Management

Research Area Information

Today, brands represent one of the most powerful intangible assets for organizations. Proper brand management can increase brand value over time (Santos et al., 2013). This management includes, among others, decisions regarding the positioning and communication strategy of the brand. However, while such actions may contribute to increasing brand awareness and attractiveness, they may not be sufficient to ensure long-term success. According to Burmann and Zeplin (2005), for a brand to be able to generate value in a sustainable manner there must be consistency between the internal management of the brand and the customer’s experience with it. For this reason, it is necessary not only that the company is able to create and communicate a brand with an attractive and differential personality, but also that it must ensure that it is consistent with the values that characterise the organisation and with which workers must feel identified. Therefore, this process of external management of the brand really begins with an internal management aimed at the creation of favorable behaviors by the employee towards his own brand.

The internal management of the brand includes all those control activities, formal and informal, which aim to influence the generation of favourable behaviour of employees towards their own brand. From a holistic point of view, some authors point out three central elements in the internal management of the brand (Burmann and Zeplin, 2005): training activities, internal communication and internal leadership. For its part, external management entails analysing brand value from the customer’s perspective, as well as determining its relationship with customer attitudes and behaviour, and the economic and financial results that can be attributed to the brand. In addition to Aaker’s classic vision (1991), who proposes that brand value is determined by notoriety, associations, perceived quality and brand loyalty, there are other measurement proposals in the literature (Martínez et al., 2008; Cuneo, López and Yagüe, 2012).

There is a clear interconnection between the internal and external management of the brand, so that customer results and business results will be a reflection of internal management. Therefore, in this line of research we intend to study the internal management of the brand from the perspective of employees and relate it to the external management of the same, reflected both in results perceived by the customer and in the market results themselves.