This article reports two studies on how managers can elicit brand-building behavior from frontline employees. Study 1 examines the mechanisms by which brand-specific transactional and transformational leadership influence employees' brand-building behavior. The results from a survey of 269 customer-contact employees show that brand-specific transactional leaders influence followers through a process of compliance, leading to an increase in turnover intentions and a decrease in in-role and extra-role brand-building behaviors. In contrast, brand-specific transformational leaders influence followers through a process of internalization, leading to a decrease in turnover intentions and an increase in in-role and extra-role brand-building behaviors. In turn, both processes are mediated by employees' perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with regard to their work roles as brand representatives. Moreover, the results show that brand-specific transactional leadership moderates the influence of brand-specific transformational leadership in a nonlinear, inverse U-shaped way, so that a medium level of transactional leadership maximizes the positive effects of transformational leadership. Study 2 addresses whether managers can learn brand-specific transformational leadership. A field experiment shows that brand-specific transformational leadership can indeed be learned through management training.

Purpose -This study aims to show that brand success can be improved if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by each employee of a company. The paper terms such brand consistent employee behaviour behavioural branding and identifies managerial instruments for its implementation and management. Design/methodology/approach -The model in the paper explains the brand's contribution to company success by brand consistent employee behaviour, functional employee performance and brand congruent mass media communication. Brand consistent employee behaviour and functional employee performance in turn are modelled as determined by formal and informal management techniques as well as employee empowerment. The model is tested on a sample of 167 senior managers using partial least squares and finds empirical support. Furthermore, practical implications are provided based on additional top management focus groups. Findings -The paper finds that behavioural branding determines the brand's contribution to company success. Further, the results show that informal management and employee empowerment have a far stronger impact on the brand consistency of employee behaviour than formal management instruments. Practical implications -Managers should spend more time explaining and discussing targets of behavioural branding, and they should create an organisational environment that enables employees to find their own individual ways of articulating a brand to customers. Originality/value -The framework in the paper integrates personal and non-personal facets of interaction for a holistic explanation of brand performance. It provides a broader understanding of factors affecting the accruement of a customer's brand experience and enables researchers and practitioners to develop more consistent and promising brand management activities.

Scholars have argued that the exploitation-exploration interaction provides a source of competi-tive advantage beyond that provided by each individually. However, we know little about the mutual effects of exploitation and exploration on either incremental or radical innovation per-formance. To address this gap, we examine data from 171 manufacturing firms. We find incre-mental innovation performance is highest when exploitation interacts with an intermediary level of exploration. Radical innovation performance, however, is solely driven by exploration. A coupling with exploitation is not effective. We contribute to the extant literature, first, by disen-tangling the interaction effects of exploitation and exploration on radical and incremental inno-vation performance, respectively. Second, we extend extant literature that agrees that main-taining an appropriate balance of exploitation and exploration is critical for innovation perfor-mance and that has conceptualized this balance as symmetrical presence and magnitude of ex-ploitation and exploration. In particular, we provide evidence in support of an asymmetric rela-tionship.

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