Enhancing Brand Understanding Through Brand Training: a Conditional Process Analysis of Recent Hires at an Airline

Abstract

Purpose -Within internal branding research, the positive association between employee brand training and brand understanding is well established. However, the boundary conditions of this focal relationship have not been researched to date, and insights about the effect of individual differences would be of significant practical value to service organizations. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to test the moderating effect on the focal relationship of three key individual differences: age, gender, and customer-contact position.Theoretical framework -The study is grounded on established constructs and relationships from the internal branding literature.Design/methodology/approach -Data were collected at a Latin American airline using a web-based survey. The sample included 225 recently hired employees. The analysis was performed through conditional process models estimated with the PROCESS macro for SPSS.Findings -Age moderates the focal relationship, with older employees displaying a weaker impact of brand training on brand understanding, which becomes nonsignificant after the age of 50. For gender, the moderating effect was not significant. Contact position had a significant negative effect on the focal relationship, i.e. brand training had a weaker impact on brand understanding for contact employees compared to non-contact employees. This is attributed to contact employees' involvement in service encounters, which provides real-world opportunities to learn about the brand above and beyond formal brand training, opportunities which non-contact employees lack.Practical & social implications of research -Training managers in service organizations can use the study results to achieve a greater impact from scarce brand training resources. For gender differences, the findings support a uniform allocation of training resources. For age differences, a differential allocation is advised, with more resources for younger employees, who have lower brand understanding scores and derive a greater impact from brand training. The finding of a diminishing impact of brand training suggests devising alternative means/

Internal Branding Processes in a Fashion Organization: Turning Employees into Brand Ambassadors

“…These studies confirm that brand training is the proximal driver of brand understanding (King & So, 2015;Murillo & King, 2019;Murillo, 2022). Furthermore, recent studies taking a more fine-grained longitudinal view have shown that even for simple jobs, such as restaurant servers, a thorough grasp of the desired customer experience (i.e., the brand promise) and their role in delivering it can take months to be fully internalized, thus emphasizing the importance of a sustained training effort (Murillo & King, 2019).…”

“…This empirical study of employees at a sportswear fashion firm tested internal branding relationships that have been previously validated in studies from various service industries (Buil et al, 2016;Du Preez et al, 2017;Huang & Lai, 2018;Murillo, 2022;Taku et al, 2022;Terglav et al, 2016). Survey results show strong support for nearly all of the hypothesized relationships (even with brand identification mediated by brand commitment), suggesting that internal branding practices, as implemented in fashion organizations, deserve greater research attention to build a holistic understanding of the profile and role of employee brand ambassadors in the fashion industry, and the best ways of recruiting, training and leading them, a topic which the fashion literature has yet to examine.…”

“…Because hospitality firms strive to create differentiated customer experiences through comprehensive training (Hurrell & Scholarios, 2014;Garavan et al, 2022), internal branding research has focused historically on the hospitality industry (Punjaisri & Wilson, 2011;Terglav et al, 2016;Zhang & Xu, 2021;Qureshi et al, 2022). However, the fundamental constructs have been studied in other service industries, including airlines (Vatankhah & Darvishi, 2018;Murillo, 2022), financial services (Garas et al, 2018;Taku et al, 2022), universities (Clark et al, 2020;Murillo & Atristain-Suárez, 2023), healthcare (Huang & Lai, 2018), ride-sharing platforms (Murillo & Terán-Bustamente, 2020); retail (Murillo, 2020;Porricelli et al, 2014), and public sector organizations (Leijerholt et al, 2022).…”