Driving Employee-Based Brand Equity

Scholars emphasize the role of front-line employees for customers’ experience with the brand, as they constitute the original source of brand equity for external stakeholders while their performance affects customer perceptions of the brand and brand equity (Baumgarth and Schmidt 2010). Current knowledge mostly captures individual brand-related antecedents of employee-based brand equity (EBBE) ignoring how employees’ perceptions of other aspects of the organizational environment shape their levels of EBBE received from the company’s brand (King and Grace 2012). Existing studies also consider brand equity as the outcome of the internal branding process, bypassing whether higher levels of EBBE are actually associated with employees’ reciprocal behavior towards the company or its customers (Lohndorf and Diamantopoulos 2014). Little research scrutiny is attracted to what drives employee brand-based equity (EBBE) as well as its value for successful internal branding outcomes.