Employee-Brand Ownership in Customer Service Interactions

Abstract

Literature on brand equity in service businesses highlights the centrality and importance of employees in delivering an organization’s brand to its customers. However, most existing research in the area of internal branding takes a management-centric approach. An emerging body of work on employee branding recognizes that, since employees are at the core of this concept, a bottom-up approach needs to be taken in exploring service brand delivery in customer service interactions. This paper joins the discussion of employee branding by proposing the concept of brand ownership and presenting a conceptual model of employee-brand ownership as related to service interactions. Findings, based on analysis of interviews with restaurant servers, suggest that employee brand ownership, unlike prior conceptualizations of brand internalization, is not constant, and varies depending on the nature of the employee’s service interaction. A model of employee-brand ownership is proposed to present and explore four different degrees of ownership and to articulate boundary conditions between these degrees.