Managerial strategies to promote employee brand consistent behavior: the new frontier for brand building strategies

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managerial strategies in promoting employee brand consistent behavior. Using a recently developed, holistic model of behavioral branding (Mazzei and Ravazzani, 2015), that suggests that a wide array of managerial strategies affect the branding process, this study addresses two specific questions: What communication strategies, in the opinion of managers, sustain employee brand consistent behavior? and What are the most important factors, both contextual and related to their cognitive-emotional states, that employees think affect their brand ambassadorship behavior. Research was conducted, based on a multiple methods strategy, to answer the two questions. The choice of methods was based on the specific characteristics of the two targets, communication managers and employees. An initial study conducted in-depth interviews with 32 communication managers, and this was followed by a case study of a single company. The results show that enablement-oriented strategies are more effective then communication-oriented strategies in sustaining employee brand builder roles. Weak employee commitment, unsatisfactory external communication, and low levels of motivation are strong contextual factors inhibiting employee attitudes to brand ambassadorship, one of the most relevant employee brand consistent behaviors in competitive contexts. The main practical implication is that companies should engage employees as brand ambassadors, not by means of prescriptions of in-role behavior, but enablement strategies leading to authentic and voluntary behaviors; besides, that companies should put a significant effort in “preparing the soil”, i.e. investing in enhancing employee commitment, level of motivation and understanding/alignment with the external communication. The values of the study lies in highlighting the crucial role of enablement-oriented strategies, and the relevance of specific contextual variables affecting the attitudes of employees towards brand consistent behaviors.