Brand Competitiveness

<p dir="ltr">Brand competitiveness, defined as a brand’s outperformance of competing brands, is gaining attention in branding literature. Scholars emphasise its importance to various stakeholders, including customers, practitioners, and academics, with a call to shift the focus from examining brands in isolation to examining them relative to competing brands, particularly in measurement and management. Despite the growing strategic importance of brand competitiveness to various stakeholders, several gaps remain. This thesis, comprising three interrelated papers, addresses three key gaps: (1) the lack of a brand competitiveness measurement developed using a scholarly scale development process, (2) the limited exploration of employees as stakeholders affected by brand competitiveness, and (3) the underdeveloped understanding of the nomological network of brand competitiveness, particularly concerning relative antecedents and relative outcomes. The first paper introduces customer-based brand competitiveness (CBBC) as a customer’s evaluation of a brand’s outperformance of competing brands. The scale development process consisted of three stages: scale construction (a literature search and a qualitative study with 20 consumers), scale refinement (interviews and a survey with 21 academic branding experts), and scale validation (three quantitative studies with 1,157 consumers, resulting in 2,078 brand evaluations across five industries). The study develops a seven-item CBBC scale, representing a parsimonious tool for measuring brand competitiveness. Applying Signalling Theory as the theoretical foundation, the study empirically validates customer-based brand equity and purchase intentions as outcomes of CBBC. This study advances the relative perspective in brand performance measures, considering the relativity at the individual customer level. The second paper adapts the notion of brand competitiveness to the internal context. Employee-based brand competitiveness (EBBC) is defined as an employee’s evaluation of their brand’s outperformance of competing brands. Applying Social Exchange Theory, the second paper investigates the underlying mechanisms by which brand competitiveness influences employees. Applying a mixed-methods approach, which included 20 interviews and a survey of 496 employees across 19 industries, the study finds that EBBC positively influences employee-based brand equity (EBBE). Furthermore, trait competitiveness moderates the EBBC-EBBE relationship, while brand pride, career opportunities, and prosocial motivation mediate this relationship. This study offers a holistic understanding of brand competitiveness from an internal perspective. The third paper examines the drivers and performance effects of brand competitiveness in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Applying Resource-Advantage Theory, it explores how relative strategic orientations affect brand competitiveness and influence relative customer, market, and financial performance. Drawing on data from 425 US-based B2B managers across 20 industries, the study finds that relative brand, market, and innovation orientations have positive effects on brand competitiveness, which in turn influence relative customer-based brand equity, market performance, and financial performance. Furthermore, competitive intensity moderates the relationship between relative brand orientation and brand competitiveness. This research responds to calls to consider the relative perspective in marketing. It contributes to the branding literature by advancing the underdeveloped research into the nomological network of brand competitiveness, with an additional contribution to the limited empirical research in the B2B context. Collectively, the findings provide an integrated understanding of brand competitiveness across customers, employees, and B2B firms, highlighting its cross-contextual relevance and practical implications for enhancing brand equity and informed strategic decision-making.</p>