Connecting Internal Branding with Employee Brand Performance

Abstract

Despite its critical managerial relevance and foundational role as a subset of internal marketing, internal branding has historically garnered less scholarly attention and theorization, and internal branding efforts directed at internal audiences remain mainly under-researched and uncharted. This study addresses this gap, particularly within the less explored public banking sector, by examining the impact of internal branding practices on Employee Brand Performance (EBP) and exploring the crucial mediating role of Brand Commitment in this underlying relationship. A proportionate stratified random sampling technique was adopted. Using data from 426 banking staff in Pakistan, analyzed via Partial Least Squares (PLS), this research tested 13 hypotheses and identified a structure of four latent constructs influencing EBP. The results reveal that an effective organization-wide internal branding strategy affects EBP and brand commitment; however, brand trust and brand identification do not directly affect EBP. For managers, this study suggests that branding should be viewed as an allencompassing process evolving at all organizational levels, with employee brand communication & training, trust, and commitment deserving full attention, and it recommends that managers in financial services actively pursue the internal branding strategy rather than letting it become a passive function of human resources. This research is original in that it fills a gap by bringing together two under-researched areas in the banking industry, namely internal branding and EBP, reveals the significance of creating internal branding at the corporate level, proposes the antecedents of EBP, and clarifies the relationships among them.