The brand management system and service firm competitiveness

Despite the growing body of literature acknowledging that strong brands are crucial for firms' long-term competitiveness, little research examines how firms should manage their brands internally to maximize their value and the firm's commercial performance. On the basis of the brand management system (BMS) that Kim and Lee (2007) and Lee, Park, Baek, and Lee (2008) describe, the current research extends these authors' work and develops a multidimensional BMS scale comprising three dimensions: brand orientation, internal branding, and strategic brand management. The BMS represents the basic internal management infrastructure necessary to sustain brand-building activities and brand equity creation. The study also conceptualizes the BMS as a dynamic capability that constitutes a potential route to acquiring a sustainable competitive advantage. The data from a sample of 151 knowledge-intensive business services firms show that the BMS effectively helps firms to perform better than their competitors and that market orientation and innovativeness are key antecedents for the development of the system. These results contribute to the scarce literature on managing brands in business services. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.