BRAND BUILDING STRATEGIES AND BRAND CONSISTENT BEHAVIOR OF EMPLOYEES

Employee brand consistent behavior spurs from an inside-out process that starting from organizational context lead to brand outcomes throughout the impact of managerial strategies on employees' attitude, intensions and behavior. A theoretical study, 32 interviews with internal communication managers of Italian and American leading companies, and a case study on a retail company, showed that during the inside-out process of brand building, human resource management, managerial communication, internal communication, and communication climate are interrelated leverages that need to be integrated in an effort of creating a favorable context facilitating genuine, discretionary and extra-role employee brand consistent behavior. Furthermore, the study revealed that the most spread internal communication strategies aimed to sustain such employee brand builder role are enablement-focused. Managerial strategies should mostly be devoted to earn loyal behavior of employees rather than to prescribe desirable employee behavior. Future research is required to develop and test constructs and measures suitable for the current organizational contexts with an increasing diverse workforce, capturing the voice of employees. Major managerial implications show that companies should engage employees as brand ambassadors not by means of in-role behavior prescriptions and control techniques but rather by means of enablement strategies based on the creation of an organizational context leading to genuine, authentic, voluntary, extra-role brand consistent behavior.