How Behavioral Branding Affects Brand Equity

Abstract

Maintaining and increasing brand equity is the top priority for most brand managers. This includes not only the areas of public relations and advertising, but also the way in which sales staff communicates regarding the brand. According to behavioral branding, the brand should be strengthened by the brand fit of the employees. To date, research and practice have developed more intuitive and heuristic methods for evaluating employee behavior and its impact on the brand. In this article, behavior will be operationalized and measured by personality and sales encounter experience. The method is based on Heider’s balance theory explaining the occurrence of cognitive dissonance in case of unbalanced states in triads, here the brand, the customer, and the salesperson. Findings show how discrepancies in personal behavior led to discrepancies in brand equities before and after the sales encounter.