The Relationship between Internal Branding and Affective Commitment

Service firms increasingly need to rely on other attributes than traditional quality and performance of their service employees to stay truly competitive. Strong brands are essential for differentiation in today's marketplace and it becomes naturally important to align the customer contact employees with the company brand to ensure consistency in all external communication. For service firm employees to fully enact the brand and display on-brand behavior outwards it is pivotal to make them truly committed to the brand and organization. Internal branding processes have been shown to be an enabler of employee commitment to the organizational brand. As such, the aim of this study was to determine the components of internal branding in order to clarify the relationship between internal branding and brand commitment of customer contact employees. The empirical investigation was conducted in the retail sector of the service industry and took the perspective of the customer contact employee. The results are interesting and give managers of customer contact employees insights about how to enable affective commitment through use of internal branding.