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An investigation into the interplay between corporate brand strategy and internationalization
Dissertation   Open access

An investigation into the interplay between corporate brand strategy and internationalization

Saejoon Kim
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
May 2016
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/etd-7741
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Abstract

Branding (Marketing) Marketing
Firms differ in terms of their brand portfolio structure based on the classification well established by prior literature: corporate branding, house of brands, or mixed branding. The issue of effectively managing a brand portfolio has become simultaneously complex and increasingly important in the international business setting. Notably, it is the degree to which a firm emphasizes its corporate name in a brand portfolio that determines the firm's branding strategy (referred to as corporate brand strategy or CBS in this study). Departing from a traditional scheme of categorical classification, this study attempts to measure firms' branding strategy continuously with reference to the degree of leverage of corporate name across an organization. With this continuous measure, this thesis studies the performance implications of a CBS by testing its main effect on firm performance, as well its impact conditioned on the degree to which firms expand abroad, in a longitudinal sample of internationally expanding retail firms from multiple countries. The results of this study show that a CBS helps achieve superior performance. Notably, this effect is moderated by the extent to which firms internationalize in a curvilinear way. In addition, we find that cultural distance between firms' home country and international markets serves to mitigate the negative interaction between CBS and internationalization. Lastly, service firms operating both company-owned and franchise units take advantage of their organizational arrangement such that they effectively overcome the complexities of international operation, better leveraging CBS in international markets. Therefore, this dissertation has important implications for theory and practice.

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