The employee as an advocate for his/her own brand has achieved heightened
attention of late. However, despite a wealth of research into consumer-brand
relationships, how employees relate to their own brands and subsequently exhibit
specific brand-behaviours is poorly understood. Particularly, little attention has been
directed towards the concept of the employee as forming brand relationships as
compared with consumers.
This thesis examines the nature of the employee-brand relationship; more specifically
we discuss functional, symbolic and experiential brand value as drivers of employee-brand
self-connection and employee-brand identification and subsequently the effect
on brand-specific behaviours.
Given the relative paucity of literature on employees and brands we adopt a
grounded theory approach and conduct a series of in-depth interviews to access
employees’ insights and experiences with the brand. Interviews were recorded,
transcribed and coded. The themes that emerge are used to construct a conceptual
framework that is subsequently tested using a survey instrument and Structural
Equation Modeling. Our findings suggest a number of similarities and differences
between the way in which employees relate to the brand and the way in which
consumers relate to the brand. Our findings have far reaching implications for
academics and practitioners alike.