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In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt a customer‐centric value creation perspective to provide insights into the contribution of business orientations, especially marketing orientation and innovation orientation to the creation of customer‐centric value (customer equity and brand performance).

To undertake this examination, a model was developed and then tested to validate its applicability in the context of both developed and developing economies. The paper includes partial least squares.

The findings demonstrate that being marketing‐oriented and innovation‐oriented appears to be important in creating customers, keeping them, and increasing add‐on selling to them and rewards the firm with greater brand performance in the marketplace. Importantly, these relationships are universally held across developed and developing business environments. Interestingly, marketing orientation was found to contribute more to the creation of customer‐centric value than innovation orientation in developing business environment, whereas the opposite was found in the context of developed business environment.

The data incorporate only the subjective measures of customer‐centric value. Future studies can use financial measures to complement the self‐reporting approach used in this paper. This dual‐approach to measuring the value of customers to the firm (customer equity) and brand performance would provide additional insights into the customer‐centric marketing literature.

The findings suggest that managers should strive to develop a high level of marketing orientation and innovation orientation as two efficient ways to achieve higher levels of customer equity. They are also advised that if their firms are more effective in acquiring potential customers, retaining current customers, and enhancing add‐on selling, they see their brands perform better. Importantly, the findings also provide guidance for managers on how to allocate their resources to key business activities (e.g. marketing and innovation) in the context of international business (developing versus developed business environments).

This study contributes to customer‐centric marketing theory by enhancing understanding of the contribution of marketing and innovation to the creation of customer‐centric value in different business environments. This study also contributes to the business orientation literature by demonstrating the utility of a cultural‐behavioral approach in measuring marketing orientation and innovation orientation.

The present study sheds light on the role of strategic orientations (SOs) in explaining business growth. The purpose of this paper is to examine how different SOs, namely learning orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation and brand orientation simultaneously affect business performance measured with brand performance, market performance and business growth in SME context and whether these effects vary across countries.

An extensive data set of 1,120 effective responses is collected from two European countries, namely Hungary, representing a post socialist rapidly growing market, and Finland with a stable, highly developed and competitive economy. A multigroup moderation analysis is conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis is used in testing measurement invariance, subsequently followed by structural equation modeling procedure used in testing research hypotheses developed on the basis of a literature review.

The results show that entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation and brand orientation have a positive effect on business growth in SMEs in both Hungary and Finland through brand and market performance. With regard to learning orientation, a positive yet somewhat weak effect on growth is found only in the Hungarian sample. The moderation analysis reveals that country moderates several of the hypothesized paths from SOs to business performance.

Prior studies on SOs have mainly focussed on single orientations at any given time. However, researchers increasingly argue that many firms are better off if they build their strategies on multiple SOs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first empirical studies to address multiple (four) SOs in the same research model. Furthermore, little is known about if and how the performance effects of different SOs vary across countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of industry competitive intensity (ICI) on brand performance with the mediating role of market orientation and organizational learning using theoretical and experimental materials in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) firms.

To test the research hypotheses, a model was designed and tested on 124 chief executive officers from 30 FMCG firms active in both food and chemical industries using structural equation modeling and partial least squares methodology.

The research findings showed that ICI has significant effect on market orientation and organizational learning. It also has significant effect on the firm’s brand performance through developing the market orientation capability as a mediating variable, but the development of organizational learning capability (as a mediating variable) is not effective in the relationship between ICI and brand performance.

Since the early 1990s, addressing intraorganizational capabilities and resources has been a major topic of strategic and marketing research. In this regard, many theoretical and experimental contents have been presented so far. However, little research has simultaneously addressed the industrial environment and the development of competitive capabilities. A manager’s understanding of the competition rate of an industry has the potential to influence the development of organizational capabilities through strategic responsiveness to his/her perception of the environment. This study attempts to show that managers and firms that consider their industrial environment to be volatile must develop their learning capabilities and market orientation, leading to superior brand performance.

Drawing on the resource-based view, this paper aims to investigate how a firm’s integrated marketing communication (IMC) as a capability is influenced by the organisational antecedents of learning orientation (LO), market orientation (MO) and brand orientation (BO). Further, the research examines how an IMC capability influences brand performance and whether these relationships are influenced by brand size.

Based on survey data from 187 managers responsible for brand communications, this paper applies structural equation modelling using SmartPLS3 to assess hypothesised relationships.

IMC capability is directly influenced by BO but not by MO and LO; these have important indirect effects. Size does not moderate key relationships but directly affects IMC capability.

Organisational antecedents play an important role in shaping IMC capability and ultimately brand performance. Future researchers should consider a larger sample of brands and firms, IMC capability building in small firms and longitudinal design to evaluate the effects of IMC capability.

BO is nested in and complementary to learning and MO, and thus cannot stand alone. Developing an IMC capability is critical for translating the benefits of organisational orientations into performance outcomes. IMC capability links MO and BO to firm performance. Appropriate resourcing is critical for success, as it has implications for developing other resources and capabilities.

This study empirically establishes for the first time a relationship between critical organisational antecedents of LO, MO and BO, their influence on IMC capability and subsequently on brand performance.

This study examines the relationship between brand digitalization and brand market performance, mediated by brand competence and brand warmth and moderated by brand familiarity, from a consumer perspective.

This study conducted a 2 (brand digitalization: yes vs no) × 2 (brand familiarity: high vs low) between-subject experiment and administered a survey with 693 valid responses. Two-way analysis of variance, Hayes' PROCESS macro and a linear regression model were used to analyze the data.

Brand digitalization positively affects brand market performance, which is mediated by brand competence and brand warmth. In addition, brand familiarity has a moderating effect on the relationship between brand digitalization and brand market performance, as well as on the mediating effect of brand competence and brand warmth.

Brand managers should enhance the integration of digital technologies into brand building and management and develop brand communication strategies that emphasize brand digitalization based on consumers' brand familiarity.

This study advances current knowledge of the drivers of brand performance by constructing the concept of brand digitalization and examining its role in improving brand market performance. Additionally, this study deepens our understanding of the relationship between digital technology usage and consumer brand response by examining the mediating effect of brand competence and brand warmth and the moderating effect of brand familiarity.

The paper aims at providing insights into how market orientation and organisational culture together contribute to brand performance, shedding light on the nexus between innovative culture and market orientation, and examining the relative importance of innovative culture over market orientation in affecting brand performance.

In a cross‐sectional survey, a variance‐based structural equation modelling was used to test hypotheses on a convenience sample of 180 marketing executives in Australia.

Organisations with a strong innovative culture appear to recognise that building a successful brand depends not always on the interpretation of feedback received from current customers and competitors, but instead on organisations' ability to innovatively develop unique ways of delivering superior value to customers. The findings were consistent with this advice to both market orientation and innovative culture. In addition, the findings indicate that market orientation is a response partially derived from the organisation's innovative culture. Finally, it was also found that organisational culture was relatively more important than market orientation in affecting organisational performance.

The paper advances the understanding of performance‐based market orientation research by investigating structural relationships among market orientation, organisational culture, and organisational performance at the micro level (e.g. brand performance).

While extant research highlights the importance of both market orientation and brand orientation in brand success, it is still unclear how they actually combine to contribute to brand performance. Grounded in the theoretical perspectives of the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities, this study unpacks how, and when, brand orientation and market orientation link systematically to influence brand performance.

In testing the research hypotheses involving mediation and moderation effects, survey data were gathered from a sample of business firms in the manufacturing sector and analyzed through regression analysis.

The results suggest brand orientation manifests through market orientation to influence brand performance via the intervening mechanism of brand management capability. The results also suggest at high levels of competitive intensity, the systematic combination of market orientation and brand orientation is critical in facilitating brand management capability enhancement and subsequent brand performance.

This study extends current literature by providing a more detailed account of how brand orientation and market orientation systematically combine to yield superior brand performance via the mediating role of brand management capability. This study also provides further insights into how, in response to different levels of competitive intensity, the systematic combination of brand orientation and market orientation is managed to facilitate brand management capability enhancement and subsequent brand performance.

The purpose of this paper is to address how marketing assets and resources of the firm perform under different product (brand) innovation conditions using the dynamic marketing capabilities (DMC) research perspective. The study contributes to the DMC research stream showing the effects and performance of heterogeneous firm drivers and resources. Academic research to date has paid a little attention to the interrelationship between market share as a performance metric, dynamic capabilities and product (brand) innovation. The current study bridges this knowledge gap by empirically validating the effects of DMC on market share performance output using panel data for 753 retail food brands.

The model was initially fitted with the β regression analysis and cluster analysis in the second step of the estimation procedure. The results of simulation by Monte Carlo experimentation are discussed.

The findings show that firms leverage their marketing capabilities unequally in the multi-brand portfolios, which leads to an unequal intra-firm distribution of assets and resources. The research contributes to the understanding of the brand competitive dynamics and appropriate deployment of assets and resources for improved firm performance.

These findings are useful for both academics and practitioners because they address new and future research. In doing so, the authors advance the firm performance and branding literature with extension in the DMC literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the manner in which market orientation types facilitate the development of brand management processes (strategic brand management and internal branding), and brand performance.

The research model is assessed using data collected from brand executives. Existing scales are used to measure all the focal constructs. Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using the Smart-PLS 3.0 software is used to check for the psychometric properties of the scales and to test the hypotheses.

The results of this study indicate that proactive and reactive market orientation influence the internal branding and strategic brand management. The mediating role of strategic brand management in the relationship between proactive market orientation (PMO) and brand performance is significant. Similarly, internal branding mediates the relationship between PMO and brand performance. Also, strategic brand management and internal branding mediate the relationship between responsive market orientation (RMO) and brand performance. Results also indicate that market turbulence negatively moderates the relationship between strategic brand management and brand performance.

Building on literature from brand management, organizational capabilities and market orientation, this study explicates the role of PMO and RMO in influencing different strategic brand management and internal branding, and subsequently, brand performance. The perspective used in this study provides an insight into how organizations can develop and manage brands from a process perspective.

To develop the brand management capability, organizations may benefit from cultivating processes that seek to meet the latent customer needs through explorative and proactive information seeking, and at the same time, pursing processes that focus on capturing the existing customer and competitor trends in the market.

This study hopefully helps marketers realize that brand management function needs to move toward being more dynamic in nature.

This study borrows from the existing research on market orientation, branding and brand management to argue that organizations are required to not only maximize the brand returns in the existing market but also to adapt to the changes in the future.