The Role of Corporate Brand Strategy on Firm Performance: A View from Internationalization, Cross-National Distance, and Organizational Form

Firms differ in terms of the structure of their brand portfolio on the basis of the classification well established by prior literature: corporate branding, house of brands, or mixed branding. The issue of effectively managing brand portfolio has become simultaneously complex and important in the international business setting. Notably, it is the degree to which a firm emphasizes 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 previous categorical branding strategy classification, this study attempts to measure firms’ branding strategy as continuously with reference to the degree of leverage of corporate name across the firm. With this continuous measure, this study test the implications of a CBS by studying its main effect on firm profitability, as well its impact conditioned on the degree to which firms expand abroad, in a longitudinal sample of global retailers from multiple countries. The results of this study show that a CBS helps firms achieve superior performance. Notably, this effect is moderated by the extent to which firms internationalize in a curvilinear way. In addition, this study also finds that cultural distance of international markets enables multinational firms to reap the gains from CBS fully and early. Lastly, service firms operating both company-owned and franchise units can take advantage of their organizational arrangement so as to endure higher levels of managerial complexities stemming from operating in the advanced stages of internationalization. Therefore, this dissertation has important implications for theory and practice.

Many thanks to Saejoon’s Dissertation Committee: Committee Chair: Hyokjin Kwak, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Marketing Committee Member: Pravin Nath, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Oklahoma Committee Member: Trina Andras, Ph.D. Professor and Head of Marketing Committee Member: Rolph Anderson, Ph.D. Royal H. Gibson, Sr. Professor of Marketing Committee Member: Bert Rosenbloom, Ph.D. Rauth Chair Professor of Marketing Management Committee Member: Brent Smith, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Marketing at Saint Joseph’s University