Network Embeddedness,Social Responsbility And Brand Value

The promotion of brand value can not only benefit enterprises' core competition capability but advance their sustainable development.Especially when comes to enterprises of manufacturing industry in China,brand value can promote marketing efficiency on one hand and help expand market share world widely on the other.Therefore,brand value has been playing significant role in the transformation of China's manufacturing industry.However,given the situation that the level of products of manufacturing industry is relatively low,and it is lack of world-known products,it is vital to study how to promote brand value so as to generate brand effect and realize sustainable development.Having selected manufacturing industry empirical data as our research sample,with quantitative and qualitative analysis method,this study has discussed the structure of brand value,based on which the impact of three different forms of embeddedness upon enterprises' value has been studied based on the social network theory and embeddedness theory.Furthermore,with the use of social responsibility theory and stakeholder theory,this paper has analyzed the mediation effect of social responsibility as well as the moderation effect of both environment dynamics and strategy congruence between the relationship of emebeddedness and brand value.More importantly,this paper has setup a moderated mediation model so as to explore and illustrate the influence mechanism of network embeddedness towards brand value.It is found out that,firstly,there exist significant positive relationship between network embeddedness and brand value.To be specific relational embeddedness,structural embeddedness and cognitive embeddedness all can boost enterprises' brand value.But their influence mechanism is different from each other.Structural embeddedness can increase organizations' absorption and control ability towards information and other forms of resources so as to promote technology innovation and product functional value.While relational embeddedness can benefit the communication efficiency between enterprises and other network members,and this can help reduce transactional cost and boost cooperation efficiency.Besides this embeddedness form could promote the strategy congruence between cooperative partners so as to build foundations to realize synergy mechanism.In comparison with the two embeddednesses,cognitive embeddedness can not only influence the cooperation will between enterprises and their partners but decide the tolerance extent towards other members' behavior,which could help increase brand cognitive value for manufacturing industry.Secondly,network embeddedness can generate incentive mechanism for enterprises to undertake social responsibility.There exist very close relationship between embeddedness and social responsibility,and the influence mechanism can be divided into stakeholders' governance,,responsibility incentive and combination driven three forms.In the aspect of structural embeddedness,it has been throwing a complex influence upon brand value,and the decision makers in enterprises are motivated to make social responsibility strategy by a combination driven mechanism.While a combination driven mechanism mostly with encouraging incentive and seldom with restraining incentive can be found during the relationship between relational embeddedness and social responsibility.And the incentive mechanism of cognitive embeddedness is much more dynamic than the other,which means the encouraging and constraining incentive can avert accordingly.Thirdly,there exist a significant mediation effect of social responsibility between embeddedness and brand value,social responsibility can boost relational value as well as cognitive value for enterprises of manufacturing industry.Innovation performance has been playing an important path effect between social responsibility and product function value.The knowledge and technology contribution of researchers as well as the R,D input can be advanced by social responsibility,and this mechanism is realized by signal transmission effect.In the aspect of cognitive value,a self-construct effect generated by social responsibility can improve cognitive value for enterprises.Furthermore,enterprise and product image can be promoted by social responsibility as well,which could help advance brand value to a large extent.It is also found out that environment dynamic has been playing a significant moderation role between network embeddedness and brand value,and this effect is generated through the mediation of social responsibility.To be specific,the negative moderation effect of market dynamic between both relational embeddedness and cognitive embeddedness and brand value is proved to be significant by our paper.When drawing social responsibility variable into our framework,the moderation effect of market dynamic is found in the first half path of embeddedness,social responsibility and brand value.Meanwhile,on the contrary,technology dynamic,the other dimension of environment dynamic,has been playing a positive role between network embeddedness and brand value.In other word,technology dynamic has strengthened the boost effect of emebeddedness towards social responsibility.The moderation effect of strategy congraence is also tested to be significant by our study.During the main moderation test,congruence can moderate the relational embeddedness and brand value negatively.While the effect between structural and cognitive embeddedness and brand value is not significant.During the path moderation test,the moderation effect between three forms embeddedness and brand value is different from each other.To be specific,during the whole path of relational embeddedness,social responsibility and brand value,the positive moderation effect of strategy congruence is tested to be significant.However,when comes to the relationship between structural emebeddedness and brand value,the moderation effect is only found during the last half path.In other word,the higher the congruence is,the stronger influence of social responsibility towards brand value will be.This study has contributed enough evidence to reveal the influence,mechanism and functional boundary between network embeddedness and brand value,which can not only expand and enrich theories of brand value and network emebeddedness,but provide scientific evidence for the brand strategy practice of manufacturing industry in China.