Understanding employees' brand supporting behaviors and their effect on consumers' brand relationship in the airline industry

Internal branding has gained importance as a mean to create a corporate brand by aligning employees' attitudes and behaviors with the brand identity. However, there is still a need for further understanding of internal brand building process and its effect on both employees and consumers. Therefore, this study had two main purposes. The first part of the study aimed to understand the effect of internal branding mechanisms on employee brand commitment and brand citizenship behaviors through brand trust. More specifically, the purpose of first part was to test the mediating role of brand trust on employee brand commitment and brand citizenship behaviors. On the other hand, the second part aimed to understand the effect of employees' brand citizenship behaviors on consumers' relation with the brand. The empirical analysis was based on data collected from two different samples of respondents, who were airline employees and airline passengers. A total of 523 responses from employees and a total of 1046 responses from customers were analyzed by using one-way analysis of variance, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling. The results of the analysis revealed that human resources involvement in branding, internal communication, and brand-specific leadership positively affected brand trust of employees. However, only leadership was found to significantly affect brand commitment of employees. This study also found that brand trust mediated the effect of internal branding mechanisms on brand commitment of employees. Additionally, brand citizenship behaviors of employees were found to positively affect consumer-based brand performance, which in turn has a positive effect on brand relationship of customers. As a result, this study showed that brand trust of employees is an important concept to explain their brand commitment and brand supporting behaviors. Moreover, the study found that brand citizenship behaviors have an effect on how customers evaluate the performance of a brand and form their relation with the brand. Besides its theoretical contributions, the findings of the study might help hospitality organizations to understand how they can improve brand supporting behaviors of their employees as well as how to enhance and maintain customers' relation with the brand.