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01. INTRODUCTION

For the purpose of reviewing two journal articles we selected the following two articles,

Service brand equity and employee brand Commitment

The effect of strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on consumers brand
loyalty

The following sections carry out an analysis for each article as Well as a summary of the
analysis.

01) MEASURING THE SERVICE BRAND EQUITY AND THE
EMPLOYEEBRAND COMMITMENT

Purpose The aims of this article are to measure the brand equity of service firms (luxury
hotels) using a customer perspective, to identify factors that predict customers brands
relationships and to explore the links between service brand equity and employee brand
commitment

Design/methodology/approach Two surveys were conducted to achieve the research
objectives. The first survey objective was to measure brand equity using a sample of 250
international customers of five-star hotels in Bangkok. The second survey objective was to
collect information regarding employee brand commitment in each selected hotel using a
sample of 250 employees.

Findings Results show that hotels belonging to the same category have different brand
equity and that brand differentiation and brand trust are the variables that have the major
influence on customer brand relationships. Perceived service quality and associations
related to hotel core services are not related to brand relationships. High hotel brands
equity have a stronger level of employee brand commitment that low hotel brands equity.

Research limitations/implications For hotel managers the research findings illustrate the
importance of brand differentiation and trust for international hotels chains and illustrate
the importance of employee brand commitment in the process of building a strong band.
Therefore this research has an implication not only for marketing but also for human
resource managers and for hotel general managers.

Originality/value The value of this research resides in the exploration between service
brand equity and employee brand commitment. The literature on service marketing
emphasizes the link between employee and service quality but to the authors knowledge
little research has explored the link between the service brand and its employees
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What is BRANDING?

The concept of branding finds its roots in the fast moving consumer goods industry (FMCG)
and it is not surprising that traditional models of brand equity developed by Aaker (1991,
2002), Keller (1993, 2003) have been largely inspired by that industry. There is no doubt that
the service industry can benefit from the knowledge accumulated by consumer goods firms.
Nonetheless, the nature of services, specifically their intangibility and the inseparability
between production and consumption requires a different approach to build a powerful
service brand.

What Is Service Brand Equity?

Brands represent enormously valuable pieces of legal property, capable of influencing
consumer behavior, being bought and sold, and providing the security of sustained future
revenues to their owner. The value directly or indirectly accrued by these various benefits is
often called brand equity (Kapferer, 2005; Keller, 2003).

A basic premise of brand equity is that the power of a brand lies in the minds of consumers
and what they have experienced and learned about the brand over time. Brand equity can
be thought of as the "added value" endowed to a product in the thoughts, words, and
actions of consumers. There are many different ways that this added value can be created
for a brand.








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Distinguish between different brand equity concepts






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Employee brand commitment

The dominant paradigm in service marketing is probably the service profit chain (Heskett et
al., 1994) that suggests the existence of a strong link between employees, service quality
and company profitability.

Employee commitment is an organizational behavior concept largely covered in the
management literature. The concept has been applied to different constituencies in an
organization, including unions, work group and team, supervisor and top management.
However the concept of employee commitment to a brand seems to be neglected.

A review of this literature shows that Porter et al. (1974) and Cook and Wall (1980) view
commitment as a one-dimensional concept, mainly affective commitment. They define
organizational commitment as . . . a strong belief in and acceptance of the organizations
goals and values, a willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of the organization,
and a strong desire to maintain membership in the organization . . .. Commitment is
viewed as one single factor, affective commitment comprising three interrelated
components:

1. Identification.
2. involvement and
3. loyalty

Following their discussion on service brand equity and its six components They use brand
relationships as a dependent variable and brand awareness, perceived quality, core brand
associations, supportive brand associations, brand trust and brand differentiations as
independent variables and They propose the following hypotheses:

H1. Five star luxury hotels are significantly different in their brand equity.
H2. Brand awareness is positively related to brand relationships.
H3. Brand differentiation is positively related to brand relationships.
H4a. Core brand associations are positively related to brand relationships.
H4b. Supporting brand associations are positively related to brand relationships.
H5. Brand trust is positively related to brand relationships.
H6. Brand perceived quality is positively related to brand relationships.
H7. Employees commitment to the brand will be significantly different between hotels
with strong brand equity and hotels with lower brand equity.

Their research design is divided in two parts using samples of hotels customers and
employees. First, they conducted a survey on international hotel customers with the
objective to measure the brand equity of luxury hotels in Bangkok.



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They used a convenience sample of 270 international customers. Personal interviews were
conducted with customers to collect relevant information. The initial questionnaire included
43 items to measure the six dimensions of brand equity on a five points Likert scale. Finally
after editing, 238 questionnaires were used for the final analysis.

*See appendix 1-3

Findings and discussions

MANOVA was used to test H1 examining the existence of significant differences between
hotels regarding their brand equity. The results are shown in Table III. The F test and p-value
supports H1, in that there is a significant difference the brand relationship is brand trust,
follows by brand differentiation, brand associations related to supporting services, and
brand awareness respectively. Based on these results, H2, H3, H4b and H5 are supported
and H4a and H6 are rejected.

Conclusion and limitations

The focus of this study was to explore the brand equity of luxury hotels in Thailand and to
examine their employee brand commitment. They suggested that the concept of brand
equity has the same meaning for consumer goods and services brands but the stheirces of
brand equity are different. In service firms, the customer experience that occurs during
interaction with employees or self-service technologies is an effective way not only to
create brand meaning but also to connect customers emotionally with the brand. Therefore
employee commitment to make the brand alive is critical.


2) The effect of strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on
consumers brand loyalty

Purpose The first objective was to find out to what extent consumers reveal an effect of
strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on brand loyalty. Second, the article seeks to
assess the moderating role of consumer involvement with a product on the relationship
between cause-related marketing and brand loyalty.

Design/methodology/approach An experimental design with 240 participants was used.

Findings The results show that consumers perceive a significantly enhanced level of brand
loyalty as a result of strategic cause-related marketing as long as the firm has a long-term
commitment to this campaign and the campaign is related to a low involvement product.
Consumers do not exhibit a significant impact of tactical cause-related marketing campaigns
whether related to high or low involvement products on brand loyalty.

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Research limitations/implications First, all respondents were students from a western
European university. Second, the experiment relied on imaginary storyboards. Third, the
program dimensions were not manipulated separately.

Practical implications If companies intend to increase brand loyalty through CRM they
should set up long lasting CRM campaigns linked to the product that shows the lowest level
of consumer involvement.

Originality/value The added value of this paper is the link between cause-related
marketing programs and brand loyalty. Moreover, a distinction is explicitly made between
tactical and strategic CRM programs.


Theoretical background
Cause-related marketing (CRM)

Cause-related marketing is to be situated in the context of corporate social responsibility
(CSR). Here, they define CSR as:

Within this notion of CSR, CRM is a specific marketing activity in which the firm promises its
consumers to donate company resources to a worthy cause for each sold product or service.
A CRM campaign aims at two objectives: to support a social cause, and to improve
marketing performance (Varadarajan and Menon, 1988). This way, CRM programs take a
responsibility towards at least three stakeholders: the firms consumers, its shareholders
and one stakeholder not directly related to the commercial activity of the firm.



In the present study, they investigate to what extent the marketing effect of strategic CRM
differs from the effect of tactical CRM. Varadarajan and Menon (1988) argue that strategic
CRM is characterized by high senior management involvement, a substantial amount of
invested resources and a long-term commitment of the firm or business unit towards the
CRM campaign. Alternatively, Drumwright and Murphy (2001) and Till and Nowak (2000)
characterize tactical CRM as a marketing activity that lasts for a short period of time and has
scant employee involvement. As can be seen from Figure 1, they conceive tactical and
strategic CRM to differ on few dimensions:

(1) The congruency between the cause and a companys core competency (Pracejus and
Olsen, 2004).

(2) The duration of a campaign (Till and Nowak, 2000).

(3) The amount of invested resources (Macleod, 2001;Theylsh, 1999).

(4) The degree of senior management involvement (Macleod, 2001; Miller, 2002).

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Conceptual model and hypotheses

The present study examines the effect of tactical and strategic CRM on brand loyalty.
Moreover, they examine the moderating effect of consumers product involvement on the
relationship between CRM and brand loyalty.

Consumers often use aspects of a CRM offer to make attributions of a companys motives.
Therefore, it can be imagined that companies with strategic CRM campaigns are regarded as
more intrinsically motivated than companies with tactical CRM programs. Ellen et al. (2000)
argue that consumers respond more positively to CRM programs that are intrinsically
motivated. They consider brand loyalty as a potential way to express consumers positive
responses. Therefore, they define:

H1. Strategic CRM creates higher brand loyalty than tactical CRM.

H2. The congruency between the cause and a companys core competencies in a CRM
Campaign is positively related to brand loyalty.

H3. The duration of a CRM campaign is positively related to brand loyalty.

H4. The amount of resources invested in a CRM campaign is positively related to brand
Loyalty

H5. The degree of senior management involvement in a CRM campaign is positively related
To brand loyalty.

H6. High (low) consumer involvement with a product strengthens (attenuates) the
Relationship between CRM and brand loyalty








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Measurement

Relying on these story boards, respondents filled in a questionnaire. In the questionnaire,
they measured the respondents score on each of the few dimensions of a CRM design, the
respondents level of product involvement, and their brand loyalty. Since these story boards
built upon fictitious situations it was not possible to measure respondents actual behavior.
Therefore, they consider the affective and cognitive components of brand loyalty as the
attitudinal dimension, while they treat the cognitive component (behavioral intentions) as a
proxy for the behavioral dimension of brand loyalty.

*see appendix 4

Moderating effect

To test the moderating role of a consumers product involvement on the relationship
between the design of a CRM campaign and a consumers level of brand loyalty, they
performed an independent sample t-test to assess the difference in brand loyalty for CRM in
case of high and low product involvement irrespective of the CRM scenario. So they
aggregated the responses of the strategic and tactical scenario. As the upper part of Table VI
shows, these differences are not significant (t-value is 0.732). As a consequence, they
cannot support hypothesis six. In addition, they assessed the power of this moderating
effect for strategic and tactical CRM separately. The lower part of Table VI reports that
product involvement does not have a significant effect on the relationship between
strategic CRM and brand loyalty (t-value is 20:697). However, the effect of product
involvement on the relationship between tactical CRM and brand loyalty is also revealed in
Table VI. Clearly, higher levels of product involvement significantly strengthen the impact of
tactical CRM programs on brand loyalty (t-value is 1.972).

*see appendix 5-6

Managerial implications and limitations

The findings from this experimental study can be used by managers to optimize the impact
of their CRM programs. In sum, if companies intend to increase brand loyalty through CRM
they should set up long-lasting CRM campaigns linked to the product that shows the lowest
level of consumer involvement. Short-term CRM campaigns as well as CRM campaigns
linked to high involvement products may benefit a third party and, as such, may be relevant
in terms of a firms policy for corporate social responsibility. However, they do not yield for
the firms customers or shareholders.






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04. THE SUMMARY
Attribute Article 01 Article 02
Article Type Research

Research
Philosophy Positivism

Interpretive
Approach Deductive

Deductive
Research Question To what extent consumers reveal
an effect of strategic and tactical
cause-related marketing on brand
loyalty.
Identifying the factors that predict
customers brands relationships
and to explore the links between
service brand equity and
employee brand commitment
Purpose Aim Do consumers perceive a
significantly enhanced level of
brand loyalty as a result of
strategic cause-related
marketing?

Investigate the impact of the
employee commitment in building
strong brands and the relationship
between the two variables
Goal Study the importance of
consumer-led marketing activities.
Analyse the interrelationship
between the employee
commitment and the brand equity

Significance
A distinction is explicitly made
between tactical and strategic
CRM programs...
The experiment relied on
imaginary storyboards.
Provide an easy to follow
discussion and empirical
analysis of a major branding
principles

Exploration between service
brand equity and employee
brand commitment.
Two surveys were conducted
to achieve the research
objectives
This research has an
implication not only for
marketing but also for human
resource managers
Variables
Dependent

Independent

Percentage change in the total
brand equity+ goodwill
The amount of resources
invested in a CRM campaign.
The degree of senior
management involvement in a
CRM campaign

Brand equity
Brand
awareness/Relationship

Employee commitment
Service Quality
Model

Cause-related marketing (CRM) Brand Equity model
Hypothesis Consumers respond more
positively to CRM programs that
are intrinsically motivated. They
Employees commitment to the
brand will be significantly
different between hotels with
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consider brand loyalty as a
potential way to express
consumers positive responses.
strong brand equity and hotels
with lower brand equity.
Indicators
Congruency
Resources invested
Management involvement
Product involvement
Brand Equity Models
Employee Turnover
Sample Period 1994 to 2006


Sampling Frame 240 Participants- Group 250 International customers and
250 employees
Data Collection


Analytical Method
Outcome Hypothesis accepted Hypothesis accepted



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05. APPENDICES


Service brand equity and employee brand Commitment

The effect of strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on consumers brand
loyalty

APPENDIX 1










APPENDIX 2




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APPENDIX 3













APPENDIX 4







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APPENDIX 5

APPENDIX 6