Family-owned Corporate Brand Identity from an Internal Branding Perspective: Scale Conceptualization and Validation

Abstract

There is extant literature to explore corporate branding; however, how family business owners, particularly of the brands located in the collectivist Asian region, make sense of their family-owned corporate brand identity (FCBI) is widely missing. In line with this gap, our study aims to conceptualize and validate a new FCBI scale to express the voice of family business owners from a collectivist, Asian perspective. Keeping abreast of the scale development procedures, a qualitative exploration leading to quantitative investigations was performed. Initially, 19 interviews (Study 1) were conducted with the owners of Pakistani family-run enterprises. Based on the themes extracted from these interviews, a pilot study was performed with data collected from 138 younger entrepreneurs (Study 2) with a background in family-business management decision-making. This led to survey-based data collection from a sample of 338 professionals (Study 3) to establish the FCBI scale. Finally, to establish the nomological validity of the scale, another survey was performed among 524 employees (Study 4) working in family-run enterprises. Results identify three unique dimensions of the FCBI scale, that is, family-oriented green leadership, family-oriented branding and family-oriented organizational culture. The scale is a unique intervention to extend growing corporate brand identity measurement literature.