Employees’ brand understanding, brand commitment, and brand citizenship behaviour: a closer look at the relationships among construct dimensions

Employees ultimately are responsible for fulfilling the brand promise. Hence, internal brand management (IBM)—or the implementation of the brand, cognitively, affectively, and behaviourally, at the employee level—is critical to brand management success. Unfortunately, detailed insights about the relationships of important IBM outcomes, such as brand understanding, brand commitment, and brand citizenship behaviour, are missing. In existing multidimensional conceptualizations, these relationships tend to be investigated at higher-order levels, but managers need a clearer understanding across the specific dimensions of different IBM outcomes. By investigating a sample of 790 employees from a German tourism company, this study reveals the importance of the brand understanding dimension of behaviour relevance, which leads to various, desirable, brand-related employee behaviours; employees must comprehend their responsibility for the brand’s perception and subsequent success. The brand understanding dimensions of brand confidence and brand knowledge also are particularly important for brand endorsement and brand compliance behaviours, respectively. In contrast, the brand understanding dimension of brand relevance has a minor role. Finally, brand commitment is particularly important for the brand citizenship behaviour dimension of brand endorsement.