AN EMPIRICAL STUDY; INTERNAL BRANDING, BRAND COMMITMENT AND BRAND CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR IN INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Abstract

Brand Citizenship Behavior is comparatively new concept, which explores the behaviors of employees towards customers in order to respect them or create intimate relationship to attract them and improve activities in organization. The main objective of this study is to identify the effect of internal brand (IB) management on brand citizenship behavior (BCB) in presence of brand commitment (BC) in insurance industry of Sri Lanka. Therefore, this study integrated internal branding, brand commitment and brand citizenship behavior of employees; then, the influence of internal brand management on BC and BCB was examined. Data was collected from 123 employees including both executives and non-executives selected through limited sampling technique. A standard questionnaire was employed together data and in order to check the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used. For data analysis correlation test and regression analysis were used. The data base was created using SPSS (version 23) software and then the research hypothesis were tested accordingly. The findings reveal that internal branding has a positive and significant effect on brand citizenship behaviors of employees, at 95% confidence level, along with it mediates the effort of brand commitment on those behaviors. The results provide valuable insight for brand managers in insurance industry on how an internal branding can be used to ensure the delivery of the brand citizenship behavior, with the meditational effects of employees’ brand commitment.