Toward a model of brand strategy adoption

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in studying brand orientation. Prior research approaches brands as strategic resources and provides considerable support for the relationship between brand orientation and firms’ financial performance. What is not well understood is how companies become brand oriented. However, much of the literature sees that the branding process starts with an understanding what a brand is, which is not self-evident in a non-traditional marketing context. The purpose of this article is to investigate adoption of a brand strategy to understand basic decisions and issues what managers face when becoming brand oriented. The context of the study is companies who do not possess much marketing knowledge, such as high technology small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The methodology applied in the empirical study was a qualitative, exploratory research. The data was collected primarily from personal face-to-face in-depth interviews in the United States and in Finland. On the basis of the results, a model of the early stages of a brand strategy adoption process in high-tech SME context is proposed. This study contributes further to brand orientation literature by providing a process view and understanding how the extent of brand orientation may be or has been achieved.