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Title
ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF INTERNAL BRANDING: THE CASE OF ABU DHABI
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Faculty Advisor
Prof. Riyad Eid
Defense Date
24 November 2016
Abstract
Internal branding is a new marketing paradigm to gain effective brand strategy that has recently emerged
in the academic literature of marketing. It is a brand spirit that brings together brand loyalty, management
and employees to their mutual benefit to create and deliver a value-added product or service to employees,
customers and stakeholders (Keller, 1993). Generally, studies on the role of internal branding in creating
a competitive organisational culture by considering antecedents that enable internal branding and its
consequences do not exist within the UAE context. This study aims to show the importance of internal
branding, and to develop and test a conceptual model that integrates specific constructs as antecedents
and consequences of internal branding, these are external customer orientation, internal customer
orientation, interdepartmental connectedness, quality of internal services, external customer satisfaction,
and job satisfaction. The study takes on a quantitative approach a positivist enquiry, i.e., the primary
research is in the form of a survey questionnaire and the secondary research is drawn from the literature.
The questionnaire was designed and distributed amongst a selected sample of 300 employees from
cross-functional sections in Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, where they were asked
to test the suggested model. The findings identified four factors as the antecedents plus two factors
as the consequences of internal branding. The study proposes an empirically tested integrated model
of the antecedents and consequences of internal branding that will enable organisations to implement
internal branding leading to business success. The developed conceptual model could contribute superior
value to the Departments of the Abu Dhabi Government in general, and to the Abu Dhabi Department of
Economic Development to contributing a practical business solution, particularly to its success. This study
is the first to propose a model that integrates the antecedents and consequence of internal branding in a
government setting in the UAE. The outcomes and findings of this study will, as it is hoped, to enrich the
internal branding concept and literature, along with extensively extending insightful knowledge beyond
the Western schools of thought to the UAE.
Dissertation
AMENA AHMED ABDULLA
AL SHAIKH AL ZAABI
Department of Business Administration
College of Business and Economics