مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

To gain competitive advantage, brands are increasingly becoming concerned with their relationships with resellers and are employing local representatives. Interactions between local individuals who represent the firm behind the brand and the reseller firm provide opportunities for highlighting commercial aspects of the brand, such as product pricing, product differentiation and brand experience, to the reseller (Gummesson, 1994). Local individuals representing brands use opportunities to promote the brand by building trust in the brand–reseller relationship (Christine, 2005; Libererman & Montgomery, 1988; Morgan & Hunt, 2002).

This practice has been regularly employed by brands in IT (Intel, HP, Microsoft), telecom (Samsung, Benq, Sony Ericsson) and pharma (Pfizer, Ranbaxy) that tend to push their products through large networks of resellers, retailers and pharmacists. Such local individuals representing firms have been termed brand ambassadors by Debling, de Chernatony, and Middleton (2002) and Gromark and Melin (2011) whereas they have been termed relationship promoters by authors such as Palmatier, Scheer, Houston, Evans, and Gopalakrishna (2007) and Walter and Gemunden (2000). This study investigates the characteristics of local individuals who represent a brand to its resellers. It does this by first conceptualizing these characteristics by employing complexity theory and then testing the conceptualization. The result is a scale of characteristics that can be used as an employee profile.

The literature fails to explain how these local brand representatives can drive reseller brand preferences by grounding them in the theory of rational choice from a utilitarian perspective which implies that the preferences of resellers as agents will depend upon their identification of means, ends, costs and benefits (Granovetter, 1985; Whitford, 2002). Previous research extends the viewpoint about this aspect of brand representatives from the viewpoint of the consumer, corporations (Chun & Davies, 2006), industrial organizations (Herbst & Merz, 2011) or the country of origin (Veloutsou & Taylor, 2012). However, this research has not considered the influence of the characteristics of individuals who represent a brand to a dynamic cluster of small and medium sized firms involved with brands as its resellers. This missing knowledge creates a gap that the authors have addressed using complexity theory and by synthesizing theories from different domains, such as the social, personality, brand management and business-tobusiness marketing literatures. One possible reason for this gap in the marketing literature is the focus of researchers on identifying tangible factors that will satisfy the rational needs of the resellers’ (Christopher, 1996; Lindgreen & Wynstra, 2005). Thus, this study addresses what characteristics of the local brand representative lead to reseller brand preferences and loyalty?