Which of the following are the relationships that a firm has with stakeholders

The evolution of the marketing domain, to go beyond the customer, includes a broad set of stakeholders (Frow, P. and Payne, A., 2011, Hillebrand, B., et al., 2015, Hult, G. T. M., 2011, Hult, G. T. M., et al., 2011). A firm's relationships with stakeholders, such as investors, employees, suppliers, distributors, customers, and partners, are valuable resources that can help the firm compete better in the marketplace (Hillebrand et al., 2015) and serve as important precursors of stakeholder value. Accordingly, recent research devotes more attention to the role of stakeholders as brand value co-creators (e.g., Vallaster & von Wallpach, 2013). More than affecting the product brand, stakeholder relations help shape a firm's corporate brand (Schwaiger & Sarstedt, 2011).

Despite this growing research interest, the conceptual development of the link between stakeholders and brands remains in an early stage (Kornum & Mühlbacher, 2013). Extant research notes the active roles of multiple stakeholders in brand value creation processes (e.g., Gyrd-Jones, R. I. and Kornum, N., 2013, Iglesias, O., et al., 2013). However, the question remains as to how stakeholders can create brand value. Marketing scholars suggest that higher-order organizational effects can arise from certain processes, such as customer relationship management (e.g., Payne, Storbacka, Frow, & Knox, 2009), but brand literature largely ignores this line of inquiry.

In the resource-based theory (RBT), resources and capabilities that are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable result in sustainable competitive advantages (Barney, 1991). Marketing strategy literature applies the RBT logic to investigate the effect of marketing resources and capabilities in areas such as brand and customer-firm relationship on firm performance (e.g. Kaleka, A., 2011, Morgan, N. A., et al., 2009, Vorhies, D. W., et al., 2011). While this literature enhances understanding of how brand equity gets created, most studies either adopt a customer-centric brand view (e.g., Vorhies et al., 2011) and/or narrowly focus on specific stakeholder group(s) such as distributors and suppliers (e.g. Kim, D. and Cavusgil, E., 2009, Zou, S., et al., 2003). There is a dearth of research that adopts a more inclusive, interactive brand perspective to examine the role of stakeholders as marketing resources. Similarly, no empirical evidence reveals how multiple stakeholder relationships can be converted into brand advantages, and then into firm performance (Kozlenkova, Samaha, & Palmatier, 2014).

The objectives of the current study thus are two-fold: (1) to delineate conceptually how a firm's relationships with multiple stakeholders can drive corporate brand equity and (2) to test empirically the extent to which stakeholder relationships can be converted into corporate brand equity and then into firm performance. With an RBT perspective, the proposed, integrated, conceptual framework connects stakeholder relationships, corporate brand equity, and firm performance. The test of this framework involves an empirical analysis at the firm level, using secondary data assembled from multiple sources that include 282 firm-year observations from 81 multinational companies during 2005–2008.

In turn, several integration-based contributions to brand and RBT studies stem from the current research (MacInnis, D. J., 2011, Yadav, M. S., 2014). First, this research extends the concept of brand equity with an RBT perspective. The revised concept shifts the focus to the strategic aspects of brand equity formation and enables theoretical linkages of brand equity with stakeholder relations and firm performance in a single framework. Second, this work adopts a dynamic capabilities approach to conceptualize the role of stakeholder relationships in creating brand value, which provides novel insights. Third, this study extends RBT literature in marketing by considering stakeholder relations as marketing resources and broadens understanding of how marketing resources can lead to brand equity. Fourth, this article provides empirical evidence of the theoretical pathway from marketing resources to competitive advantage to firm performance. The concurrent inclusion of three strategic variables in the same empirical model, taking their interdependencies into account, supports a better assessment of the chain of effects.

The next section provides a review of brand equity literature and the RBT studies in brand and stakeholder management. Following the conceptual framework and the empirical findings, this article concludes with a discussion of implications and limitations.

Brand equity

Marketing literature contains various conceptualizations of brand equity (Davcik, N. S., et al., 2015, Veloutsou, C., et al., 2013). For example, Ailawadi, Lehmann, and Neslin (2003, p. 1) refer to brand equity as “the marketing effects or outcomes that accrue to a product with its brand name compared with those that would accrue if the same product did not have the brand name.” Extant literature mostly approaches the effects or outcomes from a consumer- or firm-based perspective. The

Conceptual framework and hypotheses

Fig. 1 presents the conceptual model, grounded in RBT perspectives. First, the RBT focuses on firm performance as a key outcome variable. Second, the RBT provides a sound argument that connects stakeholder relations to competitive advantage through capabilities.

This conceptual framework guides the hypothesis development, designed to validate the pathway from stakeholder relationships to brand equity and then to firm performance. Using the RBT as a theoretical grounding renders the firm the unit

Data and measures

The empirical analysis uses secondary data assembled from three databases. The first database is Innovest, an independent evaluation agency, which provides financial and sustainability-based investment research and specializes in stakeholder relations ratings. The second data source is Interbrand, which provides brand value estimates for the 100 most valuable global brands published annually in BusinessWeek. Finally, the data to compute firm performance and other financial variables come from

Model specification and results

The test of the concurrent effects of stakeholder relations, brand equity, and firm performance relies on a simultaneous equations method. The model estimation uses a three-stage least squares technique, in which the instrument variables include all independent variables. This approach can account for endogeneity biases associated with the stakeholder relation and brand equity variables, as well as the simultaneous effects of other unobserved variables (Barth, M., et al., 1998, Shaver, J. M.,

Theoretical and managerial implications

This study has important implications for brand and RBT research in marketing. The first implication pertains to the RBT-based perspective of brand equity. This revised concept opens a new way for brand researchers to characterize the features that constitute the underlying branding resources stemming from stakeholder interactions. Moreover, this revised concept enables the link of brand equity with stakeholder relationships and firm performance in an integrative model. The inclusion of these

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