1. Introduction
In the digital economy, digital technology platforms provide channels for brands to establish direct connections with users, and brands and users start to establish a disintermediary relationship. That is, users’ personal capabilities, integration, and experience participate in the brand-building process and play a decisive role; enterprises interact with consumers directly through social media, e-commerce platforms, APPs, and other channles to jointly create brand equity. In the digital world, brands can spread more quickly among core consumer groups, which is contrary to the traditional path of brand building. The boundary of the brand has been expanded; it not only extends within the scope of business, but it also can further expand into a brand ecosystem in the digital economy. The form of a brand ecosystem could improve the stability of the brand and stimulate the vitality. In addition, brand value concept and brand experience, which are more able to attract consumers, have become the core competitiveness of the brand [
1].
Urde [
2] put forward the new concept and paradigm of “brand orientation”, which considers that “brand orientation is an approach in which the processes of the organization revolve around the creation, development and protection of brand identity in an ongoing interaction with target customers with the aim of achieving lasting competitive advantages in the form of brands” [
3]. Brand orientation is a mindset for building brands strategically, which uses the brand as the starting point and puts brand-related resources at the heart of the strategic process. Experiences of the case studies carried out by Urde [
3] show that the brand can be braided into a brand identity through a process of value creation and meaning creation by combining the brand with other assets and competencies within the company. The brand identity constitutes a collective picture or form and answers the question “Who is the brand?”. The concept of identity is central to a brand-oriented organization and provides an understanding of the lasting inner values. This brand identity will be experienced by customers as valuable and unique and is difficult for competitors to imitate. Therefore, the objective of a brand-oriented organization is to create value and meaning within the framework of the brand, and the fundamental process in such organizations is to transform products into brands with internal significance for the organization itself and for the target group. Accordingly, a product fulfils a function, whereas a brand symbolizes values and meaning in a social context [
4,
5].
Brand orientation, as a challenge to the dominant paradigm in the management field for more than 50 years [
6], has triggered a heated discussion on the dominant paradigm of market orientation and a new revolution in brand management. Urde et al. [
7] emphasized the strategic importance of brand orientation and described it as “a new approach to brands that focuses on brands as resources and strategic hubs”. Due to the critical position of brand orientation in enterprise management and strategy formulation, a large number of scholars have carried out a series of studies on the concept and structure [
2,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15]. For example, Hankinson [
12] addressed that brand orientation is the extent to which the organization regarded itself as a brand and accepted the brand theory and brand practice. Gromark and Melin [
11] considered that brand orientation is a brand-building approach that creates brand equity through the interaction between internal and external stakeholders. Regarding the content structure of brand orientation, scholars conceptualized brand orientation into several different multidimensional structures on the basis of the recognition of brand importance [
16], common brand meaning [
10], brand capabilities [
9,
17], enterprise culture [
8,
13], modes of thinking or mindset [
11,
14,
15,
18], organizational processes [
3,
10], organizational practices and behavior [
9,
13,
17], and so on.
There are also a large number of empirical studies that have verified that brand orientation has positive relationships with organization survival [
2], organization growth [
19,
20], brand equity [
21,
22,
23,
24], and organization performance [
8,
11,
13,
15,
25,
26,
27]. Therefore, it is commonly believed that brand-oriented marketing efforts yield brand-related performance gains, such as winning loyal customers, increasing brand awareness, good reputation, positive image [
15,
25], and overall market improvement performance [
28]. For example, Baumgrth and Schmidt [
21] and Azizi et al. [
29] have found a huge impact of brand-oriented corporate culture on internal brand equity in their proposed model, which indicated that with the increasing brand orientation of the organization, employee’s loyalty toward the organization’s brand will increase. As a result, this will result in employee behavior being more aligned with the organizational brand, which in turn can improve employee performance to meet customer expectations.
Although the important value of brand orientation is emphasized [
21,
29], the research on brand orientation is still few, controversial, and insufficient. Specifically, this includes: the definition and measurement of brand orientation have not been unified; the debate between brand orientation and market orientation is still going on; the impact of brand orientation on organizational performance is different in different organizational types. For example, Hirvonen and Laukkanen’s [
30] research on Finnish small service companies and studies of Boso et al. [
31] based on a sample of 108 multinational enterprises in the Commonwealth Caribbean demonstrated that brand orientation exerts no direct influence on enterprise performance. Research on B2B SMEs by Hirvonen et al. [
32] proved that brand orientation has no significant direct impact on brand performance and exerts weak influence on the business growth, which is different from the findings of Melewar and Baumgarth’s research [
13]. In addition, Chang et al. [
33] explored the positive effects of organizational resources on brand orientation for manufacturing enterprises, whereas the research of Huang and Tsai [
34] discovered that the abundance of organizational resources have no significant effect on brand orientation. This indicates that the research results on brand orientation have not reached an agreement and are still in the preliminary exploration stage. Therefore, it is necessary to sort out a systematic scientific knowledge mapping, clarify the research context and progress, and discover research limitations for strengthening the construction of brand orientation theories.
At present, there are only a few literature reviews in the brand-oriented field. For example, Baumgarth et al. [
6] summarized the origin, current progress, and future research direction of brand orientation based on studies about leadership, management, internal construction and processes, and complex implementation methods of brand-oriented organizations, which were published in the special issue of Journal of Marketing Management in 2011; Chabowski’s [
35] bibliometric analysis of 120 articles on the global branding literature (GBL) in business-related research pointed out that brand orientation is an important knowledge base of GBL and is one of the main research topics of GBL, which is of great significance to the future development of global brands. Balmer [
36] outlined the perspectives, canon, and symptomatic ‘schools of thought’ of brand orientation when he formally introduces the corporate brand orientation notion. Anees-ur-Rehman et al. [
37] have reviewed the research progress in the field of brand orientation in Australia in the past 20 years by systematic literature review. Sepulcri et al. [
38] conducted a bibliometric analysis based on 90 articles in the Scopus database, and they identified and discussed five main areas of research on brand orientation, including brand positioning concept, hybrid strategy, internal brand management, brand performance, and perceived brand positioning. The above literature reviews are based on the research results published in a particular journal [
6], in a certain database [
38], on one specific research topic [
35,
36], or on a specific country/region [
37], giving rise to some limitations in the basis and methods of the literature analysis. In particular, although Chabowski [
35] and Sepulcri [
38] have applied bibliometric analysis to brand orientation-related fields, specific research topics and specific databases lead to the limitations of their research conclusions. In terms of research methods, existing studies have adopted a single research method, such as a purely traditional literature review approach or a pure bibliometric analysis, which gives rise to the deficiency of scientific, systematic, and precise literature reviews in this field.
Both the traditional literature review and the bibliometric method emphasize the collation of previous research in order to discover the current status, shortcomings, and prospects of the research. Traditional literature review puts more emphasis on content and usually selects representative papers and writes them according to the preset research context. As a new method and field of scientometrics, bibliometric analysis takes knowledge domain as the object and adopts integrated methods, including the application of applied mathematics, graphics, information visualization, information science, citation analysis, and co-occurrence analysis to illustrate the core structure, the development history, frontier domains, and the overall knowledge framework [
39,
40], providing practical and valuable references for the scientific research.
Correspondingly, this study conducts a scientific quantitative analysis of 169 literatures and 7187 references from the WOS database, using the method of scientific knowledge mapping, as well as other literatures from the Scopus database in the field of brand orientation, using the method of traditional literature review. This study aims to evaluate the research that has been published on brand orientation between the years 1990–2021 (including three early access articles in 2022) by addressing four research questions:
RQ1: What was the distribution of research findings related to brand orientation during the survey period?
RQ2: What are the main research clusters of brand orientation and their hot areas?
RQ3: What is the evolution path of brand-oriented research?
RQ4: What are the research limitations of the existing research and what are the future research directions?
Therefore, the primary contributions of this study can be summarized as follows. First of all, scientific knowledge mapping as a new method of scientometrics is introduced into the field of brand orientation, which objectively and quantitatively displays the distribution of brand orientation research and important knowledge bases through bibliometric analysis. Secondly, comprehensively using keyword co-occurrence analysis and the traditional literature review method, this study demonstrates and discusses six research clusters, and their hot areas in the field of brand orientation are demonstrated and discussed, including conceptualization and operationalization of brand orientation construct, connections and distinctions between brand orientation and market orientation, the effects of brand orientation on organizational performance, relationship between brand orientation and internal branding, relationship between brand orientation and customer, as well as determinants of brand orientation. Thirdly, this study constructs the framework for the knowledge evolution of brand orientation and sorts out the research progress in the field of brand orientation in a systematic and multi-leveled manner for the first time, which provides useful references for future brand-oriented research.
The rest of this study is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the methodology and data used to analyze the existing research in brand-oriented areas. In
Section 3, we utilize the method of scientific knowledge mapping to demonstrate knowledge bases in the brand-oriented field and build the framework for knowledge evolution of brand orientation.
Section 4 discusses the research hot spots regarding brand orientation.
Section 5 summarizes the findings and proposes the research limitations and the direction of future brand-oriented research.
5. Conclusions
5.1. Findings
This study discusses the co-citation analysis of literature, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and research hot spots of 169 literatures and 7187 references in the field of brand orientation by comprehensively using the methods of bibliometrics and traditional literature review with the CiteSpace5.6.R2 software, and it constructs an overall framework for brand-oriented knowledge evolution, as shown in
Figure 6. The main findings are as follows:
First, brand-oriented researches have increased significantly since 2013, but the overall number is small and still in the initial stage of exploration. The distribution of the journals of the published literature is also relatively scattered, but the published fields are relatively concentrated. The core publications are from the field of brand management and marketing in the field of business research, including: Journal of Brand Management; European Journal of Marketing; Journal of Business Research; Journal of Product and Brand Management; Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.
Second, the research in the field of brand orientation has formed five core areas centered on Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, and China. Among them, Australia (30) leads the world in terms of the number of publications, followed by the United States (15). China (11) published relatively few papers, and its betweenness centrality was relatively low (0.19).
Third, one of the foundational literatures of brand-oriented research since 2005 is published by Reid [
46]. This literature systematically explains the differences and relationships among brand orientation, market orientation, and integrated marketing communication for the first time, providing a research paradigm for the follow-up researches. The most cited literature is published by Urde, which discusses the synergy and evolution of brand orientation and market orientation and puts forward two novel strategic hybrid orientation modes, including “brand and market orientation” and “market and brand orientation”. In spite of this, the research results regarding brand orientation are relatively few, involving various research contents and scattered concerns, which are still in the initial exploration stage. Specifically, the keyword co-occurrence analysis of 169 literatures demonstrates that the keywords with a co-occurrence frequency of more than 20 times includes “brand orientation (63 times)”, “market orientation (47 times)”, “management (33 times)”, “performance (30 times)”, “impact (20 times)”, and “antecedent (20 times)”, whereas the co-occurrence frequency of other keywords is less than 20 times.
Forth, the research of brand orientation is rooted in the marketing theory, brand management theory, strategic management theory, and resource-based view of the firm. Since then, based on the industry characteristics and brand management characteristics of specific situations, scholars have extended the brand-oriented research to the fields, including non-profit organizations, charities, museums, retail, tourism, higher education, SMEs, and B2B. In combination with corporate culture theory, consumer behavior theory, leadership theory, upper-echelon theory, human resource management theory, and performance management theory, the research contents of brand orientation have been constantly furthered. Up to now, the research areas of brand orientation tend to be concluded to 6 major research hot spots, including conceptualization and operationalization of brand orientation construct, connections and distinctions between brand orientation and market orientation, the effects of brand orientation on organizational performance, the relationship between brand orientation and internal branding, the relationship between brand orientation and customer, as well as determinants of brand orientation.
5.2. Limitations
Inevitably, there are some limitations in this study. In view of the status and importance of the WOS database, the data source of this study focuses on the scientific literature retrieved from the WOS database. Although, this study also summarizes the content of some scientific literatures in the Scopus database [
36,
37,
58,
86,
87,
88] in the way of traditional literature review. However, the bibliometric analysis using Citespace software does not involve Scopus database, CNKI database, and other database information. Therefore, using other databases may yield slightly different results.
The goal of this study is to provide a more comprehensive and systematic review of the scientific literature in the field of brand orientation. Therefore, the research status, progress, and evolution of brand orientation in specific fields such as B2B, SME, and NPO have not been presented, which is another limitation of this study. For example, the research results of brand orientation in the B2B field are covered in the analysis of hot spots such as brand orientation construct, brand orientation, and organizational performance. However, this study does not present the bibliometric analysis results of brand-oriented literature in the B2B field, such as research distribution, knowledge base, and evolutionary path. Therefore, a scientometric analysis of the brand-oriented literature in specific domains, such as B2B, SME, NOP, etc., may yield different results.
5.3. Future Research Directions
From an academic point of view, the topic of brand orientation is one of many multilayered topics in many related fields. Actually, this vast amount of information from different research topics provides the analytical basis for scientific research. In these cases, future research should continue to investigate bibliometric analysis and literature review analysis in specific fields such as B2B, SME, NPO, charitable organizations, higher education, tourism, etc. Future research should also continue to investigate the relationship between brand orientation and other concepts such as corporate social responsibility, business ethics, and sustainable leadership to identify new innovative research directions [
43].
In addition, brand management should also keep pace with the times in the era of digital economy. Enterprises can use various forms of digital media such as TikTok and Weibo to conduct digital marketing, deepen users’ understanding of the brand, and deeply interact with users, so as to shape the corporate image in the minds of consumers and improve brand value and organizational performance. The future studies are required to be further promoted and discussed in the network economy age, such as broadening the concept of “online brand orientation”, exploring how traditional organizations utilize online channels to conduct brand orientation, and analyzing the influencing factors of how electronic commerce enterprises conduct brand orientation. It is necessary for future research to note that the changes brought about by the network economy era are multifaceted, such as online shopping behavior of customers, online communication of employees and customers, information flooding, and live-streaming e-commerce.