Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (Sme) Branding and Outcomes in Ghana – The Role of Resources and Capabilities

Abstract

It has been suggested that a key way of enterprise survival is to pursue competitive marketing practices such as branding, which enables firms to differentiate their products and services in the marketplace, and to become more sustainable. However, there have been some erroneous perceptions that branding is a preserve of large businesses and as a result, scholarly evidence suggests that the practice has not gained much attention within SME business settings. The study explores the relationships among SME resource positions, branding capabilities and branding benefits. More specifically, the research draws on the resource-based theory and dynamic capability theory to examine the differential roles played by resources and branding capabilities in enabling SMEs to achieve product branding benefits amidst the constraints in their environment. Through extensive literature review, a conceptual framework and empirical results from 304 SMEs, the study employs exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses along with structural equation modelling to evaluate a proposed model for understanding the relationships among the constructs, as well as examining mediating and moderating effects. The study finds that an enterprise’s ability to achieve branding benefits is dependent on how SME owners/managers harness and deploy their resources and branding capability generated over a period through their tacit branding practices/activities. In addition, resource possession alone may not result in gaining branding benefits, unless they are harnessed in tandem with branding capabilities, along a set of branding efforts needed to realize the benefits. Again, SMEs’ environments determine, to an extent, the resources they can access, the capabilities they can build, and how these can be integrated with branding efforts to realize branding benefits. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are also discussed in the thesis.