Noor Hasmini Abd Ghani
Lecturer, University Utara Malaysia (UUM), Malaysia.
Osman Mohamad
University Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia.Dealer’s Market Orientation and Brand Equity:
Does Relationship Marketing Matter?
Facing with critical branding issues for examples global brand
acceptance has made an effort of achieving higher brand equity is more
crucial. The importance of obtaining brand equity information is not
only limited to consumers but from the dealer’s perspective as well.
Even, in nowadays competitive market, which have created selling
pressures justified the importance of investigating brand equity from
the dealer’s context. Similar to firm, strong brands for a dealer is crucial
as it has the ability in achieving the dealer’s competitive advantage as
well as to keep remain competitive. For great brand equity building,
effective cooperation between the firms and their dealers are crucially
important. Hence, from past literatures, the effective of managing the
strategy such as market orientation and relationship marketing are
among the great importance as these strategies are believed to
contribute to brand equity building. Unfortunately, empirical studies
on channel market orientation in relation to relationship marketing and
other subjective performance such brand equity are regrettable.
Relationship marketing is argued to be the most important mediating
variable by past researchers. Disappointingly, based on the literature
review, the exploration of relationship marketing as a key mediating
variable in relation to market orientation and brand equity building is
still questionable. Therefore, in this study, the mediator effect of
relationship marketing toward the relationship between dealer’s market
orientation and brand equity is investigated. The study is conducted
across four main automobile brands in the Malaysian automobile
dealers’ perspectives. The findings showed that, the relationship
marketing variables such as trust, commitment and satisfaction are
important mediator toward the relationship between market orientation
and brand equity. However, among all the variables, trust is the
strongest and important mediator because the impact of market
orientation on brand equity assets has been fully absorbed by trust
variable.