Brand Positioning vs. Employee Behavior

This study examines a retail company’s ability to portray their brand personality through frontline customer service workers. This was done by examining the effects of fault of service failure and employee alignment with brand on customers’ repurchase intentions from the retailer in question.

An experiment was conducted using an electronic survey that randomly assigned versions of customer/employee interactions to 176 survey respondents. Survey results indicate that a customer service employee whose personality is aligned with the high-end personality of the brand they’re representing does not elicit higher repurchase intentions. However, when the fault of failure was the firm’s and the customer service employee was aligned with the brand they are representing, mean repurchase intentions were higher.

While this study has limitations, the implications of its findings can be extended into human resource, marketing, and management areas.