Growing the service brand

Service brands are increasingly dominating the economy. However, there is limited knowledge about how to grow service brands, and whether growing service brands will require strategies different from the strategies that are based on goods brand research. To address this knowledge gap, this paper conceptualizes a “ServBrand triad” based on the service literature, and empirically demonstrates how its three drivers are related to service brand growth. Service brand growth is defined as positive changes in brand outcomes, such as the brand being liked more, used more, or more profitable or valuable to a firm. The empirical work utilizes 11 years of longitudinal brand and firm data that are analyzed by dynamic multivariate generalized method of moments (GMM) panel models. The findings confirm the importance of the three drivers of service brand growth: quality, personalization, and relationships. Service marketers are advised to emphasize relationship-based service personalization (as opposed to quality-based personalization), maintain consistent service quality “at” customer expectation, neither above nor below, throughout the relationship, and improve service quality gradually (or subtly) to avoid quality-cost tradeoff and quality inconsistency perceptions. These findings contribute to an improved understanding of the factors that drive service brand growth, and how those factors differ from the factors that drive goods brand growth.