The key role of Human Resource Management in developing brand-consumer relationships

Despite the consensus on the literature regarding the need for a supportive corporate culture to favor the development of long term brand-consumer relationships, and the key role that HRM plays in this process, there is extremely scarce empirical academic research on this topic. In fact, most of the publications on brand relationships are conceptual and do not present any empirical support (Veloutsu, 2007). Some authors have discussed they key corporate values that could promote a relational orientation (Blois, 1996; Grönroos, 1994; Gummesson, 1991; Helfert et al., 2002; Jain and Jain, 2006). Iglesias et al. (2011) have also presented a model that emerges from the fieldwork on the corporate culture values that could support the development of brand-consumer relationships. However, the main shortcoming of these studies is that they only focus on the corporate culture that can facilitate consumer-brand relationships, but do not place emphasis on the HRM policies that managers should promote to reinforce this corporate culture. Therefore, the objective of this research is to be the first study to identify the emergent internally consistent HR policies that define, develop and reinforce a corporate culture that promotes and facilitates brand-consumer relationships.