Enhancing firm performance: The role of brand orientation in business-to-business marketing

Though business-to-business branding has received substantial attention from researchers, practitioners are slow to adopt brand orientations. This study highlights the role of brand orientation in translating managerial and organizational resources into superior brand performance. Specifically, this study extends the extant literature by (1) investigating the factors that influence whether managers adopt a brand orientation and (2) exploring the processes that allow B2B branding to influence brand performance. Using data collected from 166 Chinese industrial firms operating in a variety of industrial sectors, this study finds that both entrepreneurial orientation and marketing capability positively influence a firm's brand orientation and the brand orientation can influence a firm's brand performance both directly and indirectly by encouraging customer value co-creation activities.