Hotel internal branding: A participatory action study with a case hotel

Abstract

Successful hotel branding requires the management of both external and internal branding. External branding has been widely studied to understand how hotel brands connect with customers; however, internal branding targets internal employees, and the practice is not well understood by hoteliers. For that reason, this study proposes a framework for implementing internal branding in hotel organizations. We analyzed an internal branding project for three consecutive years using a participatory action study. The findings of this study support a six dimensions framework for implementing internal branding strategies: (1) corporate support; (2) leadership of managers; (3) reciprocal learning; (4) being proactive at the personal level; (5) characteristics of departments; and (6) performance evaluation. In the proposed framework, we applied a combined social identity and social exchange approach to identify how these approaches function in different paths which contributes new theoretical insights to the understanding of internal branding.