More Than the Bottom Line: Does Socioemotional Wealth Impact the Marketing of Ethnic Minority Family Businesses? An Abstract

Abstract

Family business owners derive socioemotional wealth from their enterprises. Socioemotional wealth consists of the non-economic benefits for the owners, including family influence on the business, the social bonds of the family with the community, and multigenerational family legacy. Many of these non-economic factors have yet to be explored within the context of ethnic family businesses, which present a unique context to explore both the antecedents and implications of socioemotional wealth. The current study examines the relationship among ethnic minority family business owners’ strength of ethnic identification, socioemotional wealth, and ethnic brand promotion. Our study aims are threefold. First, we contribute to the evolving research on family businesses’ marketing strategies by exploring how family business ethnicity intersects with socioemotional wealth and strategic marketing decisions. Secondly, we extend socioemotional wealth literature by examining its nomological network to quantitatively test an antecedent to ethnic family businesses’ socioemotional wealth (i.e., the strength of ethnic identification) and a marketing consequence of socioemotional wealth (i.e., family business brand promotion). Lastly, we extend the family business literature in the context of an understudied yet prevalent population (i.e., ethnic family businesses). This study establishes a significant positive relationship between the strength of ethnic identification and socioemotional wealth and between socioemotional wealth and ethnic brand promotion. Notably, product ethnicity moderates the latter relationship such that the congruity between product ethnicity and family business ethnicity increases ethnic brand promotion. The results show that socioemotional wealth has a significant positive relationship with the firms’ marketing strategies that emphasize family business ethnicity. In other words, the higher the socioemotional endowment of an ethnic family business owner, the more likely the business will brand its products ethnically. Further, managerial and theoretical implications for ethnic family business marketing are discussed.