Brand orientation: Conceptual extension, scale development and validation

•We re-conceptualize brand orientation and provide a broader operationalization.•We unveil four distinct dimensions of a brand-oriented organizational strategy.•Five studies report reliability and validity for the new multidimensional construct.•Brand orientation has a positive effect on company performance.•Brand orientation mediates the performance effects of marketing department power and market orientation. Creating powerful brands that stand out from competition, deliver on their promise, and strengthen over time is among the greatest challenges managers face. Building on prior relevant work, this study re-conceptualizes brand orientation and provides a broader operationalization to capture the main organizational behaviors manifested by strategically brand-oriented companies. Following established measurement theory guidelines and scaling procedures, this article reports a series of five complementary studies that collectively present the development of a new brand orientation scale to measure an organization’s holistic approach to branding. The new scale comprises four dimensions (brand importance, brand consistency, brand differentiation, and brand intelligence) and demonstrates satisfactory psychometric properties of reliability and validity. The findings suggest that brand orientation (1) is stronger in companies in which the power of the marketing department in organizational decision making is high and (2) serially mediates the effects of marketing department power and market orientation on financial performance.