Personalized service and brand equity in family business: A dyadic investigation

Family business owners are crucial in building personal relationships with customers and in supporting marketing strategies that aim to develop brand equity for the firm. Through the lenses of job demands-resources theory, this research examines how family business owners' time in servicing customers produces a chain of positive and negative effects that ultimately impacts brand equity. Because family businesses depend heavily on owners' motivation and ability to multitask, their effort in dedicating time to serve consumers is limited and is expected to produce work overload. This burden harms the effectiveness in delivering personalized services to customers. However, if family businesses nurture expressions of citizenship behaviors in employees, the negative effect of work overload on delivering personalized services is reduced. Therefore, collective organizational citizenship behavior will act as a buffer to limit the negative effects of owners'job demands in delivering a personalized service. Collective organizational citizenship behavior is capable of energizing everyone in the family business, including family business owners, for them to continue to service customers in a personalized way, and at the same time develop brand equity. Implications for family business strategies are discussed based on our findings.