Understanding the Role of Entrepreneur’s Personal Brand in SMEs Total Brand

Abstract

During the past two decades, we have seen an increasing focus towards the role and importance of branding, and brand management as a key factor for achieving market penetration and market leadership. Our current literature
demonstrates that this expansion has been mainly the concern of large businesses. As we move towards Glocal organizations, we are creating SMEs organizations which are part of the larger organizations. At the same time entrepreneurs are creating new SME ventures based on market opportunities. This is creating increased competition within the SME sector. SME branding is
becoming a key issue for addressing competition for SME organizations.
Entrepreneurial SMEs have different features such as the strong role of the entrepreneur that differ their branding from large corporations. The effect of different aspects of entrepreneurs such as their traits, skills and capabilities on SMEs has been studied so far. Since SME’s brand is influenced by its entrepreneur and founder (Krake, 2005; Spence & Essoussi, 2010), entrepreneur’s personal brand, a concept which includes his traits, values and role, is defined here as a key variable and its impact on SME’s brand will be reviewed. The results are obtained from interviews, focus groups and questionnaires distributed among entrepreneurial SMEs in Tehran and Yazd provinces, Iran and the conceptual model is analyzed via structural equations model using Lisrel software. The results confirm that entrepreneur’s personal brand affects SME’s total brand, via entrepreneur’s influence.