With many years’ economic transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China,” the State Council has set May 10th as annual “China’s Brand Day” from 2017. This action indicates the implementation of brand strategy and the new national policy of promoting China’s brands. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of marketing background of top management team (TMT) on trademark and brand output.
Using the trademark application data of Chinese-listed companies, this paper constructs a multiple linear regression model and uses the OLS method. This research also uses two-stage regression to examine the effect of endogeneity on the results.
Our results show that the higher the proportion of executives with marketing background in TMT, the more the number of trademark applications. Furthermore, we document that the positive impact of TMT marketing background on the number of trademark applications is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, companies with more patent output and companies whose CEO has marketing background, indicating that when TMT can play a bigger role, companies have better innovation ability and team collaboration is more efficient, the promoting role of TMT marketing background on the number of corporate trademark applications will be stronger.
This research focuses on the world’s largest emerging economy – China, which is different from the existing literature that is mainly based on western developed countries. With China’s economy stepping into a new normal and consumption upgrading, it is important and worthy of a deep discussion about which factors affect the company’s trademark and brand management.
