The influence employees wield as brand advocates has led organizations to consider employee brand advocacy as a unique marketing strategy. While factors driving employee brand advocacy have been studied from human resources perspective, this paper aims to identify and understand branding factors that drive employee brand advocacy through online reviews.
This three-phase study analyses 305,342 employee reviews from Glassdoor, covering Interbrand’s top 20 global brands, to identify branding-related drivers of employee brand advocacy. Phase 1, using Python, investigates overall sentiments of online reviews. Phase 2 extracts advocacy factors from positive reviews and develops a branding-related model through content analysis using Python. Using linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC), Phase 3 tests interrelationships among the factors in the model.
Based on positive and subjective employee reviews, the study identifies novel branding factors and develops a conceptual model of employee brand advocacy. The model exhibits a positive correlation with the identified factors like brand reputation, brand authenticity, product belief, self-expressive brands, employee brand love and employee brand identification.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to examine employee brand advocacy through the lens of online reviews. It advances the limited literature by proposing a novel conceptual model that incorporates branding dimensions. It also draws on established theories such as triangular theory of love, social exchange theory and social identity theory, introducing theory of love as a novel contribution.
