Investigating Brand Building in SMEs: A study on how brand building can enable the internationalisation of Swedish SMEs

Abstract: There appears to be a wide recognition domestically in Sweden that small companies need to grow for the Swedish economy to be sustainable in the long term. Supplying products and services that the market wants no longer entails taking a purely domestic perspective; in fact it requires an international outlook from the outset. The authors question whether building a strong brand can assist small companies in their international growth. Much of the existing marketing literature focuses on the brand management activities of large corporations with established brands, neglecting the challenges facing entrepreneurial companies. The limited resources of these small start-ups push them to take an unconventional approach towards marketing and brand building, which implies using their internal capabilities to build the brand. The authors take the stance that with a consciously designed and implemented branding strategy, a cohesive understanding of the branding process and by involving the whole organisation, small businesses can also manage branding.By examining the brand building processes of three Swedish entrepreneurial companies, the authors have empirically deduced four strategic steps in the brand building process of SMEs, that make it dynamic and shifting over time to include various stakeholders in the value chain, such as manufacturers and distributors. The introduced model demonstrates the importance of incorporating these functions into the Marketing plan of SMEs, which in addition to aligning the company culture to market orientation, lays the foundation for internationalisation.