The Role of Corporate Brand in the Entrepreneurial SMEs Total Brand

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make an important part of the economy of countries and are companied by employment and economic blossoming. Even so, these companies have never been the focus of the science of brand and most of the literature on brand has been written about large companies which have different specifications from SMEs. Thus, SME brand is a new area that recently has introduced the corporate brand as an appropriate framework for branding in the SMEs, but there are limited numbers of scientific models of SME corporate brand. This research tries to study the effect and influence of corporate brand in SME brand. The conceptual model was compiled upon making semi-structured interviews and the focus group with a number of successful entrepreneurs in Tehran and Yazd provinces. The questionnaires were distributed through in two provinces. Data were analyzed and modeled by Lisrel software in the form of structural equation modeling. In this research, the SEMs corporate brand is operationally defined, the role of corporate brand in SME brand is confirmed, and strategies are presented on this basis.
Key words: Corporate brand; Entrepreneur; SME; Entrepreneurship