As long as you talk about me: The importance of family firm brands and the contingent role of family-firm identity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how media perception of family firm brands influences firm performance, highlighting the importance of brand prominence and family-firm identity alignment through text mining and social network analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining text mining and social network analysis to measure media importance of family brands and examines its impact on firm performance.

Findings

Brand importance correlates positively with firm revenues.

Identity match amplifies the positive effect on performance.

Media analysis provides insights into external perceptions of family firms.

Abstract

This study explores the role of external audiences in determining the importance of family firm brands and the relationship with firm performance. Drawing on text mining and social network analysis techniques, and considering the brand prevalence, diversity, and connectivity dimensions, we use the semantic brand score to measure the importance the media give to family firm brands. The analysis of a sample of 52,555 news articles published in 2017 about 63 Italian entrepreneurial families reveals that brand importance is positively associated with family firm revenues, and this relationship is stronger when there is identity match between the family and the firm. This study advances current literature by offering a rich and multifaceted perspective on how external audiences perceptions of the brand shape family firm performance.