Corporate Heritage Cognition, Brand Equity and Performance in the Chinese ‘Time-Honored’ Firms

This study discusses how the multidimensional functions of corporate heritage reinforce a firm’s brand equity and performance. Data from 208 heritage firms inform on how inheritance mechanisms operate on corporate heritage culture, entrepreneurship, and proprietary knowledge. This study establishes managerial precision over the quantifiable factors of differentiated corporate heritage that can be empirically used to study distinctive branding effects. Our results suggest that proprietary knowledge and heritage culture, accrued across generations, help build robust brand equity. Firm inheritance-based entrepreneurship positively influences performance in state-owned firms. In privately-owned firms, entrepreneurship significantly increases brand equity, but exercises little effect on performance.