Abstract:

With many years’ economic transformation from “Made in China” to “Create in China”, the State Council has set May 10 as “China Brand Day” of each year since 2017. This action indicates the implementation of brand strategy and the new national policy of promoting China’s brands. This study uses the trademark application data of Chinese listed companies to examine the influence of top management team (TMT) marketing background on trademark and brand output. Our results show that the higher the proportion of executives with marketing background in TMT, the more the number of trademark applications. Furthermore, we document that the positive impact of TMT marketing  background on the number of trademark applications is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, companies with more patent output and companies whose CEO has marketing background, indicating that when TMT can play a bigger role, companies have better innovation ability and team collaboration is more efficient, the promoting role of TMT marketing background on the number of corporate trademark applications will be stronger.

Key words: Executive functional background, Trademark application, Upper Echelons Theory, Trademark and brand management