Vietnamese IT businesses have expanded internationally and have reached a turning point with opportunities and challenges typical when establishing a global brand. To assist Vietnamese IT firms in the development of branding strategies, this study investigated the direct influences of various firm competencies, such as innovation, marketing, networking, and dynamic capabilities, on brand equity in the business-to-business (B2B) information technology (IT) industry. In addition, the study examined whether the enterprise’s capabilities indirectly affected B2B brand equity via value co-creation and customer value. By employing PLS-SEM to analyze a sample of 182 questionnaire responses from IT firms in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the study found that innovative, networking, and dynamic capabilities had a direct, positive effect on brand equity. The mediating effect of value co-creation and customer value on the association between marketing capability and brand equity was also reported. The research also recommended branding strategies for enterprises that seek to improve their internal competencies and abilities to innovate and respond swiftly to market dynamics. In a successful marketing strategy, all stakeholders must be involved in the value co-creation and brand equity building process, and this is particularly critical in a knowledge-intensive industry such as IT.

The economy is experiencing double disruption with the emergence of Covid-19 and businesses’ urgent demand for digital transformation. These create challenges for new graduate students in equipping themselves with the necessary capitals, skills, attributes, and psychological preparedness to deal with the current situation’s instability and meet the criteria of recruiters. Therefore, this paper is one of the first attempts to validate the importance of all the above-mentioned determinants on graduate employability in a relatively comprehensive framework and provide fresh evidence to Today world’s employability taking 4.0 skills and psychological capital into account. The study firstly aims at exploring the role of various types of graduates’ capitals, a set of 4.0 skills, individual attributes, and Today world’s perceived labor market on graduates’ perceived employability. Then the paper also investigates whether perceived employability and currently perceived labor market matter for actual employability. By employing PLS-SEM to analyze the primary data collected from the sample of 350 recent graduates in Ho Chi Minh city, the study finds that human capital, individual behaviors and attributes, social capital, and 4.0 skills all have a favorable impact on perceived employability. Besides, the substantial effects of perceived employability and today world’s labor market perception on graduate actual employability have also been found. The paper also provides some implications for students and managerial level of universities/institutions on how to improve graduates’ employability in Today world’s labor market.

1. Urban tourism scholarship has repeatedly called for closer integration with urban studies and city-governance literature, treating tourism as one force reshaping the city rather than a self-cont...