This study is undertaken to determine the effects of branding on performance of SMEs in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Quantitative research methodology is adopted to identify branding factors affecting SME performance. Data is collected from 175 SMEs, indicating a high usable response rate of 86.63%. Five factors emerge from the factor analysis. They are Branding Practice, Branding Management, Branding Strategy, Branding Media & Technology, and Branding Association. Subsequently, multiple regression technique is used to test the hypotheses.The results of multiple regression support the hypotheses on the relationship between branding factors and performance. Branding factors comprising Branding Practice, Branding Strategy and Branding Association have significant relationship with Company Performance. This is rather expected which firmly supports branding literature and the Resource-based View (RBV) theory that states firms possessing valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable resources have capability to achieve superior performance. On the other hand, Branding Management and Branding Media & Technology are tested negative with no significant relationship with performance. This could be explained that SMEs have limited resources and therefore, do not adopt Branding Management as much as the large organizations. Similarly, SMEs do not readily adopt Branding Media & Technology due to high cost of acquiring and maintaining media and technologies. This study therefore contributes to the body of knowledge in strategic management and marketing for SMEs in Klang Valley. Branding could enhance their performance and help them contribute towards achieving higher Malaysian GDP target in the future. With the introduction of much anticipated Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and its implementation in the next two years, SMEs in Klang Valley will face greater opportunities and challenges. Branding could be the answer to equip the SMEs, that would allow them to uniquely differentiate their products and services.Further research on the subject is highly recommended to identify other possible branding factors, or to acquire deeper insights that could further contribute to the increase of SME performance.

In order to transform Malaysia from a middle income to developed nation, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are seen as a key enabler to this transformation. As a result, the government has invested a lot of effort in numerous development programs that enhance financial accessibility and human capital development in order to achieve the transformation objective. Bank Negara Malaysia gave a mandate to various development financial institutions and selected financial institutions under the microfinance scheme, to provide loans and advisory services to MSMEs, in order to solve some of the challenges that they faced. These include; financial accessibility and limited business skills among MSME owner managers. It is upon this background that this study contributes to the understanding of the factors that determine MSME performance, by examining the role of loan amount and advisory services together with firm characteristics, owner manager characteristic and other business strategies on MSME performance. This study used original data from 381 MSMEs which are clients of Ehsan developmental financial institution in order to run a couple of inferential statistics. These included Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis test and multiple regression analysis. In order to reduce the variable that gave the best prediction of MSME performance, categorical regression analysis (CATREG) was utilized using lasso regularization. The results in the study showed strong contribution of loan amount and bookkeeping to enterprise performance. Similarly, firm size in terms of number of employee, gender, assets and number of customer had statistically significant results. The study contributes to theoretical and knowledge bases, as well as empirical justification on variables in Storey’s framework. The results also had a bearing on different stakeholders, such as owner-managers, financial Institutions (FIs) and policy makers. There is a need for policy makers to review the information and advisory service programs as well as the method of delivery due to low levels of implementation. Training, planning and insurance were other aspects that all stake holders had to look into in order to improve the current performance. The findings of the study also added to the existing empirical knowledge by supporting resource based view theory assumptions, on the influence of both internal and external resources on firm performance. Similarly, information and advisory services and loan amount (external credit) variables from Storey’s framework were examined in the context of Malaysia, and the results were robust in the overall regression. However, the study is limited to a single case study and survey, using cross sectional data in the service sector.