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Research has started exploring how brand heritage perceptions affect people. However, little attention has been paid to the underlying mechanisms and the link between brand heritage and relational outcomes. This study aims to integrate research on brand heritage with the stereotype-content model (SCM) to offer a novel explanation of why and when consumers identify with heritage brands.

Two quasi-experimental studies with consumers in Germany (N = 312 and N = 300) focus on multiple real brands to test the mediating roles of warmth and competence. Given the central role of anthropomorphism in brand applications of the SCM, two corresponding variables are examined as moderators, one relating to the brand (brand anthropomorphism) and the other relating to the individual (a person’s feeling of loneliness). Category involvement, state anxiety, brand familiarity, past orientation and consumer age are included as controls.

The findings indicate that warmth and competence mediate the brand heritage consumer–brand identification relationship. In addition, they highlight the moderating role of brand anthropomorphism and loneliness.

This study offers a novel process explanation for how brand heritage perceptions influence consumer–brand relationships, contingent upon loneliness and anthropomorphism.

The findings help marketers better understand how and when warmth and competence transmit positive brand heritage effects, resulting in more favorable responses.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is among the first to adopt a stereotype-content and anthropomorphic perspective on consumer responses to brand heritage perceptions.

This paper aims to examine a new approach to understanding the interrelationships between destination brand gender, stereotypes, destination brand identification and brand advocacy, as well as the mediating role of destination warmth (vs. competence) in the connections between destination brand femininity (vs. masculinity) and destination brand identification.

A qualitative study and literature review were conducted to revisit and refine the items on the scale. Preliminary item reduction was qualitatively grounded in focus groups, a panel of experts, and a pilot study. A follow-up quantitative evaluation of two studies (N1 = 705 and N2 = 472) was conducted to test seven hypotheses using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modeling.

The findings provide robust evidence for the interrelationships among destination brand gender, stereotypes, destination identification and destination advocacy. The outcomes also reveal that warmth is more important than competence for destination identification. Finally, the results indicated that only destination warmth serves as a partial mediator in the association between destination brand masculinity and femininity, on the one hand, and destination identification, on the other hand.

This article adds to the destination branding literature by using social role theory and the stereotype content model to explore novel connections among destination brand gender, stereotypes, destination brand identification and brand advocacy.

This study aims to examine whether customer trust is influenced by the congruence and incongruence between customers' perceptions of two types of omnichannel integration—perceived transactional integration (PTI) and perceived relational integration (PRI). The authors further considered the perceived effectiveness of e-commerce institutional mechanisms (PEEIM) as the boundary condition of omnichannel integration's effect.

Drawing upon the stereotype content model, this study hypothesizes the influences of PTI and PRI on customer trust wherein PEEIM moderates the relationships. The research model was empirically examined based on the responses surface analysis of survey data collected from 311 omnichannel customers.

Results showed that when PTI and PRI are congruent, customers are inclined to trust brands that have high levels of PTI and PRI rather than low levels of PTI and PRI. Moreover, the incongruence between PTI and PRI is positively related to customer trust. PEEIM was found to weaken the congruence effect while strengthening the incongruence effect. The authors also examined customer distrust as another relational outcome to provide a robust check.

This study uncovers customer cognition of omnichannel integration and examines the influences on customer trust, therefore contributing to our understanding of omnichannel integration's effect from the customer perspective. Findings from this research provide insights for brand managers on deploying channel integration strategies and institutional mechanisms to manage customer trust.

The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants and voice assistants provides a platform for AI to enter consumers’ everyday lives. As these voice assistants become ubiquitous, their widespread adoption underscores the need to understand how to create voice assistants that can naturally interact with and support users. Grounded in the stereotype content model from social psychology, this study aims to investigate the influence of perceived humanness and personality on building trust and continuous usage intentions in voice assistants. Specifically, a fresh perspective examining the determining factors that shape personality trait perceptions of competence and warmth in voice assistants is proposed.

An online survey of 457 participants and structural equation modeling is conducted to validate the research model.

Anthropomorphism, social presence and interactivity drive perceived warmth, whereas performance and effort expectations drive perceived competence. Perceived competence and perceived warmth together positively affect users’ trust in voice assistants, leading to a higher likelihood of continuous usage intentions.

This research provides profound theoretical contributions to the emerging field of human-AI interaction and offer practical implications for marketers aiming to leverage voice assistant personalities to build trusted and long-lasting interactions.

Consumer perception of corporate brand equity has primarily focused on product brand dimensions, neglecting considerations at the firm analysis level. Assessing corporate brands requires different criteria relevant to the competitiveness of companies, such as their prominence, management and meeting society’s demands. In this sense, this study aims to develop and validate a scale of corporate brand equity founded on consumer perceptions, transcending industry boundaries and comparing its relationship with companies' market share.

The authors used an integrative approach to clarify the construct’s domain, building on previous measures. They took several steps to select appropriate items, refine the measure, validate it through reliability tests and convergent and discriminant analyses, test the validity of the second-order formative structure of corporate brand equity and assess associations between first-order factors, the second-order factor and market share.

The model identifies three first-order dimensions of corporate brands (presence, outstanding management and responsible) that shape the second-order factor (corporate brand equity). They are directly related, but not proportionally, to market share, contributing to the general and joint assessment of the company’s competitive performance considering the consumer.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive measurement model of corporate brand equity that considers the firm level of analysis, combines metrics from previous research on corporate brand evaluation criteria and includes consumer perceptions of the company’s competitiveness, unifying branding theory with the theory of the marketing firm.

This study aims to propose and test an appraisal theory-based framework that depicts the impact of negatively valenced brand personality dimensions on brand hate development and the resultant outcomes of non-purchase intention and anti-brand actions. The study also delineates the moderation effect of Big Five consumer personality traits on brand personality-brand hate relationship.

An international sample of 370 brand haters was collected and analysed with partial least square-based structural equation modelling.

Both negatively valenced brand personality dimensions of responsibility and activity are significant predictors of brand hate in consumers, and this brand hate leads to outcomes of anti-brand actions and non-purchase intention of consumers. Moderation analysis delineates that the consumer personality trait of neuroticism significantly moderates the relationship between both brand personality dimensions and brand hate. The study also established the importance of national culture in defining consumers’ behavioural intentions.

This study provides a novel appraisal theory-based integrated framework to understand the relationship between cognition of brand personality, brand hate emotional state and behavioural actions of consumers. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to consider the impact of these personality dimensions on brand hate development while assessing the interaction effect of consumer and brand personality dimensions on brand hate development.

Conceptual and empirical research over the past 20 years has moved the social media (SM) literature beyond the embryotic stage to a well-developed academic discipline. As the lead article in the special issue in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing on Cutting-Edge Research in Social Media and Interactive Marketing, this review and agenda article has two key goals: (1) to review key SM and interactive marketing research over the past three years and (2) to identify the next wave of high priority challenges and research opportunities.

Given the “cutting-edge” research focus of the special issue, this review and research agenda paper focused on articles published in 25 key marketing journals between January 2021 and March 2024. Initially, the search request was for articles with “social media, social selling, social commerce” located in the article title, author-selected key words and journal-selected keywords. Later, we conducted searches based on terminology from articles presented in the final review. In total, over 1,000 articles were reviewed across the 25 journals, plus additional ones that were cited in those journals that were not on the initial list.

Our review uncovered eight key content areas: (1) data sources, methodology and scale development; (2) emergent SM technologies; (3) artificial intelligence; (4) virtual reality; (5) sales and sales management; (6) consumer welfare; (7) influencer marketing; and (8) social commerce. Table I provides a summer of key articles and research findings for each of the content areas.

As a literature review and research agenda article, this paper is one of the most extensive to date on SM marketing, and particularly with regard to emergent research over the past three years. Recommendations for future research are integrated through the paper and summarized in Figure 2.

Consumer welfare is one of the eight emergent content areas uncovered in the literature review. Specific focus is on SM privacy, misinformation, mental health and misbehavior.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of the marketing world. This study is the first to examine the effect of AI marketing efforts, brand experience (BE) and brand preference (BP) in light of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model.

The data collected from 398 participants by the questionnaire method were analyzed by SEM (structural equation modeling) using Smart PLS 4.0 and IBM SPSS 26 programs.

We find that four SOR elements of AI marketing efforts (information, interactivity, accessibility and personalization) positively impact bank customer BE, BP and repurchase intention (RPI). Further, we find that BE plays a mediator role in the relationship between AI marketing efforts, RPI and BP.

The findings of the study have significant implications for the bank marketing literature and the banking industry, given the limited evidence to date regarding AI marketing efforts and bank–customer relationships. Moreover, the study makes important contributions to the AI marketing and brand literature and helps banks increase customer experience with artificial intelligence activities and create long-term relationships with customers.

This paper seeks to address the following two research questions. RQ1: What are the influential user archetypes in the social question-answering (SQA) community? RQ2: To what extent does user feedback affect influential users in changing from one archetype to another?

Based on a sample of 13,840 influential users drawn from the Covid-19 community on Zhihu, the archetypes of influential users were derived from their ongoing participation behavior in the community using the Gaussian mixture model. Additionally, user feedback characteristics such as relevance and volume from 222,965 commenters who contributed 546,344 comments were analyzed using the multinomial logistic regression model to investigate the archetype change of influential users.

Findings suggest that influential users could be clustered into three distinctive archetypes: touch-and-go influential users, proactive influential users and super influential users. Moreover, feedback variables have various impacts on the influential user archetype change, including a shift toward creating higher-quality content and fostering increased interaction, a shift toward generating lower-quality content and decreased interaction but improved speed and having mixed effects due to differences in information processing among these archetypes.

This study expands the existing knowledge of influential users and proposes practical approaches to cultivate them further.

The aim of this paper, which analyses the use of sports celebrities in advertising discourse, is to understand the strategic use to which brands put them in their commercial and corporate communication on Instagram.

To this end, a content analysis was performed on the Instagram posts of the brands Santander, Movistar, Red Bull and Iberdrola during the period 2021-2022.

The results indicate that, strategically speaking, these brands use the celebrity endorsement strategy to pursue emotional objectives and to adopt a position depending on the type of user. Likewise, these findings show that they single out uniqueness as the principal celebrity characteristic, while also mainly leveraging sports values, especially competence. These values represented by sports celebrities are markedly social in nature, which implies that they enjoy a degree of public recognition that is transferred to the brand to which they lend their image.

The conclusions connect celebrity endorsers with strategic branding issues and aspects of sports.

An empirical approach is followed here to study the representation of sports celebrities in the advertising of well-known brands linked to the sports world.