Editorial

Citation

Veloutsou, C. and Guzman, F. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 24 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-03-2015-0829

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Product & Brand Management, Volume 24, Issue 2

The current issue of the Journal of Product and Brand Management (24, 2) has in total seven contributions: six papers on product and brand management and one paper on pricing strategy and practice.

Fetscherin, Diamantopolous, Chan and Abbott conduct an experimental study of Americans’ preferences for the English version of Chinese names. Their study analyses from a psychology, linguistics and marketing perspective how string length and semantic relevance to English affects the meaningfulness, memorability and likeability of brand names from Chinese companies. Their study reveals that shorter brand names and those with semantic relevance to English are more memorable, and that pronounceability also plays an important role in terms of meaningfulness, memorability and likeability.

Tong and Su explore sportswear brands personalities and their relationship to brand equity. Following Aaker’s brand personality framework, they find that sportswear brands can be described in seven dimensions: competence, attractiveness, sincerity, innovation, activity, excitement and ruggedness. Their findings suggest that competence, attractiveness, sincerity, innovation and the brand personality dimensions are the most influential in the development of brands with strong brand equity in today’s competitive sportswear market.

Michaelidou, Micevski and Siamagka study the antecedents of consumers’ intention to donate time and money to children charity brands. They develop and test a theoretical model that includes the consumers’ non-profit brand image, brand typicality and past behaviour as determinants of consumer donations. Their findings provide insights into the factors that affect donations and illustrate the key aspects that can increase donations to charity brands.

Vera uses structural equation modelling to assess the relationship between perceived brand quality, customer perceived value and disposition to pay a higher price across seven different product categories (PC’s, AA batteries, bottled water, perfume, brassier, body cream and instant coffee) in a Latin American context. His study also explores the effects of consumer involvement and brand performance as moderating factors in this relationship. His findings confirm that perceived brand quality has a direct effect on perceived value but not on disposition to pay a higher price, while customer perceived value has an effect on the disposition to pay a higher price. He finds that both involvement and brand performance moderate this relationship.

Kachersky and Carnevale investigate the relative effectiveness of second-person versus first-person pronouns within a brand name over the positioning and attitude towards a brand. They perform two experiments that reveal that when a brand is positioned on social benefits, a second-person pronoun is more favourable than a first-person pronoun, while the opposite is true when the brand is positioned on personal benefits. Their study explores the relatively understudied influence of pronouns in brand names.

Ma, Zheng, Duan and Wang examine how the Sisyphus effect influences consumer decisions on brand extensions. They conduct three studies that assess if consumers are maximisers or satisficers and analyse how each type of consumer responds differently to brand extensions that varied in terms of price and level of involvement in terms of intention to purchase. Their findings reveal that consumers’ willingness to purchase brand extensions depends on the type of consumer, purchase involvement as a situational factor and price. Their study suggests avenues to increase the effectiveness of a brand extension strategy by considering not commonly analysed consumer and situational characteristics.

Love and Okada, building on construal level theory, propose differential marketing tactics for high-quality versus low-price products. Using data from both a student sample and from more than 7,000 online auctions, they conduct two studies that reveal that consumers use more abstract versus more concrete mental models when considering high-quality and low-price products. Their findings reveal that it is more effective to differentiate products positioned on quality based on their primary features, while it is more effective to differentiate products positioned on low price based on their secondary features.

We would like to thank the reviewers that were involved in the assessment of the papers in this issue for providing guidance to the authors on how to further improve their submissions. The reviewers who reviewed the papers of this issue are the following (in alphabetical order):

• Evmorfia Argyriou, Ipsos Strategy 3, UK.

• Sally Baalbaki, Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA.

• Sujay Dutta, Wayne State University, USA.

• Richard Klink, Loyola University Maryland, USA.

• Joan Llonch Andreu, Universitat Autònoma Barcelona, Spain.

• Joana Machado, Catholic University of Portugal, Portugal.

• Eva Martínez, University of Zaragoza, Spain.

• Michael McCarthy, Miami University, USA.

• Lou Pelton, University of North Texas, USA.

• Dennis Pitta, University of Baltimore, USA.

• Stuart Roper, University of Bradford, UK.

• Feng Shen, Saint Joseph’s University, USA.

• Peter Yannopoulos, Brock University, Canada.

• Lilly Ye, Frostburg State University, USA.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue.

Veloutsou Cleopatra and Guzman Francisco