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This article aims to explore the potential of Dewey's theory of aesthetic expression to expand knowledge about aesthetics in branding and better understand how brands work. The paper aims to mine the pragmatic theory of aesthetic expression as involving artistry, intention and imagination to reveal the role beauty plays alongside usefulness in defining and refining brand image and meaning.

Dewey's dialectical method of holistically combining tensions such as beauty and usefulness is applied to brand theory and used to critique current brand management practices.

The application of the theory of aesthetic expression emphasizes: understanding humans holistically in order to explain how beauty and expression create value and enrich lives; redefining brand ownership and use to accommodate the aesthetic ways people handle expression/expressiveness; and managing brands with appreciation of how beauty empowers them to attract users.

Seven dialectical tensions featured in Dewey's theory are identified and developed into holistic propositions for the future study of brands and branding: beauty/usefulness, act/object, inner/outer material, private/public, expression/statement, appreciation/control, symbolic/instrumental.

The primary practical implication derived from application of the theory of aesthetic expression to brands and branding is that the most beautiful brands emerge from acts of co‐creation that respect the artistry, intention and imagination of the brand's stakeholders.

The article offers increased depth to the study of the expressive/emotional/aesthetic aspects of branding and offers an enriched aesthetic foundation for studying and practicing brand co‐creation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness.

Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities.

The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding.

This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined.

Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment.

Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.

Since the late 1980s, brands have gained centre stage in marketing and in the managerial discourse. From having been a mere marker that identifies the producer or the origin of a product, the brand is today increasingly becoming the product that is consumed. For the corporation, the brand is conceptualised as the essence of the firm, its most crucial “asset”. In the literature, branding is described as a process of expressing core values through the use of persuasive stories. By questioning the conception of brands as corporately managed stories, the article aims to re‐conceptualise branding as a process of aesthetic expression, where the conventional distinctions between senders and receivers become blurred. The paper looks into how brands have become depicted in the branding literature, and thereafter discusses the narrative and pictorial modes of communication. On the basis of this, the article finally discusses how images are used and reused in the joint construction of brands, thus challenging the idea of brands as stories crafted and controlled by the corporation.

To engage a critical discussion on the challenges raised for employees as corporate brands increasingly address moral issues.

The paper links theories on corporate branding informed by marketing with theories on employee identification informed by critical sociology.

While the move towards corporate branding with a strong emphasis on moral issues provides opportunities for improved employee identification, it may also lead to unintended implications in the sense of uniformity and centralisation of morals and employee demotivation.

While this paper provides theoretical analysis of the potential direness of corporate moral brands in relation to employees, no empirical investigations have been carried out to illustrate and analyse such implications. It is of theoretical as well as managerial interest to provide more research to understand this relation better.

Rather than imposing a corporate brand with moral and ethical visionary statements, managers engage employees in the corporate moral brand exercise.

The paper questions the immediate tendency towards integrating moral issues to the corporate brand based on an untested idea of that this will motivate external and internal stakeholders. Rather the paper suggests that the corporate moral brand may also serve counter‐productive purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of brand design consistency (BDC) on consumers’ aesthetic judgment and purchase intention; and whether this effect of BDC is moderated by a brand’s luxury status.

A mixed-factorial experimental design that manipulated the BDC of handbags (prototypical/high/low) and brand luxury status (luxury/non-luxury) was conducted among 311 female participants to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results obtained from t-tests and repeated measures ANCOVA demonstrate that prototypical brand designs, followed by high, and then low BDC products, evoked the most positive consumer responses. Additionally, brand luxury status moderated the effect of BDC on consumer response, such that the effect was more salient for non-luxury than luxury brands.

Luxury brands are able to leverage the halo effect, as perceived brand design inconsistency has a lesser impact on consumers’ purchase intentions than for non-luxury brands. Non-luxury brands have less latitude to deviate from their brand aesthetic, and maintaining BDC in new products is imperative for these brands.

Designers constantly navigate the thresholds of their brand’s aesthetic in design decisions; however, few studies have investigated consumer responses to deviations from brand aesthetics. To the authors’ knowledge, no studies have examined this phenomenon in relation to a brand’s luxury status, a factor that critically impacts consumers’ design expectations.

This paper aims to empirically explore the influence of website aesthetic attributes (classical and expressive) on customer brand engagement (CBE) intention.

This research develops a framework and a few research hypothesis based on available literature on the concept of aesthetics, aesthetic attribute of websites and CBE, as well as other reliable resources, relevant theories, wherever required and tested it on the data collected from 400 respondents of the Y generation (Gen Y) of India by means of structural equations modelling using SPSS AMOS 21.

The findings indicate that expressive aesthetics of the brand Web pages of the beauty products is positively associated with drawing attention. Expressive aesthetics and classical aesthetics together explained 16% of the variance in attention. This indicates that aesthetic attributes indeed play a role in drawing the attention of the customer. However, mere attention is not sufficient to form the behavioural intention in the customer to engage with that particular brand unless the customer does get fully absorbed with aesthetic attributes of the brand Web pages.

The outcome of this research is based on the view of only 400 Gen Y individuals from the city of Indore in India. This limits its generalizability across India and other country context. This study makes important contribution to brand website aesthetic and CBE literature by empirically investigating the concept of brand website aesthetics as important in interactive marketing approach to initiate CBE intention formation. It further argues that cognitive engagement is the first and foremost engagement dimension and underscores aesthetic attributes as important in forming the customer first perception based on which subsequent CBE behavioural intention develops.

This research adds novel insight in the relationship of the brand website aesthetic attributes and CBE by studying the impact of the aesthetic attribute of brand Web pages on the two cognitive elements, namely, attention and absorption and further its effect on brand behavioural intention taking as sample of Gen Y of India.

This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.

This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.

Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers’ responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.

While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora’s ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

Branded merchandise and licensed apparel comprise a substantial portion of revenue for many organizations and public figures that choose to employ such an endeavor. Endorsement deals with apparel manufacturers have historically been utilized for athletes looking to supplement their salaries and establish greater brand awareness. However, as some athletes establish ownership of their logo and become less reliant on companies such as Nike and Adidas for merchandise distribution, assessing the influence of various entity's logos on the athlete brand has become worthy of analysis. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the influence that cobranded merchandise has on consumers when the athlete logo is displayed next to another team or manufacturer logo.

Using an online panel and survey, a final sample of 127 participants completed a questionnaire to examine their attitudes towards various athlete brand elements. ANCOVA's and MANCOVA's were utilized to assess significant findings, holding the variable of identification constant.

The results revealed that only the perceptions of merchandise quality significantly varied between an athlete brand and an apparel manufacturer (i.e. Nike) co-brand. The findings indicate that athletes should look to co-brand with high brand awareness manufacturers, and that there is no significant difference between consumers' perceptions of athlete brands when co-branding with team brands.

This is one of the first studies to evaluate the relationship between the athlete brand and external entities from a consumer perspective.

Researches on the impact brand equity have grown considerably in recent years, as it has been shown to have significant impact on a company’s financial performance. This paper aims to empirically test the relationships between brand concepts and brand equity, while exploring the mediating roles of emotional attachment and customer commitment.

The research investigates the effect of brand concept on the customer–brand relationship and brand performance. Additionally, it examines how the relationship between brand concept and brand equity is mediated by customer–brand relationships such as emotional attachment and commitment.

The results empirically demonstrate the important contribution of the three brand concepts to brand equity. The results empirically demonstrate the important contribution of the three-brand concept to customer commitment and to brand equity that has been predicted by prior research.

The main contribution of this study is to demonstrate the effects of the brand concepts related to aesthetic, functional and symbolic benefits on brand equity. From this, brand equity may be viewed as a link in the path of effects that indirectly connects brand concepts with market performance. Brand concept, emotional attachment and customer commitment are relevant constructs underlying brand equity, and commitment and loyalty are key mediating variables in relational exchanges.

This study aims to develop and validate a scale for measuring online fashion brand recognition (OFBR).

Given the existing literature on brand, multiple stages of studies were conducted as a part of the scale development process. The OFBR scale was validated by a step-by-step process following the scale validation methodology suggested in the specialised literature.

The results demonstrate the 25 items of five unique factors that form the OFBR construct and confirm the strong validity of the construct. This finding suggests that the five-dimensional approach (online brand familiarity, online visual simplicity, online aesthetic attraction, online brand emotion and online social reputation) plays important role to form OFBR.

A valid and reliable OFBR scale provides a foundation for broadening the understanding on the important constructs that form OFBR, which is essential for online fashion retailing. Knowledge of the crucial antecedents that influence consumers towards online fashion products can enhance marketers’ capability to position their brands towards their target markets.

The relevance of this study lies in validating the scale for measuring OFBR for the first time in the literature on online fashion brand.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo desarrollar y validar una escala para medir el reconocimiento de marcas de moda online (OFBR).

Partiendo de la literatura de marca, se llevaron a cabo múltiples estudios como parte del proceso de desarrollo de la escala. La escala OFBR fue validada en un proceso de diversas etapas siguiendo la metodología de validación de escalas sugerida en la literatura especializada.

Los resultados demuestran los veinticinco ítems de cinco factores únicos que forman el constructo OFBR y confirman la validez del constructo. Este hallazgo sugiere que el enfoque de cinco dimensiones (familiaridad con la marca online, simplicidad visual online, atracción estética online, emoción de la marca online y reputación social online) juega un papel importante en la formación de la OFBR.

Una escala OFBR válida y fiable proporciona una base para ampliar la comprensión de los constructos importantes que forman OFBR, lo cual es esencial para la venta de moda online. Conocer los antecedentes que condicionan al consumidor al comprar productos de moda online puede mejorar la capacidad del vendedor para posicionar su marca en el mercado objetivo.

El interés de este estudio radica en la validación de la escala para medir la OFBR por primera vez en la literatura sobre la marca de moda online.

Artículo de investigación