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The purpose of this paper is to propose cultural equity as a construct to better understand the characteristics that define a culturally symbolic brand and the downstream consequences for consumer behavior and nation branding in the era of globalization.

This paper is an empirical investigation of the knowledge and outcome aspects of cultural equity with a total of 1,771 consumers located in three different countries/continents, 77 different brands as stimuli, and using a variety of measures, surveys, lab experiments, procedures and consumer contexts.

Cultural equity is the facet of brand equity attributed to the brand's cultural symbolism or the favorable responses by consumers to the cultural symbolism of a brand. A brand has cultural equity if it has a distinctive cultural symbolism in consumers' minds (brand knowledge aspect of cultural equity: association with the central concept that defines the culture, embodiment of culturally relevant values and embeddedness in a cultural knowledge network), and such symbolism elicits a favorable consumer response to the marketing of the brand (outcome aspect of cultural equity: favorable evaluations and strong self-brand connections).

This paper offers a framework that allows marketers to develop cultural positioning strategies in hyper-competitive and globalized markets and identify ways for building and protecting their brands' cultural equity.

This paper advances our understanding of brands as cultural symbols by introducing cultural equity and integrates prior research on brand equity, cross-cultural differences in consumer behavior, country-of-origin effects and nation branding.

This paper aims to improve knowledge regarding the complicated relationship among brand cultural symbolism, consumer cultural involvement, brand authenticity and consumer well-being. Although some literature has mentioned the relationship between the above concepts, these relationships have not been confirmed by empirical studies.

Based on the self-determination theory and the authenticity theory, a causal model of brand cultural symbolism, consumers’ enduring cultural involvement, brand authenticity and consumer well-being is developed. The structural equation model and multiple regressions are used to test the hypothesis. The primary data are based on an online survey conducted in China (N = 533). A total of six brands from the USA, France and China were selected as study samples.

The data reveal that brand cultural symbolism has a positive relationship with brand authenticity and consumer well-being; brand authenticity partially mediates the relationship between brand cultural symbolism and consumer well-being; and find a weakening effect of consumers’ enduring cultural involvement on the relationship between brand cultural symbolism and brand authenticity.

The weakening effect of consumers’ enduring cultural involvement on the relationship between brand cultural symbols and brand authenticity should be further verified through experiments and the model should be tested in different cultural backgrounds from a cross-cultural perspective.

The present study offers novel insights for brand managers by highlighting brand authenticity as the fundamental principle that explains the effect of cultural symbolism of brands, consumers’ enduring cultural involvement, as well as eudaimonic and hedonic well-being.

The findings suggest that cultural significance of a brand is closely related to brand authenticity and consumer well-being; however, on consumers with a highly enduring cultural involvement, the effect of brand culture symbolism and brand authenticity is weakened. This is an interesting finding because in this case, consumers may measure brand authenticity more based on the brand actual behavior (e.g. brand non-commercial tendency and brand social responsibility) rather than the symbolic image.

The present research responds to researchers’ calls for more research of consumer animosity on potential boundary conditions (e.g. product categories) and marketing strategies that may mitigate such negative impacts on marketers’ product and/or brand performance, with a special focus on the soft service sector. This paper aims to address the unique characteristics of service internationalization, i.e. cultural embeddedness, hybridized country origins and high consumption visibility, by proposing a social identity signaling model to explain consumer animosity effects in the soft service sector.

Two surveys (Pretest with 240 participants and Study 1 with 351 participants) and one experiment (Study 2 with 731 participants) were conducted to empirically test our hypotheses in the Japanese-Chinese relationship context.

The stronger the national/cultural symbolism and social expressiveness, the stronger the consumer avoidance for the service category. Then the consumer culture positioning strategy that can mitigate an offending country’s cultural symbolism can reduce consumer avoidance.

This research introduces two factors that could affect the negative social identity signaling capacity of service categories in the animosity context: the national/cultural symbolism reflecting an offending country and the social expressiveness communicating social identity. In line with the social identity signaling perspective, the present research specifically uses consumer avoidance as the dependent variable to capture the notion that consumers avoid consuming services because they wish to avoid being associated with an offending country that may threaten their in-group social identities.

To introduce the concept of cultural equity and provide a theoretical framework for managing cultural equity in multi-cultural markets.

Recent research on the social psychology of globalization, cross-cultural consumer behavior, consumer culture, and global branding is reviewed to develop a theoretical framework for building, leveraging, and protecting cultural equity.

Provides an actionable definition for a brand’s cultural equity, discusses consumer responses to brands that relate to cultural equity, identifies the building blocks of cultural equity, and develops a framework for managing cultural equity.

Research conducted mainly in large cities in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Generalizations to less developed parts of the world might be limited.

A very useful theoretical framework for managers interested in building cultural equity into their brands and for leveraging this equity via new products and the development of new markets.

The paper integrates past findings across a variety of domains to develop a parsimonious framework for managing cultural equity in globalized markets.

This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity dimensions (i.e. aesthetic, symbolism, heritage, originality, quality commitment and virtue) on consumer engagement in the context of social media. This study answers to the need of scholars to understand consumer behaviour towards family and non-family firms’ brand authenticity constructs and for practitioners to find the correct levers to increase consumer engagement.

Top 10 European family firms with a retrievable Facebook (FB) page from the Global Family Business Index have been selected. Then, the study analysed family firms’ social media consumer engagement versus their non-family business direct competitors on a sample of 21.664 FB posts over a four-year period, leveraging multi-group analysis.

The results outline that three out of six brand authenticity dimensions posted on FB are statistically arousing more interactions respect to non-authenticity-related contents when posted by family firms. However, there are no statistically significant findings when brand authenticity content is posted by the non-family competitors.

This research is helpful for practitioners and entrepreneurs who might want to strengthen their social media brand strategies. With this regard, the study provides insights on which elements of brand authenticity are perceived by consumers as more engaging and which levers to use when communicating the familiness of the company.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies crosscutting the family business and brand authenticity literature streams to conduct an empirical analysis based on official FB data with a data set of over 20,000 observations. Moreover, this study assesses that not every dimension of the brand authenticity construct is relevant in the context of social media and that its effectiveness depends on the firms’ familiness.

Luxury branding, in the context of tangible luxury consumables, has received academic attention. But the notion remained inconclusive in the context of consumption of luxury intangibles. The travel setting provides an excellent backdrop to explore the complex cognitive process of assigning meaning to the relationship between travellers and luxury travel brands. The shifting image of luxury consumption from elitism to mass aspirational, too, needs to be studied for its transformative implications. The chapter focused on developing a brand relationship scale, namely, TraveLux, in the context of luxury travel consumption and tested its robustness to explain the shared sentiments and emotions of travellers, engaged in luxury travel, across social media. The chapter identifies a four construct instruments capturing the essence of immersive experience, ethnocultural acculturation, passion and excitement and self-congruence as a seedbed of luxury brand affinity for travellers. TraveLux was also found to capture the shared experience of travellers consuming luxury travel brands, thereby establishing a synch between the instrument constructs and manifested human cognition in real-life situations. The study expanded on the volume of literature pertaining to luxury branding in the context of product-oriented industry and addresses the existing void in understanding traveller–brand relationships in luxury travel contexts. The study implicates a theoretical change in branding concept in perceiving luxury brands as price-based exclusivity to a transformative cultural experience. Further extrapolations of the study could be made by incorporating subtle behavioural patterns of travellers in perceiving luxury and subsequent evocation and predisposition towards decision-making.

This study aims to develop a robust theoretical framework to explain the impact of hotels’ green brand authenticity on guests’ perceptions of well-being, customer engagement and approach behaviors toward green brands.

In this study, the authors examined the effect of green brand authenticity on perceptions of well-being, customer engagement and approach behaviors toward green brands. For the quantitative empirical analysis, 352 samples were used. Green brand authenticity integrates quality commitment, heritage, uniqueness and symbolism as high-dimensional factors.

The study conceptualizes green brand authenticity as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with four dimensions: quality commitment, heritage, uniqueness and symbolism. The results showed that green brand authenticity has a positive effect on hotel guests’ perceived well-being and behavioral intentions. Interestingly, environmental values did not have a statistically significant regulatory role, while green behavior in everyday life had a partial regulatory role.

This study aims to develop and empirically test a conceptual model that depicts the function of green authenticity in explaining customer responses to green brands. The results and the theoretical framework proposed in this study provide significant insights for researchers and practitioners in the hotel industry.

Further than evaluating brand authenticity generally, this study evaluates the authenticity of a brand's environmental protection efforts. As a result of the empirical analysis conducted in this study, the green brand authenticity of a hotel had a positive effect on customers’ emotional and behavioral aspects. This finding provided valuable and meaningful insights for green hotels and hotel brand-related research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the interpretation strategy of cultural mixing on consumers’ evaluations of global brands that incorporate local cultural elements. Specifically, this paper examines whether a property interpretation and a relational interpretation have different influences on consumers’ evaluations of global brands that incorporate local cultural elements.

Two experiments were conducted as part of this research. Experiment 1 adopted a two (interpretation strategy: property interpretation vs relational interpretation) single-factor between-subjects design. Experiment 2 adopted a 2 (interpretation strategy: property interpretation vs relational interpretation) × 2 (polyculturalist beliefs: high vs low) between-subjects design. The data were analyzed using ANOVA and PROCESS 213.

A property interpretation (emphasizing that some features of a global brand transfer to local cultural elements) leads to a less favorable evaluation of global brands that incorporate local cultural elements than a relational interpretation (emphasizing a relation between global brands and local cultural elements). This effect is fully mediated by perceived cultural intrusion, and it exists only when consumers have a low level of polyculturalist beliefs.

This paper reveals that the phenomenon of cultural mixing occurs when global brands incorporate local cultural elements. In addition, the way that consumers perceive the relationship between global brands and local cultural elements will determine their reactions to global brands that incorporate local cultural elements.

This paper aims to provide an integrative review on nation branding literature and to identify new avenues for future research on embedding nation equity into commercial brands.

Integrative review and analysis with conceptual development and future research directions.

The authors firstly identify conceptualizations and measurements of nation brand as national identity and as national image. Consistently, three theoretical perspectives investigating nation branding were given: first, the macro view focusing on nation brand broadly as political and cultural identity; second, the micro view focusing on nation brand as a country image; and finally, the integrative view using the emerging construct of nation equity. Inspired by the last theoretical view, the authors discuss four research foci that examine nation equity in commercial brands for future research.

The paper provides an integrative understanding of nation branding and identifies novel research opportunities to study this research field – building the connection between nations and commercial brands through nation equity.