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Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

In 2010, Hero Honda (HH), the largest global two-wheeler manufacturing company (based on unit sales), terminated its 26 year old JV with Honda, effective 2014. In August 2011, HH, rebranded itself as “Hero”, with a nationwide campaign across media; over three months, the campaign was rolled out on 30 TV channels, leading websites, 200 radio stations, and 4, 000 cinema halls. Signages were changed in 4, 500 touchpoints over a weekend. The case documents the market and brand position of HH and its principal competitors, Bajaj and Honda in India, the rationale for ending the JV, the rebranding requirements, and the actions taken. Pedagogically, we evaluate the rebranding effort to sustain, create, and build consumer memories and emotions.

This case study can be taught in the core courses on marketing management and strategic management at the postgraduate level management programmes. This case would facilitate students’ to appreciate the context of a business-level strategy in congruence with the firm’s corporate goals in an emerging market. This case study discussion will enable students to: understand and appreciate the opportunities and the nature of the emerging market, explain the strategic decisions that can impact the survival of the global brands in new markets, explain different types of business-level strategy and their appropriate application, synthesise various industry and market-related information into the selection and justification of any particular business-level strategy and learn the technique of perceptual mapping.

Hero MotoCorp Limited of India; the world’s number one motorcycle company by volume, established its second global manufacturing facility in Bangladesh in 2018 with the Nitol-Niloy Group. A sister concern, Niloy Motors Limited (NML), had been in charge of the marketing, distribution and sales of the brand “Hero”. Abu Aslam, as the Chief Marketing Officer of NML soon had to confront this fast-paced and highly competitive motorcycle market of Bangladesh. He needed to meet the corporate goal of becoming the market leader by the year 2025. On the one hand, Hero was comparatively a late entrant; on the other hand, the market accommodated almost all popular global brands such as Bajaj, TVS and Honda. The high growth economy with a rising middle class and a favourable government policy had made the Bangladeshi motorcycle industry quite lucrative for the global manufacturers. Upon its entrance, Hero found a price-sensitive market where it soon became number two by adopting the cost-leadership strategy. However, the incessant price-cutting by the players led to the price war, and every company was losing profit. The resulting situation had created a strong challenge for Aslam as achieving the market leadership through cost-leadership seemed to be an impractical strategy. Towards the end of the 2019–2020 sales-year, Aslam introduced a new variant of Splendor Plus to the entry cc segment with some new features and a slightly higher price. Receiving a significant positive customer response, Aslam was seriously considering sailing away from cost-leadership. Now, Aslam was in a dilemma as he needed to choose from the three alternatives of adopting the differentiation strategy, namely, differentiation, focussed differentiation and broad differentiation.

Not applicable.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The archetype paradigm has been gaining importance as a marketing approach to global branding, advocating that strategists should create archetypal symbolism to engage with fundamental human psychology. The study reported here is based on consumer imagination theory, which aims to offers a means to determine whether a brand archetype will transform into an icon, and thereby achieve the maximum effect.

In‐depth interviews with 810 loyal customers of the Nike Air Jordan brand took place in the Asia Pacific, Western Europe, and North America regions of the world. Sub‐samples were selected and interviewed by research assistants in each sampling location, under central control to ensure that all profiles matched the known characteristics of the population under study. A relatively unstructured first phase generated question topics, which were transformed into verbatim sentences on cards, which respondents subsequently sorted. Matrix analysis elicited relationships among the resultant constructs, in terms of degree and direction. Focus group discussions were conducted to refine the emerging findings. Data were subjected to “open”, “axial”, and “selective” coding. Key concepts and relationships were finally incorporated into a fully developed model.

A “brand archetype‐icon transformation” model derived from the analysed data suggests a plan for the implementation of the “archetypal marketing” strategy, combining four theoretical elements under the overall coordination of a “comprehensive brand management” philosophy.

This study is an original and exploratory transfer of theoretical principles from classic psychology to marketing strategy. The final section examines practical potential by reference to other global brands. The paper proposes a paradigm for building and sustaining consumer loyalty to global brands.

This paper aims to demonstrate how consumer attachment to celebrity brands is driven by perceived narratives about the celebrity’s persona, which triggers communal (i.e. altruistic) relationship norms. The research investigates the differential role of narratives about celebrities’ personal vs professional lives in creating attachment and identifies and tests moderating effects of narrative characteristics including perceived source of fame, valence and authenticity.

Three online experiments tested the proposed direct, meditating and moderating relationships. Data was analyzed using mediation analysis and multiple ANOVAs.

The results suggest relationship norms that are more altruistic in nature fully mediate the relationship between narrative type and brand attachment. Additionally, personal narratives produce stronger attachment than professional narratives; the celebrity’s source of fame moderates narrative type and attachment; and on-brand narratives elicit higher attachment than off-brand narratives, even when these narratives are negative.

The authors offer recommendations for how marketers can shape celebrity brand narratives to build stronger consumer attachment. Notably, personal (vs professional) narratives are critical in building attachment, especially for celebrity brands that are perceived to have achieved their fame. Both positive and negative personal narratives can strengthen attachment for achieved celebrity brands, but only if they are on-brand with consumer expectations.

This research is an introductory examination of the fundamental theoretical process by which celebrity brand relationships develop from brand persona narratives and how characteristics of those narratives influence consumer-brand attachment.

The purpose of this paper was to uncover various factors that make the young consumers in emerging Asian market devotees of brands and sacrilize brands giving rise to a phenomenon called brand sacralization where the individual consumer considers brand as sacred as religion. Another objective of this research was to investigate the acculturation process taking place among the young adult consumers in emerging Asian market.

Based on prior literature review, the concept of brand sacralization has been defined to bring theoretical sensitivity. Grounded theory method has been used to collect, analyze and interpret the data collected through semi-structured depth interviews.

Data analysis reveals various underlying dimensions of brand sacralization and various actionable antecedents and consequence of brand sacralization.

Value of the article lies in developing a grounded theory framework for brand sacralization that can guide the marketers doing business in emerging markets to build a strong brand that the consumers would sacralize.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a multi-dimensional scale to measure retail brand experience.

Literature review and open-ended survey have been carried out to generate an initial pool of items. Item reduction has been done using exploratory factor analysis and validation of measures performed through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. A total of six separate studies have been conducted to develop and validate the retail brand experience scale.

A 22-item seven-dimensional retail brand experience scale is developed. The proposed scale has exhibited sound psychometric properties based on the findings from different reliability and validity tests, as well as from robust scale replications across several different samples. Findings support that retail brand experience has a significant impact on consumer intentions (word-of-mouth and pay more).

This research develops a set of retail brand experience measures that can provide retailers a way to examine the experiences evoked through retail brand-related stimuli.

This study is the first of its kind of its kind that develops and validates the measures of the retail brand experience.

The main thesis here is that the stories that some brands tell to consumers enable consumers to achieve archetypal experiences. Examining the stories consumers tell in natural contexts involving shopping for and using brands informs explanations of associations of archetypes, brands, and consumers. The study advances the use of degrees-of-freedom analysis (DFA) and creating visual narrative art (VNA) as useful steps for confirming or disconfirming whether or not the stories consumers tell have themes, events, and outcomes that match with the core storylines told by brands. As a proposal, an extension of thematic apperception tests (TATs) is relevant in applying the DFA to brand-consumer storytelling research. The study includes a review of early work on TATs, DFA, archetypal theory, and how brands become icons. The study's theory, method, and findings provide useful tools for brand managers and researchers on issues that relate to psychology and marketing.

Entrepreneurial brand building is an area of study in its infancy. The nature of entrepreneurship which typically implies serious limitations on the availability of resources suggests that entrepreneurs need to take an unconventional approach to brand building. This article provides an analysis of how one entrepreneurial manufacturing concern in the UK, Dyson Appliances, successfully built a strong brand of vacuum cleaners during the 1990s. In particular it considers the importance of brand image and the role of product attributes and the development of the brand’s personality in creating this. It argues that a key aspect of a brand’s personality is its values and therefore one of the tasks of brand builders is to find a way of imbuing the brand with these values. One of the richest sources of society’s values is mythology, which emphasizes especially the values of its heroes. A brand can be imbued with these values through association with mythology. This was the approach adopted by Dyson Appliances as it built its vacuum cleaners into a leading national brand.

Employing the Star Wars brand as a case study, this paper seeks to critically discuss the importance of comparative mythology for inter-generational branding and consumption practices within arts related markets.

Secondary data have been gathered focusing on the analysis of material in the form of books, academic journals, films, videos, television programs, websites and media reports related to the interface between comparative mythology, the Star Wars brand.

First, this paper indicates how the long-standing success of the Star Wars brand mirrors and reflects the power of monomythic storytelling in creating a platform for arts and place building branding associations and extensions for numerous products and services. Second, this study shows and highlights the potential of monomythic structures/storytelling and comparative mythology in acting an underlying cultural platform whereupon several arts brand associations, narratives, extensions and overall strategies can emerge. Finally, this project suggests how arts marketing scholars could further explore the infusion of mythological narratives within branding practices in the areas of performing/visual arts, museums, entertainment and arts related tourism campaigns.

Focusing on the most successful film franchise of all times, this study argues that comparative mythology constitutes an endless source for common templates of artistic, cross-cultural and inter-generational marketing practices focusing on universal moral codes and archetypes.