Search results

This study aims to investigate how brand love and brand loyalty for three brands evolved during critical moments of the 2020 pandemic, and how they performed in the long run up to 2022.

An online longitudinal study, including a survey and Twitter data for three brands: Corona Extra, with a direct semantic association with the word coronavirus; Virus Vodka, with an indirect association; Modelo Especial, with no association with the virus name but from the same company as Corona Extra.

Despite external data indicating a harmful association between Corona Extra and coronavirus, this study's findings revealed that the brand maintained its brand love in the long run and increased brand loyalty during the critical moments of the pandemic. This study's data suggest that brand love and brand loyalty may be the underlying reasons for the increase in Corona Extra's brand equity during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a highly stressful situation for consumers and brands. Some brands' names had unfortunate semantic similarities with the virus terminology, which became an additional stressor during that time. This study harnessed the opportunity to investigate brand love and brand loyalty during the pandemic at four points in 2020 and one in 2022. The authors also examined relevant Twitter data during 2020.

This study aims to examines how renaming music festivals with brand names affect festivalgoers' purchase intention in a Southwestern European country.

This study uses 291 festivalgoers' responses attending five music festivals in a Southwestern European country with structural equation modeling.

The study shows that the brand experience at the music festival directly influences brand attitude, which in turn positively influences purchase intention. The results also show the direct impact of event-sponsor fit on brand image transfer (BIT), positively affecting purchase intention.

The study examined only five music festivals in a Southwestern European country. Further studies can investigate multiple music festivals in different geographic regions. Four of the five sponsoring brands of the music festivals are telecommunication operators. Also, this study did not explore the differences in the effect of destination image, artist image and festivalgoers' attachment to music festivals.

The brand sponsorship of music festivals should ensure the event-sponsor fit to impact BIT and purchase intention positively. A synergy between events and sponsors must be created to involve consumers with the brands.

This study uses congruity theory in a music festival setting. The investigation is unique as it is conducted at five music festivals in a Southwestern European country.

Drawing on the resource-based view and contingency theory, this study aims to investigate the effects of organizational capabilities – technology capability and marketing capability – on small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs’) export performance and the moderating roles of contingent factors in this relationship in the context of a highly competitive export-oriented economy.

The research framework was tested using a three-way stepwise hierarchical multiple regression analysis with data gathered from 531 Korean international SMEs.

In addition to the direct effects of two types of organizational capabilities on export performance, the results show that both capabilities were critical when the export market was competitive, and marketing capability was more important when exporting with a brand name and targeting a developing country.

This study further extends the literature on SMEs’ internationalization in the context of highly competitive export-driven markets and highlights the importance of strategically allocating SMEs’ capabilities to reap optimal export performance by considering dynamic contingencies.

Although many scholars have acknowledged inconsistencies in the use of the retail brand term within the existing empirical literature, no one has conducted a systematic study to clarify the confusion of terms. Aiming at unifying the use of terms, this study aims to explore the terms that best express each retail brand concept, and discusses the definitions of proposed terms that can distinguish the connotation of different retail brand concepts.

Through a systematic review, 463 articles were obtained, from which retail brand terms and their definitions were further extracted. Semantic analysis and content analysis were adopted to analyze terms and definitions, respectively.

Semantically, the terms that best express four levels of retail brand concepts are own product brand, store brand, platform brand and retailer brand. Six key elements to distinguish different levels of a retail brand are identified through the content analysis of definitions, and on this basis, four proposed terms are defined.

Noting that no study focuses on the conceptual confusion of retail brands in recent decades, the findings are expected to clarify the confusion of terms and unify the use of terms, hence facilitating the communication between scholars and the sharing of research results.

Adopting a brand prominence perspective, this study aims to examine how textual and visual brand elements influence the success of crowdfunding campaigns for aftermarket offerings.

A Python-based Web scraper was used to collect data from 620 crowdfunding campaigns for aftermarket offerings hosted on Kickstarter. The linguistic inquiry and word count application programing interface was then used to analyze the linguistic aspects of these campaigns. A fixed effects regression model was used to evaluate the hypotheses.

Textual and visual brand prominence are positively associated with campaign success. Further, with some variations, both types of brand prominence augment the positive effects of narrative and graphic design elements on campaign success.

This study makes novel theoretical contributions to the literature on branding, crowdfunding and aftermarket products. The results also provide practical insights to aftermarket enterprises on creating compelling crowdfunding campaigns.

By analyzing the direct and synergistic effects of branding, narrative and graphic design elements on crowdfunding success, this study extends various literature streams and identifies several future research opportunities.

Cute products have found market success. The literature has identified various factors of cuteness, but the effect of size is under-addressed. This study aims to investigate whether and how size perception influences consumers’ cuteness perception.

In three experiments, size was manipulated in terms of visual cue, product description and product name to determine its impact on cuteness perception.

The results of the three experiments demonstrate that a size cue of smallness can heighten consumers’ perception of product cuteness. The first two studies provided converging evidence for the main hypothesis that smaller objects are evaluated as cuter. Study 3 not only replicated the findings of the first two studies but also revealed that vulnerability acts as the underlying process for the smallness-cuteness relationship. Study 3 also showed that the purchase likelihood for an extended product warranty is higher in the small condition compared to the control condition.

While the findings were robust across product types and size manipulations, possible boundary conditions related to product types or individual characteristics were not tested.

The findings suggest how brand managers can use size perceptions to influence consumers’ perceptions of the cuteness of their products and brands.

The findings inform brand managers about the nuances of size cues that may affect how customers perceive their products and identify a more generally applicable cuteness factor that may have downstream implications for marketing practitioners.

Internet celebrities have become key resources for consumers making purchase decisions. An increasing number of internet celebrities have begun to exert their influence by creating self-branded products. This study aims to examine the antecedents of consumer attitudes and purchase intentions towards internet celebrity self-brands by integrating cognitive consistency theory, cue utilisation theory and the literature on brand authenticity and celebrity involvement.

Two sub-samples of different social media brand communities were collected via online surveys of consumers with experience purchasing targeted internet celebrity self-brands. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data.

The results of the two sub-samples provide convergent evidence that brand–consumer congruence, brand authenticity and internet celebrity involvement have positive correlations with consumer attitudes towards internet celebrity self-brands, which then positively correlate with purchase intentions in both psychological (Sub-sample 1) and social (Sub-sample 2) brand communities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to develop a comprehensive model of consumers’ attitudes towards internet celebrity self-brands, which predict purchase intentions. The model is empirically tested in different social media brand communities, and the convergent results show the power of the proposed model. Internet celebrity involvement is proposed as a key driver of brand attitudes, which has received little attention. We conceptualise internet celebrity involvement and develop a scale to measure it. Based on the findings, we propose strategies to improve the marketing effectiveness of internet celebrity self-brands.

Although brands have developed mobile applications (apps) to offer consumers new experiences, low app usage numbers indicate the need to develop a systematic, practical evaluation framework for branded app design that specifies concrete design features.

An expert review provides an overview of the design of current branded apps. On the basis of an extensive literature review, this article classifies state-of-the-art design features for branded apps according to a proposed evaluation framework that includes human–computer interaction (HCI)–related and marketing-related evaluation criteria. In an application of these evaluation criteria, the authors evaluate 73 branded apps issued by 11 top fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands.

The expert review identifies strengths and weaknesses that are common to the design of current branded apps. These findings inform the set of design recommendations that this article offers, which includes 14 features common to all types of apps and 9 features specific to particular types of apps.

This research offers practical implications for app designers, who need to address design dimensions contained in the proposed framework including the HCI-related (mobile, social and user experience design features) and marketing-related (branding and customer relationship management design features) to create effective branded apps.

Design elements identified in prior literature remain abstract and do not prescribe a systematic or pragmatic approach to using them in practice. This study takes a multidisciplinary perspective (HCI, marketing and design science) to establish a practical evaluation framework for branded app designs.

This study aims to clarify identity building and authenticity management in human brand research, focusing on inside operators managing corporate accounts on social media. Conventional human brand research analyzes online influencers, and there is a research gap in whether these previous findings apply to corporate accounts.

Using netnography and interview data, this study analyzes Japanese corporate accounts on Twitter.

A corporate account’s identity is constructed under the influence of not only the brand but also the actual inside operator, called naka-no-hito, and other accounts that interact on social media. Corporate accounts are able to exhibit humanistic passion through the inside operator’s personality and maintain a distance from commerciality – to manage their authenticity. These activities attract general and other corporate and media accounts, and interactions with them re-create promotion effects.

This study observed that corporate accounts’ authenticity is not a trade-off between passion and commercial transparency but a compatibility achieved by coordinating interests among actors, together with the presence of inside operators.

Many brands claim they were born by coincidence, yet the effects and contingencies of this communication strategy are little understood by extant marketing research on unexpected events. This study aims to investigate how consumers react to brand communications portraying a coincidental vs planned origin.

This research presents five experimental studies embedding coincidental brand origins into different types of marketing communications (i.e. crowdfunding campaigns, visual ads and brand biographies).

This research finds that coincidental brand origins increase persuasion (measured as money pledged to a crowdfunding campaign, overall brand equity and purchase intention) but only for consumers high in need for cognition (NFC). This effect is mediated by processing enjoyment, as the intrinsic need for thinking that characterizes high NFC consumers is satisfied by the opportunity to process the coincidence. Further to process, the authors show that explicitly providing an explanation for the coincidence makes the effect disappear, as this deprives high-NFC consumers of the opportunity to autonomously engage in and enjoy the cognitive process.

Brand managers able to leverage coincidences in their storytelling efforts should target high-NFC consumers and should not provide an explanation for the coincidences.

This research advances the limited literature on how consumers react to coincidences in a marketing context, the understanding of how brand communication strategies persuade consumers through information processing and the NFC literature.