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This paper aims to present concepts and tools for developing place branding that protects places from overbranding, redundant promotion and excessive tourism.

The concept of a product-based place brand that reflects local ways of life and local identities was introduced. A combination of projective, typological and narrative methods was applied. Three focus groups composed of future place managers were held in three countries (N = 27) to develop place brand vocabularies and typologies of verbal characteristics of abstract places as products for internal users (residents).

In most cases, the place brand vocabularies were consistent and compatible within each abstract type and were unique (mutually exclusive) between the types. The vocabularies contained both detailed and more generalized elements. For each place, short formulations of the general concept were found. Each brand vocabulary reflected the institutional, socio-psychological, cultural, historical and geographic differences of the countries involved in the research.

A conceptual and methodological framework for creating place brand vocabularies is offered, and it describes the close relationship between multiple internal brand attributes and their concise expressions appropriate for communication and high differentiation among brand attributes that facilitate the recognition of branded places by target and non-target audiences. The framework is applicable for designing verbal attributes of place brands for specific places to avoid overbranding effects.

In job advertisements, companies present claims about their organizational identity. My study explores how employers use multimodality in visuals and verbal text to construct organizational identity claims and address potential future employees. Drawing on a multimodal analysis of job advertisements used by German fashion companies between 1968 and 2013, I identify three types of job advertisements and analyze their content and latent meanings. I find three specific relationships between identity claims’ verbal and visual dimensions that also influence viewers’ attraction to, perception of the legitimacy of, and identification with organizations. My study contributes to research on multimodality and on organizational identity claims.

The contemporary organizations invest a lot of funds to gain a better understanding of the emerging needs of customers in near future. However, customers sometimes do not appreciate these hard efforts which lead to some unanticipated results for the firm. The purpose of this paper is to identify the customers’ perceptions about the future anticipatory measures done by a company.

The authors employed triangulation of methods to develop credibility of techniques and the findings of this qualitative research study. A semi-structured interview with six participants is used to explore the phenomena. After the authors gained a better understanding about the phenomena, a focus group discussion with eight participants was held to gain a better understanding of perceptions of future. Finally, the digital ethnography was employed to better explore customer behavior.

The results show that future anticipatory efforts conducted by a company are highly appreciated by the customers. This, in turn, builds a positive autobiographical memory for customers that lead to the development of a brand relationship.

The application of futurology to study within a marketing context and the employment of autobiographical memory are unique products of this study.

This is the third of a series of studies on Chinese brand naming using content analysis from a linguistic perspective. The first study generalized the principles guiding Chinese brands in terms of syllable pattern, tone pattern, compounding structure and semantic preference. The second looked at specific branding rules, focusing on two entirely different products: cosmetic products and bicycles. The present study, following the same linguistic framework of analysis, analyzes three groups of closely related products: spirits, beers, soft drinks, to see how these brands are creatively and distinctively constructed. Finds that the brand naming patterns of the three drinks are basically in agreement with the general Chinese branding principles, and the differences among them directly reflect the development, the consumer markets and characteristics of each product.

In this article, the purpose is to discuss the Brand Recall Index (BRI) as an easily implementable marketing metric to assess the brand equity for any brand specific to an identified segment.

Two quasi‐experimental timed surveys were conducted to assess the robustness of the Brand Recall Index (BRI).

Findings demonstrate assessment potential of the BRI.

The study demonstrates the viability of BRI as a managerial measure; however, it does not necessarily demonstrate downstream nomological validity. Future research could address the influence of changing mindshare, as uncovered by BRI, on market share for a brand.

Ongoing assessment of BRI will enable brand managers to track a brand's evolving mindshare in identified segments and allow them to take corrective action.

This paper develops an easily implementable index to measure brand value–an intangible yet critical asset for any firm.

In communicating their brands, businesses need to tell a compelling story that connects with its audiences on an emotional level. Every story requires a clearly understood central character with which people can identify and create a long‐lasting emotional bond: the brand persona. Without a strong brand persona, the brand narrative lacks a focus. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to identify a brand persona that captures a brand's emotional story and builds long‐lasting value for a business.

This article defines branding and explores how to construct a story and persona that is relevant, important, differentiating, and motivating. It explores what makes a good story and a good brand persona, how to understand and connect to an audience's implicit needs. Importantly, the article discusses new learning in neurology and how to communicate so that a brand speaks in an integrative fashion to both right‐ and left‐brain thinking.

Companies that do not telling a compelling and consistent brand story that speak to both the rational and the emotional needs of audiences risk creating a shallow, short‐term “brand” that is easily destroyed by external factors. A strong brand story connects at a deep emotional level that is difficult to disengage. This brand story and the brand persona must be tended to, invested in, and go beyond “words” in order to ensure long‐lasting and real value.

Most brand work focuses on developing an understanding of explicit attitudes and developing messaging based on what people “say” they think. This article discusses a process by which implicit attitudes are explored in order to construct brand stories and personas that connect on deep, emotional levels.

This paper aims to present the results of the first phase of a research project aiming to develop a bilingual taxonomy for the description of digital images. The objectives of this extensive exploration were to acquire knowledge from the existing standards for image description and to assess how they can be integrated in the development of the new taxonomy.

An evaluation of 150 resources for organizing and describing images was carried out. In the first phase, the authors examined the use of controlled vocabularies and prescribed metadata in 70 image collections held by four types of organizations (libraries, museums, image search engines and commercial web sites). The second phase focused on user‐generated tagging in 80 image‐sharing resources, including both free and fee‐based services.

The first part of the evaluation showed that each resource presented comparable information for the images or items being described. Best practices and implementation proved to be largely consistent within each of the four categories of organizations. The second part revealed two trends: in image‐upload systems, there was a virtual absence of mandated structure beyond user name and tags; and in stock photography resources, the authors encountered a hybrid of taxonomies working in combination with user tags.

The analysis of best practices for the organization of digital images used by indexing specialists and non‐specialists alike has been a crucial step, since it provides the basic guidelines and standards for the categories and formats of terms, and relationships to be included in the new bilingual taxonomy, which will be developed in the next phase of the research project.

Front-of-packaging (FOP) is a critical branding tool that uses “cues” to communicate product attributes and establish distinct brand images. This paper aims to understand how food brands utilize cues and their relative proportions to hierarchically communicate brand image and belonging to particular subcategories.

A content analysis is used for analysing 543 food FOPs sold in Australia (breakfast cereals, chips, snack bars). Samples are collected and classified into product sub-categories defined by ingredients, consumer-audience and retail placement. A novel 10 × 10 coding grid is applied to each FOP to objectively analyse cue proportion, with statistical comparison undertaken between sub-categories.

Results reveal intrinsic cues are favoured over extrinsic cues, except for those in the eatertainment sub-category. Hierarchies are evidenced that treat product and branding cues as primary, with health cues secondary. Statistically significant differences in cue proportions are consistently evident across breakfast cereals, chips and snack-bar FOPs. Clear differentiation is evidenced through cue proportions on FOP for health/nutrition focused sub-categories and eatertainment foods.

“Cue utilization theory” research is extended to an evaluation of brand encoding (not consumer decoding). Design conventions reveal how cue proportions establish a dialogue of communicating brand/product image hierarchically, the trade-offs that occur, a “meso-level” to Gestalt theory, and achieving categorization through FOP cue proportions. Deeper understanding of packaging design techniques provides inter-disciplinary insights that extend consumer behaviour, retailing and design scholarship.