Search results

Brand authenticity has emerged as a strategic imperative for many firms. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of consumer perceptions of brand marketing communications on brand authenticity of fast-moving consumer goods.

Direct and indirect pathways from brand marketing communications to brand authenticity were conceptualized. Data were collected from US energy drink consumers and analysed using structural equation modelling. Multiple marketing mix variables and context-relevant covariates have been controlled for.

Direct and indirect pathways to building brand authenticity have been observed. The total effect of brand marketing communications on brand authenticity is strong, thereby highlighting the predictor’s overall effectiveness in shaping the ultimate outcome.

The focus on consumer-perceived authenticity as opposed to objective authenticity complements the prior literature. An integrative perspective on brand marketing communications is offered, specifying it as an antecedent of perceived brand authenticity.

An important implication is that investments into brand marketing communications will likely influence perceived brand authenticity. Such investments may also have favourable implications for the clarity of brand positioning. Overall, brand marketing communications are effective tools for building consumer-perceived brand authenticity.

A need to outline managerially controllable drivers of authenticity was addressed. How consumer perceptions of brand marketing communications influence brand authenticity via direct and indirect mechanisms was demonstrated. The existence of authenticity in fast-moving consumer goods was also demonstrated.

This study aims to explore how cocreated brand meaning builds and affects dynamic brand positioning in a hyperconnected world.

The authors conducted a qualitative study of Casarte, a high-end appliance brand, as an instrumental case for conceptualizing and theorizing. This study constructs a matrix of dynamic brand positioning as the key analysis framework using in-depth interview data, firm materials and user-generated content from online brand communities.

The matrix of dynamic brand positioning has two dimensions: brand core and peripheral meaning, and firm- and customer-led orientation. The interaction between the firm and its customers strengthens the understanding of a brand’s core meaning and consistency perception, expands the scope of brand peripheral meaning and improves the perception of brand meaning diversity. The mutual transformation of the ambidexterity of core and peripheral meanings facilitates the dynamic positioning of brands.

This study is a qualitative case study; the relevant conclusions have not been tested empirically. If longitudinal data of actual tracking support the effect of dynamic brand positioning, the theory’s reliability can be more rigorously tested.

It provides managerial logic and a tool for firms to practice dynamic brand positioning in a hyperconnected world, which contributes to the implementation of the emerging firm-customer synergistic strategy.

This study proposes a construct of dynamic brand positioning supported by qualitative evidence. It disputes the traditional view that brand positioning is determined by the perception of core meaning consistency and creatively puts forward the view that brand positioning evolves dynamically with the mutual transformation of the ambidexterity of brand core meaning and peripheral meaning.

The authors’ research examines the impact of cross-cultural difference in dialectical thinking on consumers' responses to androgynous brands and its implication for brand equity. Their research also aims to see how consumers take both feminine and masculine attributes into consideration to form their judgments of androgynous brand equity and whether this process is moderated by brand positioning.

The authors did two experiments with 400 Chinese consumers (high in dialectical thinking) and 528 British consumers (low in dialectical thinking) to test our framework.

The authors’ experimental results suggest an androgynous brand has higher brand equity in China than in the UK. Furthermore, Chinese consumers rate higher feminine/masculine attributes of masculine/feminine brands. In addition, an androgynous brand's equity is mainly driven by its less dominant attributes. Finally, their results suggest that brand positioning moderates the mediating role of less dominant attributes, more evident when brand positioning matches (vs mismatches) an androgynous brand's more dominant attributes.

By focusing on cross-cultural differences in dialectical thinking, the authors’ research offers a novel approach to reconcile existing inconclusive results on androgynous brand equity. Second, to their best knowledge, their research is the first to examine how feminine and masculine attributes jointly decide androgynous brand equity. Finally, by focusing on brand positioning, their research highlights the importance of an androgynous brand's less dominant attributes in driving its brand equity and provides a tool international marketing managers can use to strengthen such influence.

The ever-growing popularity of social media platforms is evidence of consumers engaging emotionally with these brands. Given the prominence of social media in society, the purpose of this paper is to understand social media platforms from a “brand” perspective through examining the effect of consumers’ emotional attachment on social media consumer-based brand equity (CBBE).

This paper develops a model that outlines how emotional brand attachment with social media explains social media CBBE via shaping consumer perceptions of brand credibility and consumer satisfaction. An online survey of 340 Australian social media consumers provided data for empirical testing. The inclusion of multiple context-relevant covariates and use of a method-variance-adjusted data matrix, as well as an examination of an alternative model, adds robustness to the results.

The findings of this paper support the conceptual model, and the authors identify strong relationships between the focal variables. A phantom model analysis explicates specific indirect effects of emotional brand attachment on CBBE. The authors also find support for a fully mediated effect of emotional brand attachment on social media brand equity. Further, they broaden the nomological network of emotional brand attachment, outlining key outcomes.

This paper offers a conceptual mechanism (a chain-of-effects) of how consumer emotional brand attachment with social media brands translates into social media CBBE. It also finds that a brand’s credibility as well as its ability to perform against consumer expectations (i.e. satisfaction) are equally effective in translating emotional brand attachment into social media CBBE.

Social media brands are constantly challenged by rapid change and ongoing criticism over such issues as data privacy. The implications from this paper suggest that managers should make investments in creating (reinforcing) emotional connections with social media consumers, as this will favorably impact CBBE by way of a relational mechanism, that is, via enhancing credibility and consumer satisfaction.

Lately, social media in general has suffered from a crisis of trust in society. The enhanced credibility of social media brands resulting from consumers’ emotional attachments will potentially serve to enhance its acceptance as a credible form of media in society.

Social media platforms are often examined as brand-building platforms. This paper adopts a different perspective, examining social media platforms as brands per se and the effects of emotional attachments that consumers develop towards these. This paper offers valuable insights into how consumers’ emotional attachments drive vital brand judgments such as credibility and satisfaction, ultimately culminating into social media CBBE.

Explores the detail of methodologies employed in the management classroom and in change processes with organisational groups. Through this exploration, some of the dualisms which typify modernist theoretical stances were highlighted, examined and transcended. The claim made for the practices proposed here is that they can enhance management learning through informing reflexive decision making, creative use of authority and aesthetic definitions of account‐ability, thereby complementing and enriching a modernist position which, we suggest, is inadequate in isolation.

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of branding through franchising and hotel membership affiliations in Europe, where the chain penetration rate is still relatively low, albeit growing slowly, and where hotels are limited by historical preservation codes and building restrictions.

Although branding through affiliations has been a successful strategy in North America for decades, little is known of this strategy in Europe, where the fragmented hospitality industry comprises small and medium‐sized independent enterprises which are being subjected to increasing competitive pressure from large global chains. This exploratory study, using a purposive sample, examines the factors that European independent hotels consider before committing to a third‐party brand and whether they perceive their decision to have improved their overall performance.

It is revealed that these hoteliers perceive that they had significantly improved their overall market position situation without losing a large part of their uniqueness, independence and management control. Notwithstanding, some of the hoteliers were not satisfied with every aspect of their brand selection and it was concluded that the degree of success would be highly contingent on careful selection of the appropriate kind of branding tool option for each situation.

The main issues have been identified for hoteliers to consider when selecting a brand affiliation as well as the key components for the branding companies to include in their offers. Recommendations are provided for both.

Decision‐making criteria are provided for hoteliers in the form of a checklist to use including benefits and risks and other considerations, as well as a checklist of key success factors of leading hotel branding companies.

Role clarity of frontline staff is critical to their perceptions of service quality in call centres. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of role clarity and its antecedents and consequences on employee‐perceived service quality.

A conceptual model, based on the job characteristics model and cognitive theories, is proposed. Key antecedents of role clarity considered here are feedback, autonomy, participation, supervisory consideration, and team support; while key consequences are organizational commitment, job satisfaction and service quality. An internal marketing approach is adopted and all variables are measured from the frontline employee's perspective. A structural equation model is developed and tested on a sample of 342 call centre representatives of a major commercial bank in the UK.

The research reveals that role clarity plays a critical role in explaining employee perceptions of service quality. Further, the research findings indicate that feedback, participation and team support significantly influence role clarity, which in turn influences job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

The research suggests that boundary personnel in service firms should strive for more clarity in perceived role for delivering better service quality. The limitations are in sample availability from in‐house transaction call centres of a single bank.

The contributions of this study are untangling the confusing research evidence on the effect of role clarity on service quality, using service quality as a performance variable as opposed to productivity estimates, adopting an internal marketing approach to understanding the phenomenon, and introducing teamwork along with job‐design and supervisory factors as antecedent to role clarity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that might contribute to the ease with which marketing executives in UK charities who have been promoted to senior general management positions adjust to the occupancy of these roles.

In total, 37 individuals with functional marketing backgrounds currently holding top general management positions in large fundraising charities were interviewed using a frame-worked occupational autobiographic narrative approach. The research was informed by aspects of newcomer adjustment theory, notably uncertainty reduction theory.

Social and personal considerations were much more important determinants of the ease of assimilation into top management positions in charities than were technical job-related matters. Role ambiguity constituted the main barrier to smooth adjustment. Mentoring, planned induction programmes, the nature of a person’s past work experience and the individual’s social status critically affected how readily a marketer fitted into a top management role. Disparate sets of factors influenced different elements of managerial newcomer adjustment (role clarity, self-efficacy, and social acceptance).

As the participants in the study needed to satisfy certain narrowly defined criteria and to work in a single sector (large fundraising charities) the sample was necessarily small. It was not possible to explore the effects on operational performance of varying degrees of ease of newcomer adjustment.

Individuals promoted to top management posts in charities should try psychologically to break with the past and should not be afraid of projecting a strong functional professional identity to their new peers. These recommendations can be expected to apply to organisations in general which, like large charities, need senior management mentoring and induction programmes to assist recently promoted individuals from function-specific backgrounds; job descriptions for top management posts that are clear and embody realistic expectations; and “shadowing” and training activities for newly appointed senior managers with function-specific backgrounds.

The study is the first to apply newcomer adjustment theory to the assimilation of functional managers into more senior general management. It examines a broader range of potential variables affecting managerial newcomer adjustment than has previously been considered. Relevant issues are examined in the context of an important sector: fundraising charities.

European industry, academia and potential end users for future solutions are widely involved in applying for European Union (EU) funding of research and innovation and implementation of the projects. Funding instrument requirements emphasise the influence of skills and know-how of these project consortia professionals. This chapter proposes a co-creative model for communication and dissemination, or project PR, based on the experiences of both planning and coordinating dissemination activities of three EU funded projects. Multidisciplinary international project Public Relations (PR) offers strategic opportunities for PR professionals.

The model employs the co-creation methods based on the pedagogical model called Learning by Developing (Laurea, 2011). In addition to the pedagogical model, the proposed conceptualisation of co-creation for public relations and dissemination utilises a media evaluation framework, which is adapted from Vos and Schoemaker’s model (2004), combining elements of both balanced scorecard and quality management.

The findings demonstrate that commitment and active participation of end-user groups in the early stage of the project are needed for successful dissemination, which should be supported by each partner’s PR actions and networks. The dissemination process should start when the project begins, be ongoing, even extending to beyond the project. Dissemination is an expanding process, and it requires facilitation that supports PR and the engagement of key stakeholders. The European Commission can gain from modernised PR and dissemination activities, and from as many end users as possible adopting new innovations, which generate more business possibilities for the industry, and further research projects for the academia.

Companies often conduct general Employee Opinion Surveys (EOSs) to measure some features or outcomes of an organization. Converting data to results is routine and governed by the design of the EOS and the use of standard statistical methods. However, as one moves away from results to their meanings or conclusions, and from conclusions to recommendations, other factors and variables come into play. These factors and variables are governed more by the context, the presence of constraints, the intuition of the decision makers, and the actions by engaged agents. Essentially EOSs produce ambiguous conclusions and recommendations because they are “knobless,” or lacking underlying processes which are controllable by management. The theory of the organizational hologram has evolved operationally into a family of Organizational Diagnostic Survey (ODS) forms which generate sets of results representing managerially controllable processes or combinations of processes. That is, the ODS provides a set of x‐axis variables that can be employed to explain variability in EOS results, which are viewed as dependent variables plotted on the y‐axis. Every item in an ODS form is “knobby.” The relationships among the questions and higher order results are causal and structured with known interdependencies. Combining ODS and EOS allows knobby analyses of knobless survey items.