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This study aims to examine the relationship between brand orientation and financial performance in business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It examines the impact of brand-oriented strategy on financial performance through four branding constructs, namely, internal branding, brand communication, brand awareness and brand credibility.

A questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect data from 250 Finnish B2B SMEs. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the validity of the constructs, whereas structural equation modeling was used to test proposed hypotheses of the study.

The results suggest that brand orientation improves the effectiveness of brand communication and internal branding in building brand awareness and credibility. Brand awareness emphasizes an external route through brand communication, whereas brand credibility emphasizes an internal route through internal branding. Brand awareness has a positive impact on brand credibility, and brand credibility has a positive impact on financial performance, highlighting the importance of both brand performance components for financial performance.

This study addresses the research gap in the B2B branding literature regarding the role of branding in enhancing financial performance. The results suggest that brand-oriented strategy can contribute to financial performance through brand awareness and brand credibility in the context of B2B SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model describing potential relationships among transformational leadership, charisma, credibility and organizational performance.

This paper is conceptual, based on a review of current transformational leadership, charisma and credibility literature.

The authors present a model where credibility is an antecedent of transformational leadership; transformational leadership has a positive effect on organizational performance; and charisma positively moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational performance.

A model to integrate credibility into transformational leadership research is proposed.

This paper considers credibility as an important attribute of transformational leadership, and thus credibility may have significant implications for practitioners in leadership development strategies.

Currently, there is a lack of research on the role of credibility in leadership. The authors discuss the importance of measuring leader credibility and generating a credibility scale.

The purpose of this paper is to learn how strategic hybrid orientation – constructed from brand and market orientations – is related to the brand awareness, brand credibility, and financial performance of business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The questionnaire was used in a survey to collect data from 250 Finnish B2B SMEs. The sampled firms were categorized into four clusters according to a two-by-two matrix, and their relationships with the brand performance outcomes were examined using one-way ANOVA and multiple regression.

The results indicate that strategic hybrid orientation is positively related to all three dimensions of brand performance, showing that two dissimilar orientations can complement each other in improving brand performance outcomes. However, the strength of complementary interaction seems to vary depending on the degree to which brand- and market-oriented attributes dominate in a firm’s strategy.

This is one of the first studies to provide empirical evidence to support the concept of strategic hybrid orientation for branding in B2B SMEs. This study aims to contribute to existing research on SME branding by capitalizing on B2B branding and strategic management literatures.

Drawing upon the social exchange theory, this study examines the interplay of transactive memory system (TMS) with improvisation and market competition intensity for the impact on entrepreneurship performance.

This study used the temporal separation technique and used a questionnaire survey to collect data with a final sample of 423 valid responses forming 74 entrepreneurial teams from firms across 6 cities in China.

The expertise and credibility of the TMS has a significant positive impact on entrepreneurial performance and improvisation which mediates the relationship between the expertise and credibility of the TMS and entrepreneurial performance. The intensity of market competition positively moderates the mediating role of improvisation between the expertise and credibility of the TMS and entrepreneurial performance.

This study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in emerging economies and entrepreneurial teams. Literature on TMS lacks studies on entrepreneurship performance. The authors' contextualized TMS perspective examines the impact of specific behavior of improvisation and, therefore, holds the promise to offer a novel angle to investigate how exactly TMS impacts entrepreneurship performance while engaging in micro-level processes and entrepreneurial phenomena such as surprises and response to surprises through improvisation. The study adds the context of social exchange theory to performance of entrepreneurial teams.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

The growing competitive environment in which higher education institutes are immersed has caused them to strengthen their competitive position of a brand and its equity in emerging countries. However, there are several contradictions between the empirically approved determinants and the dimensions of brand equity in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural relationship between subjective norms, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), perceived brand credibility and brand equity, taking cross-culturally comparisons between Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.

A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 800 undergraduates of private higher education institutions in Sri Lanka and Vietnam in 2019. These data were gathered using purposive sampling and analyzed using a structural equation model. A total of 768 questionnaires were considered valid. In testing the hypothesis and structure among the variables, structural equation modelling was used to determine the relationship between subjective norms, eWOM, perceived brand credibility and brand equity for the higher education institutes in emerging countries.

For the conceptual framework, the author found that this structural equation model complies with the empirical data. The structural equation model shows that subjective norms, eWOM and perceived brand credibility were significantly related to brand equity. Perceived brand credibility was found to be the mediating variable. Further, the location was found to moderate the relationship between perceived brand credibility and brand equity, highlighting that Vietnamese students are more relying on perceived brand credibility in creating brand equity than their Sri Lankan counterparts.

The study was conducted at private higher education institutes in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Future research could benefit from perceptions of undergraduates in public higher education institutes. This study discusses the implications of developing branding strategies for higher education institutions.

The current research contributes to the services marketing and branding literature in the higher education context. The paper presents the crucial elements in building brand equity for higher education institutes to fill the existing gaps in higher education branding literature. The findings of the current study provide strategies to improve the higher education sector.

Purpose: This chapter focuses on the enterprise’s ethics and social responsibility, which are interdependently resulting in an enterprise’s credibility and better performance. The authors provide a comprehensive tool that can help enterprises and humankind to find a better way toward new economic and social conditions, thus society’s transformation, beginning with the enterprise-level innovation of decisions that originate from the (key) stakeholders’ personal level innovation of decisions. The purpose is to show a possible path toward requisitely holistic enterprises’ governance, management and practice.

Method: The authors use a qualitative methodological approach, based on three relations (the law of requisite holism, the law of hierarchy of succession and interdependence, and the law of entropy) and three elements (10 guidelines defining the subjective starting points and objectives, and 10 guidelines on assuring the agreed policy to survive in latter steps of working process) of Dialectical systems theory. This chapter methodologically also follows the ethics of interdependence. Based on the research, the authors propose to use the supplemented credibility strategy as a possible methodological way of introducing enterprise ethics into practice.

Findings: The authors introduce a supplemented model of the strategy of an enterprise’s credibility. The authors propose using this new model to develop an enterprise’s social responsibility and ethics in a broader sense. The authors focus is on financial institutions’ governance and credibility. The main finding of this chapter is that strong regulation of the financial sector contributes positively to all four dimensions in the strategy of an enterprise’s credibility – if it is requisitely holistic rather than one-sided and short-term.

Originality and Significance of Findings: The strategy of an enterprise’s credibility could be used as a practical implementation tool for (key) stakeholders. They can use the strategy of an enterprise’s credibility to innovate its behavior toward appropriate holistic behavior and sustainable development stimulating. This new tool can lead enterprises toward (more) social responsibility, enterprise ethics and credibility. In applying this theory to financial institutions, the authors find that such financial regulation (and supervision) significantly strengthens multiple dimensions of enterprise credibility. In this regard, the authors find it favorable and encourage such regulation in all enterprises engaged in financial services, including non-bank institutions. Besides, to add to more comprehensive social benefits, the authors find it favorable to encourage similar development in other economic sectors, not the opposite, deregulation.

Recent figures show that users are discontinuing their usage of TripAdvisor, the leading user-generated content (UGC) platform in the tourism sector. Hence, it is relevant to study the factors that influence travelers’ continued use of TripAdvisor.

The authors have integrated constructs from the technology acceptance model, information systems (IS) continuance model and electronic word of mouth literature. They used PLS-SEM (smartPLS V.3.2.8) to test the hypotheses using data from 297 users of TripAdvisor recruited through Prolific.

Findings reveal that perceived ease of use, online consumer review (OCR) credibility and OCR usefulness have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, which ultimately leads to continuance intention of UGC platforms. Customer satisfaction mediates the effect of the independent variables on continuance intention.

Managers of UGC platforms (i.e. TripAdvisor) can benefit from the findings of this study. Specifically, they should improve the ease of use of their platforms by facilitating travelers’ information searches. Moreover, they should use signals to make credible and helpful content stand out from the crowd of reviews.

This is the first study that adopts the IS continuance model in the travel and tourism literature to research the factors influencing consumers’ continued use of travel-based UGC platforms. Moreover, the authors have extended this model by including new constructs that are particularly relevant to UGC platforms, such as performance heuristics and OCR credibility.

Malicious web domain identification is of significant importance to the security protection of internet users. With online credibility and performance data, the purpose of this paper to investigate the use of machine learning techniques for malicious web domain identification by considering the class imbalance issue (i.e. there are more benign web domains than malicious ones).

The authors propose an integrated resampling approach to handle class imbalance by combining the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO), a population-based meta-heuristic algorithm. The authors use the SMOTE for oversampling and PSO for undersampling.

By applying eight well-known machine learning classifiers, the proposed integrated resampling approach is comprehensively examined using several imbalanced web domain data sets with different imbalance ratios. Compared to five other well-known resampling approaches, experimental results confirm that the proposed approach is highly effective.

This study not only inspires the practical use of online credibility and performance data for identifying malicious web domains but also provides an effective resampling approach for handling the class imbalance issue in the area of malicious web domain identification.

Online credibility and performance data are applied to build malicious web domain identification models using machine learning techniques. An integrated resampling approach is proposed to address the class imbalance issue. The performance of the proposed approach is confirmed based on real-world data sets with different imbalance ratios.

This study aims to examine the links between company performance (CP) and supply chain (SC) orientation considering halal small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Kazakhstan. The SC orientation framework integrates three aspects to determine CP, i.e. credibility, commitment and top management support.

Halal SMEs were reviewed; 271 valid responses were obtained and scrutinised, employing the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique.

The credibility of SC stakeholders performs the main impact on the CP of halal SMEs in Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, commitment and top management support show fewer influences, although they significantly impact CP.

This study confirms the relationships between SC orientation and CP from the perspective of halal SMEs. The social capital theory was applied to explain these relationships. It is the initial attempt to investigate such relationships in a post-Soviet Union country.