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The case was written using information and data from secondary sources. It describes real people and the situations experienced by them. It does not use any fictitious names, scenarios or organizations.

The case study “Melanie Perkins: Poised to Redesign Canva from Tech Unicorn to Tech Giant?” describes the entrepreneurship journey of Melanie Perkins (she) (Perkins), the CEO of Australia-based tech unicorn and graphic design company, Canva Pty Ltd. (Canva). The case starts with a brief look into Perkins’ background and documents her entrepreneurial spirit, which, at the age of 19, led her to identify a hitherto unserved market (yearbooks) in the graphic design industry and offer an online design system through her venture, Fusion Books (Fusion). Fusion was completely bootstrapped and became a runaway success within five years. That encouraged her to envision setting up a one-stop-shop design site that would make design accessible to everyone.

However, when she tried to raise funds, Perkins encountered multiple rejections from venture capitalists. She persevered and continually refined her strategy. Eventually, she managed to raise venture capital funding and establish her design startup, Canva, in 2013. Canva then went on to disrupt the graphic design industry. The case describes in detail the reasons for Canva’s success, which went on to be one of the few profitable unicorn start-ups. The case also throws light on how Perkins used Canva as a tool to change society with her two-step plan. Despite its market success, Canva faced heavy competition in the design and publishing space from well-established players. Can Perkins challenge the competition and ultimately make Canva a software giant in the future?

The case is intended for use in teaching the subjects “Entrepreneurship Development,” “Business Strategy,” “Leadership Skills and Change Management” and “Positive Psychology for Managers” in both graduate and post-graduate programs.

Brand narratives are created to differentiate brands, and consumers base their assessments of a brand’s authenticity on this narrative. We propose that the default consumer position is to accept a brand’s narrative, and we find that consumers maintain belief in this narrative even when explicitly reminded that it is manufactured by firms with an underlying profit motive. Because belief seems to be the default position adopted by consumers, we investigate what factors act as disruptors to this default position, thereby reducing assessments of authenticity.

This research uses a series of studies to investigate when and why consumers view some brand stories as authentic and others less so. In addition, we examine the impact of changes to authenticity assessments on managerially important brand outcomes.

Only when one or more authenticity disruptors are present do consumers begin to question the authenticity of the brand narrative. Disruption occurs when the focal brand is perceived to be nakedly copying a competitor, or when there is a gross mismatch between the brand narrative and reality. In the presence of one or both of these disruptors, consumers judge brands to be less authentic, report lower identification, lower assessments of brand quality and social responsibility, and are less likely to join the brand’s community.

Creating compelling brand stories is an important aspect of any marketing manager’s job; after all, these narratives help drive sales. Care must be taken when crafting narratives however, since consumers use these as the basis of their authenticity assessments, and brands deemed inauthentic are penalized.

The purpose of this study is to modify the service quality scale (SERVQUAL) for measuring the performance of Islamic banks after modifying and validating it to fit the Islamic banking context. Furthermore, it provides insights for the limitations good service delivery has on maintaining favorable provider’s satisfaction in Islamic banks under conditions when category attitudes have been disrupted and made salient by major disruptive events.

Focus groups (managers of Islamic banks) were conducted to develop context-specific service quality measures. Exploratory factor analysis and CFA have been conducted to test the validity of scales developed and questionnaires were then sent to Islamic banking customers of major Islamic banks in Egypt for testing the relationships between the research variables and hypotheses developed.

The findings of this study are two-fold; identifying a service quality dimension not previously identified in extant service quality measures (SERVQUAL, CARTER), devotion to customers and alerts brand managers that harm to category attitudes caused by societal-level disruptive events can make it difficult to gain high satisfaction even with superior customer service. In this disruptive event context, although high service quality is associated with brand satisfaction, brand satisfaction seems unexpectedly dampened by category attitudes, perhaps, due to the general malaise felt toward the category following the disruptive events.

Islamic institutions are alerted to the heightened need for providing superior service, as even superior service may no longer assure high satisfaction. Extrapolating to an even bigger societal disruptor, in the soon-to-come post-COVID-19 world, category attitudes toward walk-in banking services will be in turmoil and highly salient. So, brand managers will need to develop creative ways to strengthen not just brand attitudes but also to re-stabilize category attitudes if the category is to recover.

This is considered a pioneer study in using mixed methods to re-think the famous SERVQUAL scale in a unique context and relating findings to impacts of disruptive events on attitude toward Islamic banking.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the growing, and multifaceted, role for events within destination shopping centres. With particular focus upon The Gruffalo experience (GE)—a three week pop-up experiential children’s activation—the study offers insights and provides a conceptual framework, relating to the emerging and future role of events.

The study emerged from a privileged opportunity to research The GE, enabling a visitor questionnaire survey (n=1,305), using a non-probability sample, and four in-depth interviews, which were extended by an additional seven respondents.

There is a noteworthy role for events as “enlivenment”; attractors to increase visitation, repeat visitation and equally to impact dwell time and boost footfall and sales for tenants. The study revealed a need for a developed event portfolio, with various fundamental tensions relating to objectives, tenants, integration with wider strategy and customer experience.

By interlinking events with shopping, re-visitation intention is improved and therefore not only does it deliver short-term return but longer-term payback. The vast assortment of events, and stakeholders, means a strategic and reflective approach is required. A limitation of the study is that there is limited existing research on this topic upon which to compare the overall findings, or specifically the survey data and analysis.

This early research study into events within destination shopping centres has revealed a prolific and advantageous, but also emerging and intricate, relationship. There is an absence of extant literature and therefore this paper makes a notable contribution to this unfolding area.

Fashion subscription service is a newly emerged retailing model that provides an innovative way of shopping to meet consumers’ fashion needs. From the perspective of innovation adoption, the purpose of this paper is to provide an insight of consumers’ perceptions as well as adoption intention of this innovative retailing format.

This research is qualitative in nature, utilizing focus group study approach. In this paper, content analysis was applied to analyze the data.

While possessing varying degrees of knowledge about fashion subscription retailing, the participants shared the following perceptions of relative advantages, including convenience, personalization, consumer excitement, opportunities to try new styles, and opportunity to better manage their apparel budget. Concerns mainly focused on missing social shopping experiences and the hassle in the cancellation process. The overall adoption intention was high.

Due to the nature of this research, the sample size was limited and results may not be generalized. This research paid less attention to individual differences, in terms of demographic and psychographic characteristics.

Future marketing could focus more on educating consumers about the attributes of the services they provide. Retailers can strategically leverage the positively perceived advantages in their marketing communications to enhance consumers’ adoption intention of their services.

The paper fills a gap in the literature on consumer behavior toward fashion subscription retailing and sheds light for companies in their endeavors to excel in this new retailing venue.

Considering the central role of narratives in the articulation of the self, processing experiences and conveying meaning, many scholars in marketing and consumer behaviours have tried to study the subject. This pool of multi-disciplinary studies has yielded fragmented literature resulting in ambiguity. Therefore there is a need for an article, which studies the extant literature comprehensively. Hence, this paper aims to pursue two objectives, to summarize prominent research studies in consumption narratives and to suggest directions for future research.

The paper reviews 25 key studies on consumption narratives and highlights their most important contributions, methods and findings.

As in consumer narrative research, the concept almost always has been borrowed from different domains, the findings suggest a concise definition to fill this gap. Also, to enrich the findings, three-level of consumption narratives are discussed.

This paper serves as a basis to comprehend the essence of consumption narratives in the consumption context, to understand the research gaps and provides directions for future research.

Considerando el papel central de las narrativas en la formulación de uno mismo, el procesamiento de las experiencias y la transmisión de significados, muchos académicos en marketing y comportamiento del consumidor han tratado de estudiar este tópico. Este conjunto de estudios de carácter multidisciplinar ha dado lugar a una literatura muy fragmentada y ambigua. Por tanto, se hace necesario un trabajo de investigación que estudie de menara exhaustiva la extensa literatura existente. En definitiva, este artículo persigue dos objetivos, resumir las investigaciones más destacadas sobre narrativas de consumo existentes en la literatura y sugerir orientaciones para futuras investigaciones.

Este artículo revisa 25 estudios clave sobre narrativas de consumo y resalta sus contribuciones, métodos y hallazgos más relevantes.

Teniendo en cuenta que en la investigación sobre narrativas de consumo el concepto ha sido casi siempre tomado de diferentes ámbitos, los hallazgos sugieren una delimitación conceptual más concisa para cubrir este vacío. Asimismo, para enriquecer los resultados se analizan tres niveles de narrativas de consumo.

Este artículo sirve de base para comprender la esencia de las narrativas de consumo en el contexto del consumo, entender las brechas de investigación que aún existen en este ámbito y proporcionar guías para futuras investigaciones.

考虑到叙事在自我表达、处理体验感受和传达意义方面的中心作用, 许多营销学者和消费者行为学者都试图对这一主题进行研究。由于研究成果横跨多个学科, 而导致文献支离破碎, 造成了歧义。因此, 有必要对现存文献进行综合研究。因此, 本文的研究目标有二, 一是总结当前消费叙事研究的主要成果, 二是为今后的研究指明方向。

本文回顾了关于消费叙事的25个主要研究, 并强调了它们最重要的贡献、方法和发现。

由于之前的消费者叙事研究中, 消费者叙事的概念几乎总是从不同的领域借用, 研究结果提出了一个简明的定义来填补这一空白。此外, 为了丰富研究结果, 本文还讨论了三个层次的消费叙事。

本文作为理解消费语境中消费叙事本质的基础, 来理解研究的差距, 为今后的研究指明方向。

Ind suggests front line employees can be segmented according to their level of brand-supporting performance. His employee typology has not been empirically tested. The paper aims to explore front line employee performance in retail banking, and profile employee types.

Attitudinal and demographic data from a sample of 404 front line service employees in a leading Irish bank informs a typology of service employees.

Champions, Outsiders and Disruptors exist within retail banking. The authors provide an employee profile for each employee type. They found Champions amongst males, and older employees. The highest proportion of female employees surveyed were Outsiders. Disruptors were more likely to complain, and rated their performance lower than any other employee type. Contrary to extant literature, Disruptors were more likely to hold a permanent contract than other employee types.

The authors augment the literature by providing insights about the profile of three employee types: Brand Champions, Outsiders and Disruptors. Moreover, the authors postulate the influence of leadership and commitment on each employee type. The cluster profiles raise important questions for hiring, training and rewarding front line banking employees. The authors also provide guidelines for managers to encourage Champions, and curtail Disruptors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons for the discontinuation of sports sponsor–sponsee relationships and categorize them. Despite the negative outcomes of a sponsorship dissolution, research on this topic is rather scarce.

The paper relies on an analysis of 24 historical cases and 19 in-depth interviews focusing on the Dutch soccer league. Several sponsorship disruptors are identified and clustered into four categories.

The four categories for sponsorship dissolution are the following: sponsor-related factors, sponsee-related factors, inter-relational factors and external factors. In total, ten sponsorship disruptors are identified: insufficient value creation, objectives achieved, sports results, signal to society, exclusivity, negativity, personal relationship, changed marketing strategy, financial situation and legislation and regulation.

This study primarily investigates soccer sponsorship cases. Future research could investigate other sponsorship areas, which could yield different reasons for sponsorship termination.

Practitioners are advised to view the sponsorship relationship as a strategic alliance, rather than a resource, from the beginning of the sponsorship. A solid relational framework is needed, which is built around the elements of trust, commitment and collaborative communication. If such a foundation does not exist or has eroded, the sponsorship relationship is fragile and can be endangered by various factors.

This study uses inductive reasoning to devise a framework that enables sponsees to anticipate when sponsors are likely to discontinue their sponsorship such that the sponsees can take actions accordingly. Apart from validating existing reasons for sponsorship dissolution, this research also presents novel and previously undiscovered sponsorship disruptors.