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Women in many countries are breaking through the gender barrier and are working in positions where they have a major impact on the buying and selling activities in business-to-business relationships. A number of studies have investigated the role gender plays in driving perceptions of sales representatives in the USA, however, little research has been undertaken on this important topic in China, one of the largest and most influential countries. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the gender of both the buyer and seller, affects perceptions of expertise, trust and loyalty in business relationships.

A survey instrument was developed, tested and used on individuals with purchasing responsibility in China. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in the pre-test and the final study data to develop and refine measurement instruments, assessing construct validity, identifying method effects and evaluating factor variance across groups. Independent t-tests were used to compare male and female buyers on their evaluation of sales reps.

The results indicate that the gender of the sales person does not seem to be a consideration for male buyers in evaluating reps in any of the variables tested. However, female buyers consistently give less favorable evaluations to female sales people than male sales representatives. The possible implications of these findings are discussed.

First, this research uses a quantitative methodology in both the collection and analysis of the data. Thus, future studies may want to use a qualitative data set to gain a more in-depth understanding of the business-to-business relationships between men and women in the workplace. Also, as the study was concentrated on a relatively small number of business professionals from only one area in China, subsequently researchers should consider increasing the geographic domain where respondents are sampled, to help improve the generalizability of the results.

The gender bias by female buyers found in this study has several important implications for businesses in China. Specifically, the suggests that female buyers may carry with them a “collective negative bias” against other women, in this case, female sales reps. The solution to this problem is not to avoid assigning female sales reps to female buyers, rather, it is to change the negative collective social-esteem identity preconceptions. Organizations can do this through training by making women aware of their own predisposition to unfairly evaluate women that they interact with in the workplace.

It has been argued that gender plays a small role in perceptions of sales representatives in buyer-seller relationships. While this seems to be true in the USA, it has not (until now) been empirically tested in China. Somewhat surprisingly, the gender differences we did uncover are not from male buyers in their assessments, but from female buyers in their evaluation of women sales representatives. This result provides some interesting insight into Chinese business relationships and how some women in positions of power are more critical of other women within their sphere of influence.

The purpose of this paper is to test a model that examines whether the “meets expectations” and “affective feeling state” perspectives of satisfaction are distinct constructs in a cross‐product group setting with products that have disparate levels of consumer involvement, and to test whether the constructs' influence on (re)purchase behavior are (dis)similar across product groups.

New measures were developed for a survey that was administered to mid‐Western US respondents. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test hypotheses that were developed from extant literature.

The study's findings suggest there is external validity that meets expectations and affective feeling state are two distinct constructs, and that while each construct's influence on (re)purchase behavior varies across product groups, the comparative influence differs from what is suggested in extant literature.

Only three brands, each of which is relatively affordable were used in the study and the survey was completed with university students and with respondents from a broad range of age and socio‐economic backgrounds.

This study provides a foundation for future cross‐product group research, and reveals marketers' need to develop strategies with dual goals of meeting consumers' expectations, and developing positive consumer affective feelings.

This study is a benchmark comparative cross‐product group consumer satisfaction study.

The Journal of Product and Brand Management (JPBM) has a 30-year long history. To commemorate the journal’s 30th anniversary, this research paper aims to present a retrospective overview of JPBM.

This research examines the performance of the research constituents, social structure and intellectual structure of scholarly publications produced by JPBM between 1992 and 2021 using bibliometric analysis.

This research sheds light on the growing influence of JPBM through four major knowledge clusters (themes): strategic brand management; consumer behavior; product development and innovation management; and brand engagement. A temporal analysis of decade-by-decade cataloguing of the JPBM corpus revealed another set of three distinct knowledge clusters (themes): retailing and pricing strategies; marketing communications; and relationship marketing.

Though the state-of-the-art overview herein offers seminal and useful insights about product and brand management research curated by JPBM, which can be used by the editorial board and prospective authors to curate and position the novelty of future contributions, it remains limited to the accuracy and availability of bibliographic records acquired from Scopus.

This research advances the internal review and subjective evaluation of the evolution of brand management thinking in JPBM by Veloutsou and Guzmán (2017) with an objective retrospection on the performance and scientific evolution of product and brand management research in JPBM.