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The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of e-tail brand experience on e-brand trust and e-brand loyalty. The study also tests whether gender moderates this influence.

In all, 429 responses were collected using both offline and online survey methods. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling techniques were performed to test the measurement and structural models using SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 20.0 statistical software.

Empirical results confirm the impact of e-tail brand experience on e-brand trust and e-brand loyalty. Gender was found to moderate the relationships. It was further found that e-tail brand experience developed almost same levels of e-brand trust in both males and females. However, males became more loyal to e-tail brands when they received positive e-tail brand experiences.

E-tail brand managers should focus on the design and delivery of unique e-tail brand experiences to develop e-brand trust and e-brand loyalty in customers. The direct influence of e-tail brand experience on e-brand loyalty was found to be weaker in females, which suggests that managers could take steps to specifically deliver experiences that please female customers which might result in increased e-brand loyalty of this segment.

Examining the phenomenon of brand experience in context of online retail while considering gender as moderator highlights the originality and contribution of the present study to existing retail and brand experience literature.

This study aims to identify the structural relationships among the drivers of lovemarks (mystery, sensuality, intimacy, trust, reputation and performance), lovemarks (brand love and brand respect) and loyalty of a name-brand coffee shop.

To this end, a self-administered questionnaire survey was conducted, and after eliminating the outliers, a total of 401 data were analyzed using the SPSS and AMOS statistical packages.

The results of the current study indicate that both customers’ brand love and respect are positively related to their brand loyalty and sensuality, intimacy, trust among drivers of lovemarks directly affecting their brand loyalty, suggesting that the theory of lovemarks is useful to understand the process of generating brand loyalty. Moreover, it was revealed that reputation and performance are significant antecedents of brand respect, while mystery, sensuality and intimacy are important to explain brand love.

The present research informed that effectively dealing with two constituents of lovemarks (brand love and brand respect) are of utmost importance in building patrons’ brand loyalty. In addition, patrons’ cognitive and emotional experiences should be improved to boost the level of loyalty for a name-brand coffee shop.

This study made a contribution to the literature by conceptually and empirically evaluating lovemarks’ dimensions simultaneously in the name-brand coffee shop environment. In addition, this research was the first attempt to explicate loyalty formation for a name-brand coffee shop by using the lovemarks theory.

The purpose of this study is to assess the mediating role of brand trust and commitment in the relationship of brand engagement and brand experience with brand loyalty in the online service context.

To achieve the study’s objective, 414 users of virtual service brands, predominantly in the online banking, airline and hotel sectors, were surveyed.

Both brand engagement and experience exert direct effects on brand trust and commitment, as well as indirect effects on brand commitment (via brand trust) and service brand loyalty (via brand commitment).

This paper adds to the literature by incorporating brand engagement, experience, trust and commitment into a unifying framework. The framework emphasizes brand trust and commitment’s mediating role in the relationship that brand engagement and experience share with brand commitment and loyalty in the online service context.

Marketers should formulate online brand engagement and experience strategies that strengthen customer brand trust and commitment, which are expected to exert a significant brand loyalty-enhancing effect.

Brand engagement and experience were validated as key drivers of brand trust and commitment, thereby further substantiating their role as important strategic metrics. Moreover, the role of commitment as a mediating factor in the association between brand engagement and experience and their respective impact on brand loyalty has been verified. Although the findings suggest that improved brand engagement/experience contributes to brand loyalty, this effect transpires only though brand commitment.

This paper examines the development of customer-based brand equity through communication consistency in a luxury hotel segment. Communication consistency is considered as a basic principle of the integrated marketing communications (IMC) approach.

The empirical research was conducted among 223 guests during their stay in five-star deluxe luxury hotels in a Mediterranean country. Data are analyzed through the PLS technique and impact-asymmetry analysis.

Communication consistency is found to have a strong positive impact on all brand equity dimensions, especially on brand trust, brand image and perceived quality. The impact-asymmetry analysis further revealed negatively asymmetric relationships between communication consistency and six out of seven brand equity dimensions, except for affective commitment.

Some restrictions related to the measurement scales should be mitigated in future research.

Communication consistency is confirmed as a core management practice in luxury hotel business. Marketing professionals operating in this industry are therefore confronted with increasing challenges of efficient management of IMC.

This work addresses several research calls from the most recent marketing and hospitality literature. The analysis of the impact of communication consistency has extended our knowledge on the potential of IMC in creation of a strong brand. Obtained insights into the shape of the relationship between communication consistency and seven different brand equity dimensions help to better understand the process of brand equity building in a luxury hotel setting.

This article investigates the factors in customer engagement with electronic brand (e-brand) communities and the mechanism behind their effects. The aim is to investigate the influence of various characteristics of e-brand communities on customer engagement, satisfaction through brand loyalty, and Recommendation.

A survey questionnaire was administered to 320 Facebook users in Pakistan. The aim is to investigate the influence of various characteristics of e-brand communities on customer engagement, satisfaction through brand loyalty and recommendation. The data were analyzed using PLS-SEM to test a model developed under the stimulus–organism–response perspective.

Each community attribute significantly affected customer engagement, which was further found to mediate the relationship from these attributes through to customer satisfaction and then to brand loyalty and recommendation.

An original model hypothesized from the stimulus–organism–response framework was validated among an emerging market sample, highlighting the role of customer engagement with e-brand communities in mediating the effects of information and service quality on customer satisfaction.

This study aims to investigate how price and other service brand attributes (such as website attractiveness, efficiency, privacy, fulfilment) determine e‐brand promise/reputation and the e‐loyalty of shoppers in an online setting.

Using the convenience sampling method, a survey research was carried out during a two‐day airline exhibition among experienced respondents who had purchased online tickets in the past. To identify what determines online brand reputation and its effect on e‐loyalty, structural equation modelling using the two‐step approach was performed.

Fulfilment and competitive price offers have the most significant impact on e‐loyalty, with a full mediation impact (via online brand reputation), whilst website attractiveness has a partial impact. These simultaneously confirm the role of e‐brand reputation as a mediator construct and its antecedents and its relationship with e‐loyalty.

The mediation impact further increases the strength of brand reputation as a construct when modelling consumer responses in an online setting. In particular, the full indirect impact (price and fulfilment) was able to explain how online brand reputation was formed and brand promise can be achieved.

The practical contribution of the study and its managerial implications can be seen in the context of defining strategy and positioning. By confirming that different brand enactments are found in different settings (for example, price, fulfilment, site's attractiveness), this study offers some insights into a company's site strategic brand positioning and differentiation. For example, appropriate enactments, such as price, fulfilment and the attractiveness of the site, could be addressed when designing and enhancing online brand reputation and e‐loyalty. Sample size limitation and generalisation is limited to within the internet airline setting.

While existing research mainly focuses on the effect of service quality and image attributes of e‐loyalty, the current research focuses on other aspects of brand differentiation – e‐brand reputation and the important influencing elements, such as price and website attractiveness – which hitherto have often been ignored in an online setting. In other words, this study highlights the most important attributes that will help to “meet” the online service brand promise through e‐brand reputation.

This paper aims to measure customer-based brand equity in the context of hotels, and to develop and empirically validate a new scale, named guest-based hotel equity (GBHE), by incorporating the customer perceived value of hotels as a multidimensional construct in addition to its traditional dimensions (i.e. brand awareness and brand image).

A structured and self-administered survey was used, targeting 348 hotel guests who were surveyed about their experience with the last hotel they had stayed in during the previous year. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the research constructs dimensions, unidimensionality, convergent and discriminant validity and composite reliability.

The empirical findings indicate that GBHE is a multidimensional construct with nine dimensions, namely, hotel awareness, hotel overall image and seven dimensions of customer perceived value (i.e. the values of price, quality, self-gratification, aesthetics, prestige, transaction and hedonism). The new scale is found to have excellent psychometric properties; it has demonstrated its predictive power on behavioral intentions.

Although the authors believe that the sample size was reasonable and adequate for conducting CFA analysis, a bigger sample would be better and might increase the robustness of the proposed scale. In addition, to avoid the retrieval failure problem, hotel guests should be surveyed just after their stay in the hotel or not long afterwards. Further, the hotel classification or hotel star rating was not considered in developing and validating the GBHE scale.

The findings of this study provide hotel managers with a new tool to use in assessing the experiential value of the hotel brand equity, other than conventional hotel awareness and brand image. Further, using the multidimensional construct of perceived value provides hotel managers with more insights into what aspects of hotel brand equity they should focus on to influence the behavioral intentions of their guests.

The originality of this research is highlighted in several points. First, it develops and empirically validates a new scale to measure customer-based brand equity in the hotel context, that is, GBHE. Second, it incorporates the customer perceived value of hotels not as a unidimensional construct that is concerned only with cost, but as a multi-dimensional construct which includes in the GBHE scale dimensions that are both cognitive (i.e. of price and quality) and affective (i.e. of self-gratification, aesthetics, prestige, transaction and hedonism) in addition to its traditional dimensions (i.e. brand awareness and brand image). Third, it assesses the predictive power and relative importance of the GBHE dimensions for behavioral intentions (i.e. loyalty to hotels). Finally, no research has been done so far on the brand equity of hotels in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), although it is considered a fertile soil for tourism in the Arabian region.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of product and customer dimensions in the contribution of brand experience to the formation of true brand loyalty. The dimensions included are brand credibility, affective commitment and involvement. Synthesising past studies, the researcher proposes brand credibility and affective commitment to mediate the relationship between brand experience and true brand loyalty. Furthermore, the researcher investigates the variation in hierarchical pattern, i.e. brand experience-brand credibility affective commitment-true brand loyalty, under different levels of involvement.

The variations in hierarchy were compared by design. The authors investigated the variations in hierarchy on the basis of products which belong to different level of involvement, on the basis of individual differences in involvement, and on the basis of the interaction of product involvement and subject involvement. Multi-group invariance tests in SEM were used to explore model variations.

The hierarchy-of-effect model was found to vary based on the level of product involvement, subject involvement and interaction involvement. Three patterns of hierarchy have been observed: the first pattern was observed in high-high groups (both product involvement and subject involvement were high), the second pattern was observed in low-low groups (both product and subject involvements were low) and the third pattern among high-low or low-high groups.

The variation observed highlights the need to segment the market by interaction involvement. This would be useful for managers engaged in building sustainable consumer-brand relationships.

This study considered the interaction of product approach and subject approach in defining involvement which is rarely attempted in research. The study also integrates the variations in the role of customer dimensions, namely involvement, brand credibility and affective commitment with the relationship between the central constructs brand experience and true brand loyalty. The variations observed are among a socio-economically homogeneous sample of respondents.

Authenticity has become increasingly dominant in business practices, particularly in branding and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, as consumers want it in all aspects of their lives. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the role of perceived CSR authenticity in predicting perceived brand loyalty (i.e. brand trust, positive word of mouth [PWOM]) via perceived brand authenticity by considering the moderating effects of brand image on perceived brand authenticity and loyalty to determine its influence in the global branding context.

Using a non-probability convenience sampling technique, this study received 817 responses from consumers who regularly used global brands. Finally, this research examined 734 responses to test the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

This study discovered that perceived CSR authenticity strengthened perceived brand authenticity, which fostered perceived brand loyalty by enhancing brand trust and motivating consumers to spread PWOM about global brands. Similarly, perceived CSR authenticity directly influenced perceived brand loyalty by enhancing brand trust but did not affect PWOM. Likewise, the moderating effect of brand image was significant in fostering perceived brand loyalty by enhancing brand trust, but it had no effect on PWOM. In contrast, the brand image had a significant negative effect on perceived brand authenticity.

This research offered many insightful suggestions to global managers in the manufacturing and service industries that might assist them in designing and implementing several branding strategies to achieve corporate objectives.

This novel research contributes to the attribution theory by examining consumers’ perceptions of CSR authenticity, brand image, brand authenticity and brand loyalty from the global branding perspective.

This study aims to fill various gaps detected in the literature on mass prestige (hereafter referred to as masstige) theory. The originality of the work stems from the multidimensional application of Paul’s (2015) model, the introduction of brand addiction as a construct from the consumer-brand relationship (CBR) theory within the context of wines and the exploration of a new and less studied sector in masstige strategies.

A structured questionnaire was distributed to collect data from masstige wine brand buyers in Portugal, of whom 166 completed the questionnaire correctly. A conceptual model was developed and tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

The findings include that only two dimensions of Paul’s (2015) masstige scale affect brand addiction: brand knowledge and excitement and status. Brand addiction has a positive effect on brand loyalty and electronic word of mouth (eWOM), and brand loyalty has a positive impact on eWOM. Theoretical and managerial implications were explored.

This research added a CBR perspective to masstige theory and applied masstige theory to wine brands for the first time. These three distinctive aspects collectively contribute to the novelty and significance of the research, opening up exciting possibilities for future investigations and providing a valuable contribution to the academic community and the wine industry alike.