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Previous research warns against low-fit extensions as prone to causing negative spillover and, through it, harming the parent brand equity. Using the theory of schema-triggered affect and the link formation hypothesis, the purpose of this paper is to develop and tests predictions as to how negative spillover from low-fit extensions can be actively managed through repeated ad exposure.

A controlled experiment assesses the response of US consumers to the Dutch Heineken brand, a top 100 global brand, following sequential and repeated exposure to print ads depicting extensions for either Heineken wheat beer (i.e. a high-fit extension) or Heineken pretzels (i.e. a low-fit extension). Analytical methods include multiple regression, ANOVA, and t-tests.

The findings show that repeated ad exposure has a positive moderating effect on the magnitude of spillover from extension to brand. Second, the findings also show that repeated ad exposure changes the valence of spillover from low-fit extension to brand from negative to positive. In combination, the findings suggest that low-fit brand extensions can, when carefully managed, be a viable strategic option for market growth that is especially relevant for global brands.

This research shows that repeated ad exposure can change the valence of spillover from low-fit extensions to the parent brand from negative to positive. Future research should extend the work by considering other brands and alternative tools that managers can use to make low-fit extensions a viable strategic choice.

This study finds, in contrast to previous research, that managers should indeed consider low-fit brand extensions as a viable strategic option for brand growth. This is possible because the findings show that repeated ad exposure can be used to control potential negative spillover from a low-fit extension to parent brand. This conclusion is particularly relevant for global brands, i.e. brands for which the opportunity costs of limiting global expansion and the financial investment necessary to establish a new brand with global appeal are substantial.

This paper differs from other spillover studies by manipulating repeated ad exposure, a mechanism which the authors theoretically link to spillover and which managers can also directly influence. In doing so, this paper offers a theoretical explanation and an empirical test of how negative spillover from low-fit extensions can be managed.

The present study sheds light on the role of strategic orientations (SOs) in explaining business growth. The purpose of this paper is to examine how different SOs, namely learning orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation and brand orientation simultaneously affect business performance measured with brand performance, market performance and business growth in SME context and whether these effects vary across countries.

An extensive data set of 1,120 effective responses is collected from two European countries, namely Hungary, representing a post socialist rapidly growing market, and Finland with a stable, highly developed and competitive economy. A multigroup moderation analysis is conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis is used in testing measurement invariance, subsequently followed by structural equation modeling procedure used in testing research hypotheses developed on the basis of a literature review.

The results show that entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation and brand orientation have a positive effect on business growth in SMEs in both Hungary and Finland through brand and market performance. With regard to learning orientation, a positive yet somewhat weak effect on growth is found only in the Hungarian sample. The moderation analysis reveals that country moderates several of the hypothesized paths from SOs to business performance.

Prior studies on SOs have mainly focussed on single orientations at any given time. However, researchers increasingly argue that many firms are better off if they build their strategies on multiple SOs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first empirical studies to address multiple (four) SOs in the same research model. Furthermore, little is known about if and how the performance effects of different SOs vary across countries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between brand orientation and business growth in business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The authors also explore whether this relationship is moderated by internal firm-related factors (firm age, firm size) and/or external market-related factors (market life cycle, industry type).

The authors develop and empirically test a conceptual model using data from 396 B2B SMEs operating in Finland. Structural equation modeling is used for testing the research hypotheses.

Brand orientation contributes to business growth via two indirect paths, the first one going through brand performance and the second one going through brand performance and customer relationship performance. However, although the effects are positive, the results reveal that the regression coefficients are relatively small, implying only a limited impact of brand orientation on growth among B2B SMEs. The results further suggest that firm age, firm size and industry type moderate the brand performance–business growth relationship, whereas market life cycle moderates the effect of brand orientation on brand performance.

Future research could extend this study by examining brand orientation in industrial markets simultaneously with alternative strategic orientations, such as market, technology and innovation orientation. New moderator variables should also be considered, such as market or technological turbulence. Furthermore, given that this study uses a cross-sectional data set, it is recommended that future research should attempt to test the model using longitudinal data sets.

B2B SMEs are able to gain business growth through developing a strong brand. However, brand orientation per se appears to be of limited relevance for such an endeavor. Consequently, managers of small industrial firms should consider brand orientation only with, and in comparison to, alternative strategic orientations.

Brand orientation has been very rarely examined from the perspective of B2B firms or that of SMEs. Interestingly, the findings indicate that the performance benefits of brand orientation seem to be smaller among B2B SMEs than what earlier research would imply. The analysis of moderation effects offers additional insights into whether there are differences between industrial SMEs as to the relevance of brand orientation.

Despite prior studies, little has been done to understand the advertising carry-over effect. The purpose of this study is to investigate the heterogeneous attributes of the carry-over effect by focusing on the differences between franchise and non-franchise firms.

The data were retrieved from the Compustat database and annual corporate financial reports (10-K) for five representative franchise industries from 1980 to 2009. Ultimately, 185 firms were included and 1,592 firm-year observations were analysed. This study used a Panel VAR (Vector Autoregression) to examine the effects of advertising on firm performance. We can control endogenous effects using Panel VAR, which also allows us to control unobserved firm-specific heterogeneity.

This study found that advertising had no effect on sales growth or brand equity in the long run for non-franchise firms and further confirmed that non-franchise firms incur agency costs. In contrast, the effect of advertising on sales growth and brand equity was significant for franchise firms. A carry-over effect of advertising on brand equity was detected for franchise firms, but sales growth rapidly decreased after two years.

Even though franchise firms retain the carry-over effect of advertising on brand equity, franchisors should carefully monitor market trends and their sales growth because sales growth rapidly decreased after two years.

This study incorporated the concepts of the delayed response effect and the customer holdover effect to better understand the advertising carry-over effect. From the results, this study proposed a more detailed concept of carry-over effects for further studies. From this perspective, this study makes both academic and industrial contributions.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the effects of advertising based on economic cycles. To comprehend advertising effects in the restaurant industry from an economic cycle perspective, this study investigated both short- and long-run advertising effects under periods of economic contraction and expansion and compared those effects between the two economic periods.

The data were collected from the COMPUSTAT database for the restaurant industry (SIC 5,812) from 1979 to 2010. To estimate the economic cycles, the 2005 year-based real gross domestic product (GDP) was used from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Also, all variables were depreciated by the value of the US dollar in 2005. For estimation, a single equation error correction model was used to examine the short-term and long-term effects of advertising.

The results of this study indicated that both the short- and long-term effects of advertising on sales growth were more obvious in contraction periods than in expansion periods. However, the short-run effects of advertising on brand equity did not significantly differ between expansion and contraction periods. Further, the long-term effects of advertising on brand equity were greater in expansion periods than in contraction periods. The findings suggest that restaurant firms should not reduce their advertising budgets during periods of economic contraction to take advantage of superior sales growth outcomes during these periods.

The results of this study provide restaurant managers with useful practical implications. During economic contraction periods, restaurant managers should not reduce advertising budgets to take an ascendant position in terms of sales growth. Though the net positive effect at year t + 1 of contraction periods was smaller than that of expansion periods for sales growth, this is temporal and the long-run positive effect on sales growth spreads into future periods. Thus, a counter-cyclical advertising strategy could compensate for reduced sales from weak customer demands during economic contraction periods.

There have been many empirical studies on the advertising effect in the literature. However, this study examined whether the effects of advertising differ between economic expansion and contraction periods. This specificity is helpful for industrial practitioners as well as academic researchers.

This research examines the effect of team diversity on customer behavior (purchase likelihood) associated with sustainable luxury products and further considers the mediating role of customer skepticism and the moderating role of the growth mindset in these relationships.

Study 1 aims to confirm the direct effect of team diversity on purchase intention and the mediating effect of customer skepticism. Featuring a fictitious brand, Study 2 seeks to test the moderating effects of a growth mindset. This research recruits participants located in the USA who have shopping experiences with a luxury product.

The findings support the notion that team diversity can mitigate customers' skepticism while enhancing purchase likelihood. Moreover, this effect is stronger among those with a growth mindset. As such, the findings suggest that communicating the heterogeneous composition of team members can benefit sustainable luxury brands.

Underpinned by the signaling theory and incremental theory, this research examines the effects of team diversity on customer behavior (purchase likelihood) related to sustainable luxury products, as well as the role of customer skepticism (as a mediator) and a growth mindset (as a moderator) in these relationships. Thus, the findings broaden the current diversity research which has predominantly focused on team decision-making and performance.

Consumers subscribe to different mindsets or implicit theories of personality malleability, namely, fixed and growth mindsets. This study aims to investigate how and why consumers’ mindsets can influence their word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions toward a brand and the consequent implications for a brand’s personality.

Three mall-intercept studies and one online study demonstrate the influence of consumers’ fixed and growth mindsets on their WOM intentions. The first two mall-intercept studies identify motivations underlying consumers’ WOM intentions as a function of their mindset orientations. The third mall-intercept study examines the implications of such mindset-oriented WOM intentions for a brand’s personality dimension and the underlying psychological mechanism. The fourth study tests the link between WOM intent and behavior.

Results show that fixed (growth) mindset individuals exhibit greater WOM intentions than growth (fixed) mindset individuals for motives of “impression management” (“learning and information acquisition”). Findings further demonstrate that brands that exhibit dual personality dimensions simultaneously, one salient and the other non-salient at any instant, garner equivalent WOM intentions from both fixed and growth mindset individuals, contingent on the fit between the salient brand personality dimension and the dominant consumer mindset. Finally, using a real brand, it can be seen that WOM intentions actually translate into behavior.

The study measures offline WOM intent but not offline WOM behavior.

This study sheds new light on branding strategy by demonstrating how and why dual-brand personalities may attract consumers with both kinds of implicit self-theory orientations. Relatedly, it also demonstrates a technique of framing ad-appeals that support the dual-brand personality effect.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to propose and demonstrate the use of simultaneous dual-brand personalities as an optimal branding strategy.

Due to increased health concerns, restaurant customers rely more on credible cues that indirectly represent health-related credence quality. To comprehensively understand the dynamics between credence cues and restaurant delivery with different infection risks, this study aims to investigate changes in cue utilization during the pandemic.

Data on delivery sales, brand and review rating between 2019 and the first half of 2020 were obtained from Meituan. Fixed-effects estimation was used to investigate 579,858 restaurant observations across 338 cities in China.

Health concerns significantly increased the use of restaurant delivery and the increased delivery sales remained steady even after infection risk was reduced. However, cue utilization in restaurant delivery substantially changed depending on inflection risk. In the pandemic-spreading period, the sales effect of the brand increased while that of review rating decreased. The decreased effect of review rating was recovered in the pandemic-flattening period, whereas the abnormal brand effect continued only when branded restaurants had a high rating.

The findings demonstrate the selective and contextual nature of cue utilization in the restaurant delivery setting. These characteristics are also manifested in a health crisis from a credence cue perspective.

The findings demonstrate the selective and contextual nature of cue utilization in the restaurant delivery setting. These characteristics are also manifested in a health crisis from a credence cue perspective. Further, this study re-conceptualizes credence quality and cues, considering their roles in risk management. The findings help develop risk management strategies based on customers’ usage patterns of credence cues in health crises.

The dynamics between credence cues and restaurant delivery has not been comprehensively investigated, especially when infection risk changes. This study delivers theoretical and practical contributions about how to use credence cues in the restaurant business amid health crises.