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The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into how engineering employees perceive the functional, ethical and political dimensions of the corporate brand and its meaning(s) for other stakeholders.

The paper explores brand meaning and brand attachment in the case of employees in an engineering consultancy firm operating within the defense and artillery systems sector. In-depth interviews with managers and consultants at a cross-section of organizational levels along with thematic and reflexive interpretation of qualitative data have been carried out.

Identity-based definitions of the brand, the definitions of a “strong engineering brand”, associations of the corporate brand with engineers’ personal brands, brand essence and integration and the meanings of a military brand have all been raised, explored and discussed from the engineer’s perspective.

This paper is among the first of its kind to pursue brand research in an engineering-intensive firm with military and defense brand associations. Future research is encouraged to add further detail and verification to the themes and findings of this paper.

The military context is enmeshed with high levels of sensitivity and difficult research access particularly upon brand-related academic research. This has led in part to very limited marketing and branding knowledge into this setting despite its significance.

Given that the engineering consulting sectors are among the top drivers of employment and knowledge advancement, and given that brand associations have considerable impacts on employees’ identification, self-awareness and emotional well-being, understanding the dynamism and complexities of employee-brand associations is inevitable in these settings.

The defense context has unique characteristics and has hitherto remained an under-researched context with respect to branding. This is despite that the defense sector deserves to be in the spotlight because professionals’ voices are rarely heard and acknowledged within the branding literature.

Provides an example of a firm’s use of distinguishing product attributes to engineer and nurture strong consumer‐brand relationships. Ty Inc., manufacturer of the popular Beanie Babies brand, has effectively engineered the brand to incorporate attributes of nostalgic value, personification, uniqueness, facilitation, engagement, aesthetic appeal, quality/excellence, association, social visibility and image congruence, and price risk. By incorporating these attributes and actively nurturing consumer‐brand relationships, Ty has benefited from greater customer satisfaction, which has led to higher purchase volumes, brand loyalty, and positive word‐of‐mouth communications. The straightforward methodology used to examine customer perceptions of Beanie Babies involved asking respondents to rate Beanie Babies on the ten characteristics associated with high‐involvement, relationship‐prone products. The same measurement approach could be easily replicated by managers of other firms to evaluate the relational potency of their own brands.

This issue of Retail Insights focuses on the subject of branding. There are a number of retail reports that offer valuable insights into current trends in branding. Professor Leslie de Chernatony analyses UK consumers’ attitudes towards brand extensions in a survey commissioned by Ventura. The Brand Finance Report for 1999 provides interesting reading on brand values and the overall performance of companies last year. In addition, there are a collection of shorter reports on various new branding issues and abstracts of articles on the topic.

This paper presents a holistic review of the literature related to business process re‐engineering (BPR). It reviews some definitions of BPR and clarifies confusion around its concepts, traces the evolution of BPR and identifies its main drivers, and discusses issues of integrating BPR with TQM, benchmarking and change management. It then provides a strategic view of BPR implementation, conceptualises the major role of IT in BPR, reviews BPR approaches, methodologies, techniques and software tools, and discusses the scope of BPR and level of radicalness as indicators of degree of change. Aspects of improving business through BPR and the impacts of IT‐enabled change on organisations are identified and, finally, current and future development of BPR concepts and practice are also reviewed.

To demonstrate how a company's retail store design relates to its brand and is influenced by, and contributes to, its corporate values.

The case study briefly summarises the significance of corporate values, branding and design in the retail industry, and subsequently explores The Body Shop's application of these elements to its business. The case study is contextualised by The Body Shop's retail environment forming a particularly important communication channel for the company.

The Body Shop has in many ways been the victim of its own success. Being a unique proposition, and having effectively created its own retail category, it has appeared slow to evolve its brand identity. The strong association between the company and its campaigning founder, increasing competition and changing consumer attitudes, have been significant factors in the company's struggle to re‐align and update its brand.

The case study largely draws on secondary sources. However, it is informed by one of the authors' experience and knowledge of The Body Shop's design process, which has previously remained unpublished.

The problems of planning and managing store design as a communications channel are highlighted. In particular, it demonstrates the difficulties in aligning a retailer's visual identity with its brand and market.

The case study examines the under‐researched relationship between retail branding and design, and contributes to knowledge of the problems created over time by strongly held ethical values, for both branding and design.

A new pendant controller is one of the results from a 12‐month development programme at Pressflow Automation. Presents three case studies illustrating the different benefits which three plastic moulders have derived from use of robotics.

The purpose of this study, which draws on the stimulus organism response (S-O-R) theory, is to empirically examine the effect of brand coolness on communal brand connection and brand commitment, while assessing how the latter fosters brand trust and loyalty among smartphone users.

Data are collected from 410 smartphone users in Ghana and analyzed with Smart-PLS utilizing the structural equations modeling technique.

The study's findings show that consumers' perceptions of brand coolness have a positive influence on their communal brand connection and brand commitment. The study also discovers that brand commitment influences brand loyalty, whereas communal brand connection influences brand commitment, loyalty and trust, respectively. Similarly, brand commitment and communal brand connection are identified as important mediating variables in the relationship between brand coolness and both brand loyalty and brand trust.

The study underlines the significance of developing cool brand images and communicating same effectively to current and prospective customers, along with other stakeholders.

The study highlights the fact that properly creating cool brands can lead to increased communal brand connection, brand commitment, and, consequently, brand trust and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of a corporate brand on consumer satisfaction and ascertain which corporate brand attributers had the most influential effects on consumer satisfaction.

Using a multiple regression method and an Australian sample of 235 consumers, this paper tests a relationship between consumer-perceived corporate brand and consumer satisfaction.

The results demonstrate that a corporate brand acts as a critical predictor of consumer satisfaction thus providing support for the research proposition. The three components of consumer value (functional, emotional and symbolic) were found to be critical and consistent predictors of consumer satisfaction. Corporate associations and core organizational values were also found to be the drivers of consumer satisfaction.

Although the cross-sectional nature of data collection method limits the data to a single point in time; this research contributes important insights into the factors affecting one of the key performance indicators such as consumer satisfaction.

The findings have important implications for a corporate branding strategy implementation and effective corporate brand communications that can be employed for enhancing the relationship with the existing consumers as well as acquiring new consumers.

Consumer satisfaction has primarily been studied as a mediator through which a brand impacts on consumer loyalty. This paper extends existing research by considering a corporate brand as an antecedent and a driver of consumer satisfaction. To address the disparity between operationalisation and conceptualisation of the corporate brand construct, this study maintains a corporate brand is a multidimensional construct and measures it accordingly.

Reports the results of the first stage of research (in progress, 1997‐2000), which aims to develop an understanding of the challenges facing publishers who have entered the children’s multimedia market in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings of the first stage of the research amongst established UK publishers producing multimedia for children are described. These point to a number of factors that appear to be critical to the success of publishers in the multimedia market: modification of corporate culture, internal structures and processes; branding of the company’s chosen multimedia identity; focusing on the added value element of multimedia products; promotion of organisational learning, innovation and creativity within the company; and sourcing necessary skills effectively. A second study will examine the perceptions of new media companies which have entered this market.