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This study aims to examine and compare the influence of the disposition to engage in engagement behaviors on physical and virtual engagement platforms, as well as the influence of these engagement behaviors on brand loyalty, value-in-use and word-of-mouth.

Data were collected using a survey distributed to a random sample of 10,000 fans of five teams in the Swedish top-division of elite football. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to derive a distinction between prevalent platforms, scales were validated through a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was used to test the research model.

Customer disposition to engage with the sports team had a significant influence on customer engagement behaviors on both physical and virtual engagement platforms. However, engagement behaviors on virtual platforms were found to be more important than engagement behaviors on physical platforms for fostering brand loyalty and value-in-use.

The results highlight the importance of engagement behaviors with a brand on virtual engagement platforms. Thus, brand managers should prioritize their presence on social media to generate the positive outcomes of customer engagement behaviors.

By examining the effects of customer engagement behaviors on both physical and virtual engagement platforms, this study provides new insights to the emerging customer engagement literature.

Retail marketers use brand communities (BCs) on social media (SM) to create digital engagement and reach new customers. However, this marketing form needs perceived content vividness and enduring involvement with products. The purpose of this study compares digital engagement (measured as an intention to recommend a retail brand online) produced by BCs of retailers at three levels of cognitive load (measured as exposure time to website).

Online quasi-experiments were conducted to analyze how SM platforms with diverse levels of enduring involvement with products, perceived content vividness and cognitive load influence digital engagement.

Results show enduring involvement with products produced digital engagement. In addition, cognitive load produced an inverted U-shaped effect on digital engagement in the condition of high content vividness (perceived). In the low content vividness condition, cognitive load produced similar or greater positive effects on digital engagement than those produced in the high content vividness condition.

The study implies a willingness to recommend online serves as a proxy of digital engagement failing to capture the reciprocal activities from the firms to customers. It also assumes that measuring product importance and usage frequency of the product serve as proxies of enduring involvement failing to capture the hedonic motivations related to products.

Practitioners should prioritize enduring involvement with products over perceived content vividness to improve digital engagement and reach new customers through their BCs on SM platforms. In addition, managers should use SM with content perceived with low vividness to improve digital engagement.

The study shows the influence of enduring involvement with products on digital engagement. It supports applying the resource-matching theory in SM platforms. It offers an alternative operationalization of constructs. The study compares multiple products and SM platforms providing empirical evidence of distinct levels of content vividness between SM platforms, not considered in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transformation of the perspective applied to distribution structures in the late 1900s. This change implied that the previous focus on channel management by a channel captain was abandoned because of changes in the business reality. This perspective was replaced by models and concepts featuring collaboration and joint coordination between actors and relationships embedded in networks.

Changes of perspectives on phenomena are assumed to occur through the dynamic interplay between business reality, the conceptualisation of this reality and the managerial recommendations derived from this conceptualisation. The study is based on a thorough longitudinal literature review.

Shifts of perspectives occur when there is an increasing mismatch between the current business reality and mainstream conceptualisations. In this transformation, new constructs are required to illustrate new aspects of the business reality, exemplified in the study by interaction and networks. Some established concepts lose their significance, illustrated by the channel captain. Others may be re-interpreted, as is the case with the power concept. The study also shows that “forgotten” conceptualisations can be re-wakened, exemplified by the view of distribution structures as network constellations. In turn, these changes in the conceptualisation of distribution impact the managerial recommendations.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, there are no previous studies analysing how the perspective on a certain phenomenon changes through the dynamic interplay between business reality, conceptualisations and managerial recommendations.

The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies in creating value by outlining a customer‐based approach to service. The customer's logic is examined in‐depth as being the foundation of a customer‐dominant (CD) marketing and business logic.

The authors argue that both the goods‐ and service‐dominant logic are provider‐dominant. Contrasting the provider‐dominant logic with CD logic, the paper examines the creation of service value from the perspectives of value‐in‐use, the customer's own context, and the customer's experience of service.

Moving from a provider‐dominant logic to a CD logic uncovered five major challenges to service marketers: company involvement, company control in co‐creation, visibility of value creation, scope of customer experience, and character of customer experience.

The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implications for research and practice.

Awareness of the mechanisms of customer logic will provide businesses with new perspectives on the role of the company in their customers' lives. It is proposed that understanding the customer's logic should represent the starting‐point for the company's marketing and business logic.

The paper increases the understanding of how the customer's logic underpins the CD business logic. By exploring consequences of applying a CD logic, further directions for theoretical and empirical research are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the brand impact of consumer knowledge regarding a common supplier and shared product specifications between manufacturer and private label brands.

The study uses three fast‐moving consumer goods in an experimental setting.

The study finds that knowledge about common sourcing and shared specification decreases perceptual gaps between private labels and manufacturer brands and improves attitudes towards the retailer.

The study uses a student sample, although all product categories and brands tested are popular with this demographic, and they are a key target market for the tested industries.

Manufacturer brands that supply private labels need to make sure that this information does not reach consumers and/or ensure their own brand version remains superior to the private label. Retailers that use well‐known manufacturer brands as suppliers of their high‐quality private labels might wish to share this information with customers as a means of improving attitudes towards the private label and retailer brands.

This paper builds on earlier platform sharing research and shows the dangers and opportunities of sharing product specification across brands with differing reputations and prices.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This paper aims to empirically examine the brand impact of intra‐brand platform sharing.

The study uses two real platform‐sharing examples from the automobile and consumer electronics industries in an experimental setting.

The study finds that intra‐brand platform sharing caused no damage to brand equity in either setting.

The study uses a student sample, although all product classes and brands tested are popular with this demographic which is a key target market for the tested industries. The study also tests intra‐brand platform sharing where the price differences are 20 percent between higher and lower level platform applications, and the findings may not hold for larger price gaps.

Platform sharing has been shown to damage brand equity in inter‐brand applications, but the current findings suggest that intra‐brand platform sharing is safe for the brand, and allows managers to also benefit from the cost savings in product design, manufacturing and servicing that have made the technique popular.

The paper builds on earlier platform‐sharing research and shows where the technique can be safely practised from the standpoint of protecting brand equity.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to identify, evaluate and structure the research that focusses on omni-channel retailing from the perspective of logistics and supply chain management; and to reveal the intellectual foundation of omni-channel retailing research.

The paper applies a multi-method approach by conducting a content-analysis-based literature review of 70 academic papers. Based on the reference lists of these papers, the authors performed a citation and co-citation analysis based on the 34 most frequently cited papers. This analysis included multidimensional scaling, a cluster analysis and factor analysis.

The study reveals the limited consideration of logistics and supply chain management literature in the foundation of the omni-channel retailing research. Further, the authors see a dominance of empirical research as compared to conceptual and analytical research. Overall, there is a focus on the Western retail context in this research field. The intellectual foundation is embedded in the marketing discipline and can be characterised as lacking a robust theoretical foundation.

The contribution of this research is identifying, evaluating and structuring the literature of omni-channel research and providing an overview of the state of the art of this research area considering its interdisciplinary nature. This paper thus supports researchers looking to holistically comprehend, prioritise and use the underpinning literature central to the phenomena of omni-channel retailing. For practitioners and academics alike, the findings can trigger and support future research and an evolving understanding of omni-channel retailing.

This study compares the associations between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and brand value in the financial services industry in East Asia and the USA.

A sample of 84 major banks in East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and the USA is used to test the links between CSR and brand value using ANOVA and multiple regressions.

Brand value is positively related to CSR for the entire sample, but is associated with distinctively different CSR factors depending on the geographic markets. In Japan and South Korea brand value is associated with a bank's appreciation for its employees, while in China, brand value is linked to a focus on the community. East Asia's culture is rooted in Confucianism, a philosophy that emphasises caring for the “greater good” (i.e. for the community) and for one's subordinates. In contrast, Americans are more concerned with “green” issues, and subsequently caring for the environment is associated with brand value. In addition, corporate governance, or regulatory compliance, has a strong relationship with brand value for American banks.

The study emphasises the complexity of global brand management given that eastern and western companies exhibit distinct patterns regarding brand value. Specifically, our study shows that the links between CSR and brand value vary substantially between different countries and regions.

This study investigates the association between CSR and brand value and establishes that different CSR aspects are linked to brand value for banks in East Asia and the USA. The study also establishes that CSR is not a universal concept, given that such distinct brand value‐CSR links have been found for the different geographic markets under investigation.

The purpose of this paper is to review the extant literature on value co-creation using bibliometric analysis in an attempt to gauge the evolving journey of this concept since its inception in the business and management domain.

Based on a bibliometric analysis of 458 research articles retrieved from the Thompson Reuters’ Web of Science Core Collection™ for the period of 2004–July 2018, this study carries out the following bibliometric techniques: citation analysis, co-citation analysis and co-occurrence of author keywords.

The study reveals the nature and direction of research that the field of value co-creation has taken over the past decade. Three significant areas emerge out as prominent themes in the literature of value co-creation: value co-creation in the context of customer service, value co-creation in the context of enhancing brand value and value co-creation for marketing of services through the adoption of service logic. Apart from these, the study also reveals the most influential authors, journals, institutions and countries pertaining to the research on value co-creation, along with the possible future directions of research in this area.

This study has limitations in terms of usage of a single database and its inability to contextualize the citation structure of articles revealed from the review.

This study would enable practitioners gain a comprehensive understanding of the concept of value co-creation that they can eventually adopt as a strategy for enhancing their business growth, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

This study identifies the intellectual structure of the value co-creation literature and maps out the gradual advancement of the field over the years.