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This study aims to explore and extend the consumer–brand relationship literature by integrating the relatively new construct of brand coolness with a growing body of work on gratitude. Specifically, gratitude is explored alongside emotional brand attachment as an additional mechanism affecting the relationship between cool brands and the loyalty outcome of repurchase intention. Consumption context is examined as a boundary condition to the effect of gratitude.

Data was collected from an online survey of a Qualtrics panel of 356 US consumers. A moderated mediation model is used to explain the effects of brand coolness on repurchase intention via emotional brand attachment and brand gratitude in the moderating presence of consumption context.

Brand coolness significantly increases repurchase intention. Furthermore, emotional brand attachment and brand gratitude are established as parallel mediators of the relationship between brand coolness and repurchase intention, with brand gratitude exhibiting a significantly stronger mediated effect. The impact of brand coolness on brand gratitude is moderated by social visibility, with publicly consumed cool brands stimulating greater brand gratitude than their privately consumed counterparts.

Brand gratitude is shown to influence repurchase intention independent of the impact exerted by consumers’ emotional brand attachment. Cognitive appraisal theory is used to distinguish brand gratitude from other mediators studied in consumer–brand relationships. Findings establish the moderating influence of the social visibility of the brand on the relationship between brand coolness and gratitude.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the extent to which female and male university students from low-income countries express different entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, the study empirically tests whether the anticipated financial returns to entrepreneurship versus salaried employment, or the perceived barriers to entrepreneurship exert a stronger influence on the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions.

To test the relationship of anticipated rewards versus barriers to entrepreneurship on gender and entrepreneurial intention, the study uses new data from a field survey in Sierra Leone and employs multiple mediation analyses.

The authors find that the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions operates through the mediator of perceptions of the financial returns to entrepreneurship but not perceived barriers to entrepreneurship.

The authors study intent, not behavior, acknowledging that cognitive intent is a powerful predictor of later behavior. Implications for future research on entrepreneurship in the African context are discussed.

The results from this study can be applied to both pedagogic and business settings in the field of entrepreneurship, with concrete implications for policymakers.

Results suggest that the gender gap in entrepreneurial intentions (EI) for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)- and business-educated students in Sierra Leone is predominantly influenced by anticipated financial returns to occupational choices, as opposed to perceived barriers to entrepreneurship, a more frequently studied antecedent to EI.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the prejudice and discrimination constructs through the lens of a transcendent knowledge concept.

The paper seeks to demonstrate that Spiritism or Spiritist Doctrine (SD) – regarded here as a source of transcendent knowledge – offers compelling arguments and provides suitable explanations (i.e. transcendent ontology) in relation to the issue of discrimination

Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of diversity and inclusive perspectives by examining the antecedents and consequences of discrimination through the insightful lens of SD tenets. In this sense, the findings suggest that the discriminators and prejudiced people may ironically pass through – as a result of the law of cause and effect – the same hard situations (i.e. ordeals or nightmares) – even though in their future lives – that they impose in their current victims to forcefully open their minds, support universal values, enhance their own feelings and spiritual intelligence.

Evidence presented here (although conceptually in nature) could be somewhat integrated into training sections of diversity management. At a minimum, it may encourage the shift of attitudes, revision of embedded values and reflections about the spiritual consequences to the perpetrators of discrimination against minorities.

Taken as a whole, the SD tenets prompt us to understand that the acts of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination engender suffering for their perpetrators, even in their future lives (i.e. reincarnations). Broadly speaking, the SD principles compel us to consider transcendent knowledge even in the context of organizational life.