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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between religious involvement and attitudinal (importance of helping others and of being socially active) and behavioral components of prosociality (volunteering, charitable giving, and blood donations) in Germany.

The empirical analyses are based on representative, longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which allows avoiding issues of reverse causality.

The results suggest for a moderate, positive link between individuals’ religious involvement as measured by church affiliation and church attendance and the prosociality aspects addressed. Despite the historic divide in religion, the results in West and East Germany do not differ substantially in terms of the underlying mechanisms.

The paper complements the growing literature from experimental economics on the relationship between individuals’ religiosity and their prosociality. Based on representative longitudinal data, it contributes by providing evidence for Germany for which there is barely any insight yet and by addressing a wider range of attitudinal and (self-reported) behavioral components of prosociality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the largely unexplored conceptualisation of the brand-as-a-person metaphor in small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by examining its potential relation with the SME owner-manager, the pathways to its creation and development and the intuitive nature of this relationship.

A grounded theory approach was used, and data were collected through a set of 36 semi-structured interviews with 30 SME owner-managers in various sectors in Mexico.

The results indicate that SME owner-managers intuitively humanise their brands. The study revealed four pathways to develop the brand-as-a-person metaphor in the SME context: through personality traits, tastes and preferences, abilities and knowledge and values, all suggesting that SMEs’ brand-as-a-person metaphors are largely an extension of their owner-managers.

The paper presents a theoretical framework that illustrates the four pathways to the creation and development of brand-as-a-person that are derived from the brand’s relationship with the SME owner-manager. The results of cross-industry semi-structured interviews are limited to a single culture context.

SME owner-managers should first undertake an introspective personal assessment of their intuitive and conscious decision-making, as SME owner-managers often make decisions in an intuitive way. The results suggest that they should act in a more conscious, responsible and rational way when formulating their brand strategies.

This is the first study to clarify the profound influence of SME owner-managers’ personal characteristics, including personality traits, tastes and preferences, abilities and knowledge and values, on the brand-as-a-person metaphor. This study also confirms the intuitive learning strategy formulation of SME owner-managers’ branding practices and SMEs’ need for a more rational approach to branding.