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Brand prominence describes the conspicuousness of a brand on a product. The purpose of this research is to investigate the types of brand prominence variation.

Utilizing an exploratory approach, 20 in-depth interviews were conducted where respondents created five outfits for anticipated social scenarios. The prominence of brands on these outfits were photographed, catalogued and qualitatively analyzed for thematic variation. Then, the brand prominence data points were quantitatively content analyzed.

The results from the qualitative analysis is an organizing framework describing three major types of brand prominence variation: brand visibility, brand frequency and brand distribution. In addition, heat maps were generated to visually display the prominence of brands distributed on the individual’s body. Subsequent results from the quantitative content analysis revealed that brands on shoes and pants were most likely to display significant levels of prominence in relation to frequency and visibility dimensions. Significant differences across participant demographic groups were also found in terms of the brand visibility.

This new information on brand prominence variation provides business brand managers with insight on how to measure and monitor their own levels of brand prominence displays. They, in turn, can engage in more strategic placement and prominence of their brands in the future production of fashionable clothes, shoes and accessories.

The conspicuous consumption literature has long been interested in studying how consumers display their brands. The current study demonstrates how consumer researchers can measure brand prominence variation and therefore gain better insight on the consumer who engages in conspicuous consumption via brand prominence variation.

The decisions marketing managers make on advertising expenditures are vital to maintaining the sales and profitability of a firm. However, these decisions have not been taken into account to a great enough extent when determining a firm’s performance. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the marketing-finance interface and to reveal the effect marketers’ discretionary advertising expenditures can have on firm performance. In particular, the real activities method of managed earnings (ME) will be used to study this phenomenon.

The initial sample consisted of all the companies that appear in the North American COMPUSTAT files over the period 1970-2014. Since the focus here is on the effect of discretionary advertising expenses on firm performance, the authors restricted the samples to only include observations with advertising expenses. Therefore, the sample included 14,732 firms.

OLS regressions revealed a negative relationship between marketers’ discretionary advertising expenditures and firm performance using return on assets as a proxy for firm performance. Additional regressions displayed similar results for return on sale and return on cash adjusted asset proxies. Fixed effect and Tobit regressions also confirmed these findings. Finally, this effect was especially true for low performing firms. The economic significance of these findings on firm performance is also discussed.

The decisions made by marketing managers on advertising promotional efforts impact sales directly and brand equity indirectly, but they can also have an impact on firm performance. Therefore, it is important for investors to understand the level of ME in relation to marketing and advertising decisions that are taking place at their firm.

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals who choose to begin a gender affirmation journey often find the experience challenging. This can be a highly stigmatized process, and TGD consumers must strategically interact with brands and products to successfully construct authentic identities. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to obtain a better understanding of the TGD individual’s identity transformation within the consumption context.

Interviews were conducted with 27 TGD individuals about their gender affirmation journeys. The process of in vivo coding and thematic coding were applied for inductive analysis. Through subsequent analysis, parities with concepts from stigma management theory and Alvesson’s (2010) self-identity metaphors were identified.

The results of this study illustrated seven themes of TGD consumption patterns in relation to the gender affirmation journey. Awakening marks the watershed realization of a TGD identity, a cessation of some consumption habits and an emergence of new ones. Exhibiting is a form of information control and often transpired with new clothing purchases. Shifting one’s name and pronouns on identification documents is a means of covering. Remaking typically involves the procurement of medical services such as hormonal prescriptions and/or surgical procedures. Disclosing to individuals in one’s reference groups is a method of assessing (and maintaining) the wise, the curious and the oblivious. Rebelling against the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in media portrayals and leisure activities is a technique to express one’s eccentricity and quirkiness. Finally, releasing describes the potentially waning TGD label and a somewhat stabilizing pattern of consumption. A model of TGD consumers is presented, and key assertions are discussed.

The variety and complexity of consumer purchases associated with gender affirmation journeys were investigated, and it was revealed that many of these consumption choices aided in the TGD individual’s stigma management as well. The key assertions presented here progress the literature on gender affirmation journeys by predicting patterns of consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being on the affective organizational commitment of frontline employees.

Previous research was used to develop hypotheses and develop a questionnaire for this project. An online survey was completed by 108 frontline employees.

The hypothesized model of all three variables having positive effects on organization commitment was supported. Internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being were significant predictors of affective organizational commitment.

A key limitation of this study is the cross-sectional, data collection design. A longitudinal study would allow for increased confidence when evaluating causal inferences with this type of data.

This paper identifies how managers may be able to use internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being as potential tools to increase the affective organizational commitment of frontline employees.

This paper demonstrates the importance of subjective well-being as an important component of life for an employee and success of the organization.

This paper extends current research on affective organizational commitment by testing a new model that includes internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation, and subjective well-being as predictor variables.

Pre‐adolescents (children between the ages of eight and 12) are becoming increasingly important in today's market segment, in terms of both absolute size and spending power. Although much research is available concerning adolescent consumer behaviour, very little is known about pre‐adolescent consumer behaviour. The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which normative and informative conformity issues affect the purchase of apparel products by pre‐adolescents. Results from the 200 pre‐adolescents interviewed indicate that: —as pre‐adolescents age, social conformity influence increases; —both males and females are concerned that others like the clothing they purchase, and purchase clothing to look like peers; —they purchase clothing to conform with both social and organised groups; —they most often observe informational clothing behaviours from peers, athletes, entertainers and siblings. This study revealed that pre‐adolescents begin to use clothing to conform to peer groups as early as age eight, a finding never before reported.

We show how organizational forms shape job structures, specifically the variety and types of jobs employees hold, extending previous research on job structures in four ways. First, the social codes associated with wineries’ generalist and specialist forms constrain the number of jobs and functional areas delineated by job titles. Second, form-based constraints are weakened by institutional rules that impose categorical distinctions on organizations. Third, these constraints are stronger when there is more consensus around forms. Fourth, these constraints are contingent on the legitimacy and resources of organizations of varying ages and sizes.

This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for depicting organizational processes: the episodic spiral model (ESM).

On the basis of a strong process view as the orienting paradigm, the authors demonstrate the need for the ESM by discussing the shortcomings of two specific spiral types in the organizational literature – the knowledge creation spiral and the efficacy spiral.

A review of each spiral type through the lens of nonlinear assumptions reveals the treatment to date of organizational spirals as uni-directional and insufficient for understanding organizations. The authors propose that managers must undertake a paradigm shift in order to gain a greater awareness of both the environment in which they operate, as well as their process actions. To facilitate this shift, the ESM depicts choice points, chosen and rejected trajectories, and upward and downward environmental drafts, as well as a multi-dimensional environment, as a way of re-conceptualizing approaches to space, time, and change in organization studies.

The authors propose that the model provides a way for scholars to enhance the study of organizations by understanding that organizations exist in a more dynamic environment than previously studied; recognizing that the organization has a wider range of choices available, and acknowledging the long-lasting ramifications of both choices made and choices discarded; and obtaining a more comprehensive look at the way the organization moves through space and time at any given moment. Taken together, the authors hope that these contributions allow organizational scholars a new approach to theorizing, exploring, and writing about the organizations they study.

This study aims to explore how source type can influence organizational assets proposed by source credibility theory (SCT) when paired with matched situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) strategies for accidental, preventable, and victim crises. Crisis communication delivered online provides an invaluable outlet for organizations to disperse information to stakeholders quickly. It has been shown that receivers of this information have motivational assumptions about sources having their own agenda for producing content. Thus, it is important to explore how sources tasked with delivering crisis responses can influence perceptions of the sincerity and credibility of the message.

The researchers conducted a 3 (crisis response: matched accidental, matched preventable, matched victim) × 3 (source type: organization, CEO, The New York Times) online between-subjects experimental design (N = 623).

By identifying how the source disseminating crisis responses influences message perceptions, findings from this study recognize how the crisis response is situated in a greater context. Since perceived sincerity and credibility were found to influence message acceptance and reputation, making intentional decisions that acknowledge both within a crisis communication strategy may benefit both future practice and research applications.

The current study advances understandings afforded by SCCT, along with SCT, by experimentally testing the influence of these variables within crisis responses on outcomes such as account acceptance and organizational reputation.