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Learning objectives of this case is to understand the hairdressing industry and develop the sub-branding strategy. After reading this case and practicing in class, students should be able to understand this business and marketing terminology and apply them in the real world. Students will learn the branding strategies: brand extension, brand architecture and brand portfolio. Students will design (DS) the brand name for the new store.

Case synopsis Mr. Tai-Hua Teng (aka TR) was a hair artist and opened his first hair salon, vis-à-vis (VS), in 1989 using a high-end positioning strategy. VS focused on offering superb and diverse services to keep ahead of the competition rather than trying to undercut prices. VS hair salon had a solid foundation based mainly on the elite, celebrities and high-salary customers. In 2017, TR owned 16 stores (including one in Canada and two intern salons), 1 academy, 265 employees and 3 brand names. The three brand names were VS, DS and concept (CC). DS and CC were less known to the public, so now these two brands had been carried the parent name and were known as VS DS and VS CC. Quick cut hairdressing businesses were thriving because customers needed quick and cheap hairdressing services. Acknowledging the benefits of entering the highly competitive quick haircut market, TR began to contemplate the new brand name and services to offer. VS had adopted the brand house strategy but TR wondered if it was better to have an individual brand name when entering the quick haircut market. The sub-branding strategy carried the established quality assurance of VS but there was possible brand overlap. An individual new brand name might lack the well-established values from VS but it also showed the potential to reach different segments of customers. TR’s decision to make: a branded house or hybrid? This case showed a high-end hair salon facing the need for simplicity in the market and considered how to expand its business to the lower-end market. Keywords: hairdressing, brand extension and sub-branding strategy.

Level of difficulty: easy/middle level to undergraduate courses specific prerequisites: it is not necessary for students to prepare or read any marketing theory or chapters of the textbook. However, it would help a more in-depth discussion if students know the CCs of brand architecture, brand portfolio, brand extension and line extension.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

As consumers read multiple reviews, so consumer review consistency is important. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of consumer review consistency in influencing attitudes toward brands by examining its underlying effect on consumers’ emotions after they read consistent consumer reviews. In addition, the moderation effect of hedonic and utilitarian purchase values on positive consumer emotions and attitudes toward brands is explored.

This study used a quantitative design in which 329 participants – undergraduate and MBA students at a university in Taiwan – were asked to complete online questionnaires. To generalize the results, the questions in the questionnaire were based on any consumer reviews that the participants had recently browsed.

Consumer review consistency positively influences attitudes toward brands. Positive emotions are also developed when reading consistent consumer reviews, and this positively influences consumers’ attitudes toward brands. However, positive emotions are not derived from consistent consumer reviews in all contexts. The results show that positive emotions work well when consumers shop using hedonic value. Positive emotions create positive consumers’ attitudes toward a brand when they shop using hedonic value, but this significant effect does not occur when consumers shop using utilitarian value.

This study’s results suggest that only investigating the quality of a consumer review or other aspects of a single review might overlook the impact of consumer review consistency, as consumers read multiple reviews. Consumer review consistency plays an important role in brand effectiveness, as consumers form positive attitudes toward brands when they read consistent reviews. Positive emotions can strengthen consumers’ attitudes toward a brand. Moreover, positive emotions increase positive attitudes toward brands only when consumers shop using hedonic value. However, positive emotions do not enhance consumers’ attitudes if they shop using utilitarian value.

Rather than focusing on the quality of a single review, online shops should carefully consider consumer review consistency. Although positive reviews are better than negative reviews, it is quite difficult for every shop to maintain 100 percent positive reviews. Therefore, maintaining and offering quality products and services are rather important to acquiring more positive reviews. Online shops should consider experimental marketing strategies when managing online shops. The layout of online sites that show consistent consumer reviews can provide consumers with cues that shorten decision making, especially for products that consumers tend to shop for using hedonic value.

This research extends the previous consumer review literature. Previous research was focused mainly on the quality of consumer reviews or other aspects of a single review. This research shows that focusing a single consumer review is not sufficient, as consumers generally read more than one consumer review. In addition, the role of positive emotions as a mediator between consumer review consistency and attitudes toward a brand was investigated. Furthermore, the moderated mediation effect was applied to investigate the role of shopping value (hedonic vs utilitarian value) as a moderator of positive emotions’ mediation effect.

Despite the growing interest by scholars, practitioners and public policymakers, there are still divergent and fragmented conceptualizations of nation branding as the field is still developing. In response, the purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize nation branding research and to provide directions for future research.

The authors review peer-reviewed theoretical and empirical journal articles published during the last two decades – from 1998 to 2018. Selected journal articles on nation branding were subsequently synthesized for further insights.

The field of nation branding is fragmented and has developed in the course of the last two decades in different directions. This paper identifies key publication outlets and articles, major theoretical and methodological approaches and primary variables of interest that exist in the nation branding literature. The findings also highlight several research themes for future research.

This research fills a need to summaries the current state of the nation branding literature and identifies research issues that need to be addressed in the future.

This study aims to explain why e‐mails trigger emotional response states in receivers and to explore the influence of e‐mail formats on the receivers' intention to forward e‐mails.

Data were collected from 305 undergraduate and EMBA students in one university in Northern Taiwan. Participants were asked to fill out the questionnaire based on any forwarded e‐mail that they had recently received.

This study reveals that people will have a stronger intention to forward e‐mails that make them feel positive emotions, display richer information, are greater in length, or include audio and visual information.

This study shows that e‐mail forwarding function maintains guanxi with others, supporting the social psychology theory that personal emotional states will trigger specific behaviors. Also, this paper extends the explanation of the “information richness” theory concerning the influence of format on receivers' e‐mail forwarding intentions.

This study can assist marketing managers in developing e‐commerce by exploiting the special features of e‐mails identified in the study.

This study provides a behavioral model of the type of e‐mails most likely to be forwarded. Enterprises can use this model in developing better guanxi with their customers.