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The purpose of this study is threefold. First, human brands are conceptualized and the distinction between them and personal brands is established. Second, human-brand research is reviewed in light of a strategic brand management framework and gaps in the knowledge that may suggest new research pathways are identified. Third, the extent to which a brand management model designed for products could be applied to human brands is explored.

A systematic literature review was conducted in this study. The content analysis of the selected set of papers allowed the assessment of the state of this field of brand management and the identification of proposals for future research.

Substantial research exists on different aspects of human brands. However, these studies are fragmented in nature, thus highlighting the need for specific and complete human-brand management models.

A limitation of this literature review is that it is based on a sample of papers collected by one specific criterion; furthermore, the way the papers were classified may be challenged. However, this study provides a comprehensive picture of studies on human brands available today.

A parsimonious distinction and connectivity between human and personal brands suggest a branding-by-individual continuum. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first identifiable one that summarizes the growing literature on human brands, reveals important gaps in the knowledge and calls for the development of particular human-brand management models.

This paper aims to understand employees’ perceptions of human resources management functions and how these affect brand performance, and the indirect influence of human resources management functions when mediated by job satisfaction in branded hotels in China. Hotel human resources functions, specifically organizational career management, and internal branding in hotels in mainland China were examined. The mediating effect of job satisfaction on the relationship between organizational career management and internal branding on brand performance was also examined.

A survey of hotel supervisors and middle managers in mainland China yielded 510 valid questionnaires for data analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to empirically test the relationships between human resources management functions (organizational career management, internal branding and job satisfaction) and brand performance in four- and five-star hotels in China.

The structural equation modeling results showed strong support for the mediating effect of job satisfaction on the relationships between organizational career management, internal branding and brand performance. Interestingly, although internal branding significantly affected brand performance, organizational career management alone did not.

The main limitation was the use of a convenience sampling method, which means respondents may not represent a sufficiently broad sample of hotel employees. Future studies are encouraged to explore internal branding and hotel career management using a probability sampling method.

The findings offer new insights and directions for hotel human resources managers to improve brand performance, either through promoting internal branding itself, or by enhancing organizational career management, internal branding and employees’ job satisfaction to achieve brand performance.

This is the first empirical study to analyze hotel management employees’ perceptions of the relationships between hotel human resources management, employees’ job satisfaction and hotel brand performance in China. The findings demonstrate the usefulness of applying human resources management functions to hotel branding.

By adopting a managerial perspective, this study aims to deepen how the strategic role of brand voice is conceived in the design of in-car name-brand voice assistants (NBVAs), how the brand experience based on NBVAs is designed and how the NBVA brand experience might influence customer brand engagement (CBE). The ultimate aim is to develop an interpretative theoretical framework for developing voice-based branding through NBVAs.

A qualitative research approach with the analysis of a single in-depth case study is followed: the NBVA developed in-house by Mercedes, which was the first NBVA launched in the automotive market.

In the design of the NBVA, a key role was assigned to the brand voice in developing the brand’s anthropomorphic profile. Driving safety, consistency with the corporate identity, human-like interaction, dynamic personalisation and connectivity emerged as the strategic criteria for designing the NBVA brand experience, which was oriented towards the pursuit of multiple CBE dimensions.

Although the qualitative empirical contribution of this study differs from statistical generalisations, the research insights are analytically generalisable. The insights emerging from the study could guide future research on voice-based branding.

The results may be a useful conceptual reference for managers involved in designing brand voice and brand experience based on NBVAs.

This study is the first empirical contribution to the marketing literature about voice-based branding in an innovative experiential field, a topic that, thus, far has been poorly analysed.

In recent years, brand personality as a branding construct has received considerable interest, which has led to a significant effort to develop tools to measure the personality of brands. Although the majority of these studies have focused on the brand personality of conventional product brands, the new boundaries of marketing obviously necessitate the application of branding constructs to non‐traditional products such as places. This study aims to focus on brand personalities of places, and to examine the applicability of this concept for city brands.

The research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 898 college students.

The findings of the study reveal that differentiating places with regard to their brand personalities is achievable. The paper introduces two new dimensions of brand personality for cities.

The extraction of two new factors that contribute to place brand personalities is considered a major contribution of this research to the marketing literature.

While the charity retail literature emphasizes the richness of human resource practices among charity retailers, it rarely makes the link between these practices and their interest for establishing charity retailers' brands. Simultaneously, while the retail branding literature increasingly emphasizes the central role of human resource practices for retail branding, it rarely explains how retailers should conduct such practices. The purpose of this study is to test the recent model proposed by Burt and Sparks in 2002 (the “fifth generation of retail branding”) which proposes that a retail brand depends on the alignment between a retailer's substance (vision and culture) and its perceived image by customers.

The research is based on an ethnographic study conducted within the Oxfam Trading Division, GB from October to December 2002.

The study supports the Burt and Spark's model and makes explicit the practice of human resource for branding. The study demonstrates that it was the alignment between the vision of Oxfam's top management and its new customer‐oriented culture, two elements of its core substance mediated to customers by store employees, which has enabled an improved customers' perception of the brand. The study also seeks to elaborate upon the Burt and Spark's model by specifying an ascending feedback loop starting from customers' perception of Oxfam brand and enabling the creation of a suitable culture and vision again mediated by store employees.

New research should explore whether and how retailers create synergies between human resource and marketing functions to sustain their brand image.

If the adoption of business practices by charity retailers is often discussed, this study highlights that commercial retailers could usefully transfer human resource best practices from leading charity retailers to develop their retail brand.

The paper is of value to commercial retailers.

Drawing upon social judgment theory, the research examines whether changes in psychological involvement with a sport human brand owing to their sporting success can generate spillover effects on people's national pride, a proxy for the collective level of well-being and whether the individual's behavioral engagement in sport spectating will moderate this relationship.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment grounded in the 2021 Indian Premier League championship, the authors solicit responses from 296 representative individuals residing in India twice using a two-wave panel design. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, repeated measures T-test, latent change score analysis, and structural regression analysis to examine the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride.

The results demonstrate a positive association between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride. Further, the findings indicate that an increase in psychological involvement with sport human brand was associated with an increase in national pride due to the successful athletic endeavor involving the sport human brand. However, the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride was invariant irrespective of patrons' spectatorship behavior.

This research demonstrates that sport human brands possess transformative soft power that extends their prerogative cultural identity personified by their athletic ability and success, allowing them to shape public sentiments of national pride via their profound influence through and beyond the complex network of brand ecosystems.

To deal with the agenda of extensive research to establish employer branding as a valuable Human Resource (HR) practice, this study aims to examine perception of seafarer to explore the attributes related with employer branding in maritime industry. This study intends to explore the applicability of instrumental-symbolic framework of employer branding in maritime industry to understand the dimensions related with attractiveness of seafarers’ jobs.

Sample of the study is Indian seafarers include only officers from both deck and engine. Total 276 usable responses were considered at the end for data analysis.

Both, the instrumental and symbolic attributes explained significant variance in predicting attractiveness of seafarers’ occupation, thus supporting hypotheses 1 and 2. In particular, among instrumental dimensions, social/team activities, structure, advancement, travel opportunities and pay and benefits positively predicted seafarers’ attraction towards their job. As symbolic dimension, sincerity, competence and prestige was positively related, and ruggedness was negatively related to attractiveness of the present job among seafarers.

Overall, the present findings ascertain the utility of the framework as a conceptualization of employer brands and support the applicability of instrumental-symbolic framework for understanding the dimensions of occupational attractiveness in different context and culture, i.e. Indian Seafarers.

Although the popularity of employer branding is growing amongst human resources practitioners, but still, there is dearth of academic (mainly empirical research) literature on the subject, `appeals to management researchers (Cable and Turban, 2001; Backhaus and Tikoo, 2004, Edwards, 2009; alniacik and alniacik, 2012; Kucherov and Zavyalova, 2012). With this in consideration and to deal with the agenda of extensive research to establish employer branding as a valuable HR practice, the present study examines perception of seafarer to explore the attributes related with employer branding in maritime industry.