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The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of parent brand characteristics and brand-extension fit on attitude towards the extension in the context of services-to-goods (SG) brand extension compared with services-to-services (SS) brand extension.

A survey design was used to collect data from 626 individual respondents. The respondents were selected using probability sampling from two cities in India. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The study indicated that context (SS or SG) moderated the influence of factors on attitude toward brand extension. A favorable attitude towards the parent brand had a greater positive influence on SS brand extension compared with SG brand extension. Quality variance among service types under the parent brand had a higher negative impact on attitude towards SG brand extension than on attitude towards SS brand extension.

Managers may prefer extending a service brand to another service rather than a good when consumers have a favorable attitude towards the brand. Furthermore, when the perceived quality of service types under a service brand varies substantially, extension of the brand to a good requires greater concern than extension to a service.

The unique contribution of this study is the examination of the moderating influence of the characteristics of an offering (SS vis-à-vis SG) on the link between brand extension attitude and its influencing factors.

Can industrial marketers afford to choose unethical strategies? To answer this question, this study aims to use game theory to analyze whether an industrial marketer choosing and implementing an unethical strategy is successful in maximizing her market share across her strategies.

The competition between two industrial marketers is modeled as a strategic game for the market share of a product that is identical in all attributes except the production process. Each industrial marketer’s objective is to choose to implement either the ethical or the unethical production process to maximize her market share.

The study finds that both industrial marketers choosing to implement ethical strategies is the unique Nash equilibrium of the game. That is, an industrial marketer choosing to implement an unethical strategy in the production process will be unsuccessful in maximizing her market share when both the industrial marketers are rational.

The study contributes to the literature on industrial marketing ethics, particularly that on product ethics, by showing that industrial marketers gain market share if they choose ethical strategies.

The study has implications for industrial marketing executives, as organizational consumers are increasingly aware of the strategies of industrial marketers. Failure to implement ethical strategies will cause industrial marketers to forgo their best possible market shares.

This study’s novelty lies in using a game theoretic approach to demonstrate the positive implications of ethical strategies for industrial marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to help marketing scholars view virtual worlds as new product–markets and trigger serious investigations on consumer evaluation of brand extensions when a brand is extended from the real world to a virtual world and vice versa.

The paper makes an extensive review of studies on virtual world. Further, it amalgamates understanding from well-established literature on consumer evaluation of brand extensions into the emerging virtual world understanding to conceptualize moderating influence of contexts – the real world context and a virtual world context – on how consumers evaluate brand extensions.

Through logical arguments supported by existing literature, the paper provides 14 well-conceptualized propositions that argue that the real world and virtual world contexts moderate the well-established relationships in brand extension literature. It broadly proposes that the relationships between the consumer evaluations of brand extension and its known determinants are stronger in case of within-the-world extensions and weaker in case of across-the-world extensions.

The paper introduces to the marketing scholars an entirely new area of enquiry as it challenges the known brand extension knowledge when a brand is extended across the worlds.

Marketers considering launching new offerings across the contexts of real or virtual world would have implications on whether to extend the brand or not.

Virtual worlds have largely been construed in marketing literature as fictional worlds. There is not much explored in terms of virtual worlds as new product–markets. The study offers unique value in conceptualizing differences among within-the-world brand extensions and across-the-world brand extensions.