Search results

This study aims to examine salespeople’s perspectives on the value of corporate heritage to relationship selling and the issue of trust in personal selling situations in the context of emerging markets.

An interpretive approach was adopted, and 16 semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior salespeople in heritage institutions operating in Jordan.

This study reveals that corporate heritage is a valuable organizational resource for relationship selling. Reflecting the values of “trust” and “affinity,” corporate heritage confers trust to salespeople and their products in personal selling situations. Sales managers are advised to use corporate heritage to strengthen sales activities and empower salespeople.

While previous research has explained the significance of corporate heritage to relationship marketing, the significance of corporate heritage to relationship selling and the issue of trust in personal selling situations remain unexplored. Jordan represents a context that has been largely neglected despite being typical of the corporate heritage phenomenon.

Family businesses feature prominently in economies, including the South African wine industry, using websites to convey their family identity. This research paper aims to explore the family identity elements that family wineries use on their websites, their alignment and how these are communicated online.

Based on Gioia’s methodology, a two-pronged approach was used to analyze 113 wineries’ websites’ text using Atlas. ti from an interpretivist perspective.

South African wineries use corporate identity, corporate personality and corporate expression to illustrate their familiness on their websites. It is portrayed through their family name and heritage, supported by their direction, purpose and aspirations, which emerge from the family identity and personality. These are dynamic and expressed through verbal and visual elements. Wineries described their behaviour, relevant competencies and passion as personality traits. Sustainability was considered an integral part of their brand promise, closely related to their family identity and personality, reflecting their family-oriented philosophy. These findings highlight the integration that exists among these components.

Theoretically, this study proposes a family business brand identity framework emphasising the centrality of familiness to its identity, personality and expression. Using websites to illustrate this familiness is emphasised with the recommendation that family businesses leverage this unique attribute in their identity to communicate their authenticity.

This study contributes to understanding what family wineries communicate on their websites, specifically by examining the elements necessary to create a family business brand based on the interrelationship between family identity, personality and expression with familiness at its core, resulting in a proposed family business brand identity framework.

This chapter explores the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from an Islamic Shari'ah-compliant perspective. It provides a comprehensive literature review on CSR with an explicit focus on the Islamic perspective of CSR, Islamic models of CSR, CSR practices in conventional and Islamic banks, and the consequences of CSR to Islamic banks. This chapter's main contribution lies in considering the current CSR literature from a Shari'ah perspective. Likewise, it identifies gaps in the current literature and suggests potential areas for future research. This chapter attempts to improve the understanding of how Islamic banks integrate social responsibility into their operations. The insights from this chapter are helpful to practitioners and academic scholars in Islamic finance, accounting, and CSR. This chapter emphasizes the importance of incorporating Islamic values and principles into CSR practices and encourages further research and investigation in this area.

Despite the plethora of research into country-of-origin (COO) effects, research that investigates the cognitive structures behind elite consumers' preferences for foreign brands remains limited. Hence, this study aims to investigate the cognitive structures behind foreign brand preference among professional elites in Sri Lanka.

Using the means-end chain (MEC) theory as the theoretical lens and building on the findings of 30 laddering interviews (semi-structured), a survey was conducted among 311 professional elites to uncover the key elements of the cognitive structures behind foreign brand preference.

The findings revealed that the cognitive structures behind foreign brand preference are influenced by a bundle of brand attributes, brand consequences and personal values of elites', which significantly influence their attitudes towards foreign brands. Multi-group analysis further revealed that the relationship between brand attributes and attitudes significantly differs across Chinese and US COOs where the path coefficient is stronger for elites' preference for Chinese brands.

This study is the first of its kind to explore the COO effects on consumer cognitive structures. The findings contribute to MEC theory and shed light on the understanding towards elites' preference for foreign brands.

This paper aims to investigate the influential aspects of industrial branding in building customer brand engagement from the buyer’s and the seller’s points of view. Collecting buyer and seller information is essential to understand business-to-business interaction better. Buyer’s and seller’s perspective integration is significant for stakeholders to develop proper strategies to achieve customer brand engagement.

This study uses a structural equation model to examine the antecedents of customer brand engagement from the buyer’s perspective; then, the result is compared with the seller’s view by conducting an analytical hierarchy process. The authors exercise 140 valid data from the buyer’s industry and 9 experts from the seller’s industry.

This study finds that in developing customer brand engagement, rational brand quality is the most influential from the buyer’s view and top priority from the seller’s view. Surprisingly, both parties have different perspectives about the second and third priorities. The buyers put emotional brand associations as a second priority; perceived value is meaningless and insignificant. On the contrary, the sellers set the perceived value as the second priority and emotional brand associations as the last.

The respondents from the buyer industry cover various industries, and the research is limited to the buyer and the seller in the chemical polymer emulsion market, a market where product quality and application quality on the buyers’ side are essential and where the buyer–seller interaction is intense. Replicating the study in other industries and cultural backgrounds is recommended for generalization.

The paper’s novelty is that there are different priorities and perspectives from the buyer’s and the seller’s views. This study contributes to industrial brand engagement research studies. Investigation of the buyer’s and the seller’s perspectives in industrial brand engagement research studies is still limited.

Art hotels are increasingly providing an opportunity for creative artists to exhibit their artworks and collections within their premises. This research investigates how some hotels are transforming themselves into important cultural tourism centers. Specifically, its objectives are: (i) to better understand the extent to which travelers are aware about the existence of art hotels and to evaluate their level of interest in art-oriented initiatives; (ii) to determine which attributes and features of art hotels are appreciated by travelers; and (iii) to identify the type of travelers who are willing to stay in art hotels. The findings from a descriptive survey suggest that the incorporation of art into the hospitality industry can attract a diverse customer base and could result in a sustainable competitive advantage for hotels. This study identifies four types of travelers including: Art-Infused Travelers, Art-Seeking Travelers, Art-Indifferent Travelers, and Art-Blind Travelers. These prospective tourists were categorized according to their level of awareness and interest in art hotels and art-related experiences. In conclusion, this contribution implies that artification processes within the hospitality industry can add value to the cultural tourism market. Hence, it also advances future research avenues to academia.

This paper aims to explore how entrepreneurs use social media (SM) to develop their organisational identity within business networks.

A single embedded case study was used comprising a case firm entrepreneur and eight connected network actors within an artisan food context in Ireland. Data was collected using an in-depth interview complemented with content analysis of networked firms’ Facebook posts (N = 1,652) over a three-year period.

This paper identifies four common network processes through which entrepreneurs can leverage SM to develop their organisational identity within networks. The processes are network relating, collaborating within networks, interacting with trends and connecting with community.

Findings are limited to the Irish artisan food sector and explore identity development through a single SM platform. The applicability and variation of use of the processes across industries would serve to further refine the processes identified.

Practically, the four processes through which identity within a network can be developed using SM can help entrepreneurs to access and position themselves within business networks, gain access to resources and overcome the classic limitations of newness and smallness.

This paper provides a conceptual framework illustrating the processes involved in developing entrepreneurial organisational identity within business networks using SM. This paper adds to a growing literature that places interaction at the heart of identity development and responds to calls to further understanding of the process of identity development for entrepreneurial ventures.

Understanding how firms manage multiple stakeholders is an academic and business call. This paper aims to describe a firm’s processes to implement a stakeholder value creation system, defined as the firm’s processes to create appropriate value with multiple stakeholders.

The authors based their investigation on a conceptual framework extracted from a previous literature review. From there, the authors conducted qualitative empirical research designed as a multiple-case study. In-depth interviews with 47 people from 11 different firms are the key source of this study.

This paper proposes a framework demonstrating how a firm can implement a stakeholder value creation system. Results pointed to three processes: value creation, distribution and capture. Value distribution mechanisms are drivers for both value creation and capture processes. The system is a set of multiple flow relationships between the firm and its stakeholders.

This research is limited to the Brazilian context.

The stakeholder value creation system is composed of seven elements: walk-the-talk organizational behavior, stakeholder business model, societal non-attended need, stakeholder preference matrix, stakeholder bargaining power, retention of rents and governance mechanism. Managers may design their firm’s unique processes using these elements as drivers.

The present investigation demonstrates that societal issues matter for firms to formulate strategies that positively impact their economic, social and environmental results.

The authors investigated competitive strategy concepts of value creation and appropriation from a combination of resource-based and stakeholder theories and a system perspective. The framework of this study consolidated both theories’ ideas from a complementary perspective. The authors suggest managers and academics should adopt the power of the “AND” position instead of the “OR” trade-off position.

Consumer perception of corporate brand equity has primarily focused on product brand dimensions, neglecting considerations at the firm analysis level. Assessing corporate brands requires different criteria relevant to the competitiveness of companies, such as their prominence, management and meeting society’s demands. In this sense, this study aims to develop and validate a scale of corporate brand equity founded on consumer perceptions, transcending industry boundaries and comparing its relationship with companies' market share.

The authors used an integrative approach to clarify the construct’s domain, building on previous measures. They took several steps to select appropriate items, refine the measure, validate it through reliability tests and convergent and discriminant analyses, test the validity of the second-order formative structure of corporate brand equity and assess associations between first-order factors, the second-order factor and market share.

The model identifies three first-order dimensions of corporate brands (presence, outstanding management and responsible) that shape the second-order factor (corporate brand equity). They are directly related, but not proportionally, to market share, contributing to the general and joint assessment of the company’s competitive performance considering the consumer.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive measurement model of corporate brand equity that considers the firm level of analysis, combines metrics from previous research on corporate brand evaluation criteria and includes consumer perceptions of the company’s competitiveness, unifying branding theory with the theory of the marketing firm.