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This chapter is a reflection of how Venkataraman’s “The Distinctive Domain of Entrepreneurship Research” has influenced the field of entrepreneurship. The theory underlying the original chapter provided the first true theoretical basis for the discipline of entrepreneurship, grounded in Kirzner and Schumpeter. Its two discrete components, opportunity, and role of the individual became the basis for new approaches in empirical research and new conceptualizations of entrepreneurship theory. These components led to new approaches to concepts such as motivation, perception, and information’s role in the entrepreneurial process. The chapter revisits the three core questions raised by “The Distinctive Domain”: how opportunities arise, why do only some recognize and pursue opportunities, and what are the consequences of the pursuit of opportunities. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the impact of the original chapter in practice and academia.

The purpose of this paper is to review a typology of branding that identifies four perspectives on branding: corporate perspectives, consumer perspectives, cultural perspectives and critical perspectives. This typology helps organise and synthesise the growing interdisciplinary literature on brands and branding, and sheds light on the various ways corporate brands work.

A brief synthetic review of branding is offered, along with contemporary examples of emerging aspects of the four branding perspectives.

The four perspectives demonstrate the growing interdisciplinary interest in brands. They also signal a move away from a focus on the brand-consumer dyad, towards broader social cultural and theoretical concerns. Studies that extend brand research into cultural and historical realms may provide an essential bridge between our understandings, on the one hand, of value residing within the product or producer intention, and on the other, value created by individual consumers or brand communities.

The insights from this review may shed light on a number of branding research areas, including studies on corporate marketing, cultural heritage brands and strategic brand communication.

The paper illustrates how complex branding has become and offers conceptual tools to think about and guide branding from multiple points of view.

This paper provides a selective overview of important recent developments in corporate marketing and brand research over as well as a look at visual aspects of four perspectives of branding as a complement to corporate branding research. The typology of brand perspectives helps organise and illuminate a burgeoning brand literature, and provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding brands.

This conceptual study explicates the dynamic, interlinked relationship between two of the most popular theories in marketing today: psychological ownership (PO) and engagement. The study is set in the sharing economy (SE), where platform business success depends on high levels of engagement by users, both individuals and collectives. The study argues individual PO (iPO) acts as the antecedent to engagement within a dyad of brand and user, and collective PO (cPO) as the antecedent to collective engagement by communities of users.

This conceptual study synthesizes PO theory and engagement theory to produce a PO–engagement framework. The authors adopt a dual-level perspective encompassing individual- and group-level phenomena in the SE and employ examples from practice to illustrate their arguments.

PO acts as the antecedent to the positively valenced disposition and engagement activities of actors in the SE. iPO manifests as engagement within a dyad of brand and user. Outcomes include brand love and contributions to brand reputation and service offerings. Collective PO manifests as engagement within a community or collective. Outcomes include community-oriented peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing for the benefit of others.

This study offers a dynamic framework of PO and engagement in the SE, the PO–engagement framework. The authors contribute to PO and engagement literature studies in marketing by illustrating how a platform user's attachment to targets in the SE motivates emergence of PO, and how different types of engagement manifest from different types of PO.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of conspicuous consumption on brand attitudes in the context of luxury brands market in China.

Two studies are conducted to test three hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors examine the mediating effect of self-brand association (SBA) on the relationship between social class and conspicuous consumption (H1 and H2); In Study 2, the authors examine the effect of observing others’ conspicuous consumption on the observer’s SBA (H3).

Results show that SBA negatively mediates the relationship between social class and conspicuous consumption. Moreover, the negative effect on SBA of observing conspicuous brand usage varies by social class.

The current study focused on the principal linkage between social class, SBA and conspicuousness, and future research could examine the influence of different personality traits on luxury consumption or the existence of sub-types or variants of conspicuous brand users.

The present study has important implications for luxury brand management, and provides rich insights to consumers’ motivations that lead to distinctive luxury consumption behaviors.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly seeking to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and inclusiveness within the societies they operate in, often by highlighting the amount of tax they pay. The author proposes to summarize channels through which tax impacts the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and analyze them in relation to a single goal, SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) in a single region (the Central and Eastern Europe, CEE). The impact of tax is often ambivalent, but above all it is hard to quantify as there are many stakeholders involved and corporations still tend to disguise their internal information. The author analyzes MNEs’ operations in the CEE region to better understand how reporting standards influence the achievement of SDG 10, focusing on country-by-country reporting (CbCR) and non-financial reporting of European banks and other corporations who publish CbCR on a voluntary basis. The authors perform a quantitative analysis of CbCR data and a qualitative investigation of 201 non-financial reports by 30 MNEs. From the theoretical viewpoint, this research may help to construct a framework to evaluate the tax impact of a given company. Given that, this chapter also outlines why and how it can be beneficial for MNEs to publish voluntary reports it can also serve to motivate increased voluntary participation of MNEs in the transition to sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: how do consumers construct meaning around their inconspicuous luxury fashion experiences? What desires do inconspicuous consumers strive to fulfill? What sentiments do they associate with their inconspicuous luxury fashion consumption?

This exploratory research begins with a netnographic study of 11 online luxury blogs followed by in-depth interviews and home observations of ten luxury consumers with inconspicuous preferences in Dubai.

Inconspicuous choices are not simply for associative or dissociative motivations but several symbolic consumption schemas come into play. A typology of inconspicuous luxury fashion consumers has emerged: fashion influencers, trendsetters, fashion followers, and luxe conservatives.

The findings have potential to yield important managerial implications for fashion retailers and brand communications. The typology of inconspicuous consumers provides a basis for developing a more targeted relationship marketing program for luxury fashion brands.

This research advances luxury knowledge in fashion and consumer behavior research by unveiling how consumers construct meanings around their inconspicuous consumption. The typology developed in this study marks the starting point for further extensions to explore the complexities of inconspicuous luxury consumers, which are grounded in the roles they take on in society, how they plan their luxury consumption journey and how they eventually use these possessions for self-identification and communication to others.

Recent development and democratization of digital technologies call for studying base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) consumers’ interactions with these technologies. This study aims to explore how BOP consumers interact with mobile information and communication technology (mICT) and improve their welfare.

Following an extensive literature review, content analysis of the reviewed articles and reports was conducted to build this article’s conceptual foundation.

This study has conceptualized five mechanisms in which mICT improves the lives of BOP customers through enhanced access and control of resources. In particular, the authors characterize a converging nature of mICT and related applications (social media, internet of things, artificial intelligence and sharing economy) as resources for social change. The authors find a striking contrast between BOP and affluent consumers regarding their motivations and barriers to adopting mICT-based applications. Implications to research, technology design and policymaking are discussed.

The intersection of mICT and BOP is under-researched. With this paper, we tried to address this research gap. Further, this study has brought out several important research questions in each application, serving as a springboard for future researchers.

This paper explores reasons behind Muslim fervour, in response to advertisements that cause them offence – where marketing promotions and brands are seen to contradict or challenge the tenets of their religion (Islam) and culture.

The authors investigate Egyptian Muslim Millennials’ perceptions post 2011 Egyptian Arab Spring revolution qualitatively – through a series of iterative focus groups, diaries, and laddered coding procedures.

In contrast to the way in which media stories regularly highlight this phenomenon locally, internationally, and inside and outside of the Muslim world, we find that the landscape is more cultural, contextual, dynamic, politicised, and subtle. In addition, religiosity may not in fact be the determining factor and its presence is much more nuanced. The socially mobile, educated, and digitally connected Egyptian Muslim millennial demographic, that grabbed headlines during the Arab Spring for their influence, were found in this study to describe offence as being annoying or provocative advertisements where the message, theme or execution disregards their intelligence. Furthermore, parents, access to basic utilities, and having a stable living environment command a greater influence than religiosity for them. Finally, an environmental paradox exists, where restricted living conditions juxtaposed in parallel with escapism offered by social-media consumption, leads millennials towards being more accepting of advertising that could be classified as offensive.

This study is of value for researchers, educators, and professionals in the fields of advertising, marketing communications, consumer behaviour, and sociology.

The observations raise questions concerning how the media reports stories, or advertisers conduct their campaigns – as to whether they are representative, motivated by sociopolitics or propaganda, an intended tactic, highlight unintended poor execution, ambivalence, or part of a wider phenomenon.

The authors present a new dual-process personality/religiosity conceptual model – designed to explain the stepwise process of Muslim opinion-forming, behaviour, and consumption of advertisements. Furthermore, we illustrate this with a supporting allegory the authors call a “Narnia paradigm”, drawing from C.S. Lewis’s fictional story “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.