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This final chapter of the book provides an up-to-date overview of research on B2B branding. The chapter discusses the current academic endeavors and propositions from researchers in the field, while focusing on the discipline of B2B marketing. It furthermore elaborates on the importance of brands and branding for decision-making processes by discussing the role of B2B buyers and sellers. Additionally, branding as part of marketing has been reviewed from its historical background and the first attempts to develop its conceptual background. The chapter then focuses on business buyers and their main characteristics with regard to brand relevance. Finally, the key challenges of developing a strong B2B brand are presented and discussed, after which future research avenues and upcoming trends within the B2B branding context are considered. Digitalization and the digital context are identified as important areas to know in the future, as they are increasingly becoming important stages for marketing activities within the B2B domain. The digital context is a specific platform to explore further. In addition, the intangible aspects of B2B branding that are still unknown to many managers and academics, such as emotions in situations of interaction and sales are explored. From a thematic point of view, sustainability issues will become increasingly important to handle in organizations, which will put pressure on B2B marketers, as sustainability can be communicated through the corporate brand and related branding efforts.

Many practitioners and researchers believe that differences exist between service and product markets, which warrant different marketing practices. The branding literature, however, remains biased towards products. This is especially true in the realm of brand equity. Brand equity, however, like many of the branding concepts, has an equally important role in the service markets. For this reason, this study applied ten existing consumer based measures of brand equity to a financial services market (credit cards). The convergent and predictive validity of these measures was assessed, which in turn helped to determine whether these measures that have typically been applied in product markets can be used to capture brand equity in a service market. The results found that most measures were convergent and correlated highly with market share in the predicted direction, where market share was used as an indicator of brand equity. Brand recall and familiarity, however, were found to be the best estimators of brand equity in the credit card market.

This illustrative study of the effects of a strike‐induced supply interruption in an Australian product market shows that, although in the short term customers changed to a competitor's product when their usual brands were unavailable, overall market share returned to previous levels in the post‐strike period. However, the structure of the market was changed in that intra‐company brand competition increased after the strike relative to the degree of inter‐company brand competition. The study was too limited to rule out the influence of advertising, but this change is likely to have an influence on future profitability policy.

Brand equity has been a topic of interest in consumer goods markets for many years. Several studies suggest that existing consumer‐based measures of brand equity, which have traditionally been used in the consumer goods markets, can also be used to capture brand equity in the services markets. The purpose of this research is to assess the quality dimension in consumer‐based measurers of brand equity in the context of services and to compare it with consumer goods.

A pilot and a main study were conducted. Nine different brands were tested in a consumer‐based experimental online survey. Each participant was assigned randomly to one brand.

In the consumer goods markets customer service can be considered as a marketing instrument. In the services markets customer service is a part of the perceived quality of a service.

The implication leads to the question whether existing measures of brand equity in consumer goods markets should be used without adaptation in services markets. The findings show that the consumer‐based brand equity should be measured different in these markets. Concerning the differences the findings show also that customer service can be seen as a marketing instrument in consumer goods markets and a part of the perceived service quality in services markets.

There is a lack of research in the difference of measuring brand equity between consumer goods and services. This paper explores this difference of measuring brand equity.

Store brands, which were once only found on the shelves of developed countries, are now being introduced in emerging markets in increasing amounts. The purpose of this paper is to describe the store brand process as it is found in emerging markets. In doing so, the authors explain what are the forces that have led to the development of store brands in emerging markets and the sort of strategies that should be implemented.

The paper provides comparative statistics showing the penetration of store brands in both developed and emerging markets. Then, the conditions that determine whether store brands should be adopted by retailers are identified and discussed.

Five key factors have been identified that explain successful management approaches to introducing store brands in developed as compared to emerging markets. These include the number of store brand categories available, the quality of store brands, type of products, the manufacturers of the products and the number of product lines sold by retailers. Finally, the paper discusses the future of store brands in emerging markets and predicts that their penetration will closely follow the trend in developed countries.

This paper provides insights into what sort of strategies should be used by store managers in emerging markets to adopt store brands in order to satisfy the income levels of many of their customers. The use of store brands will not only provide more consumer satisfaction, but increased profits for the store.

This article introduces the special symposium entitled “Advances in corporate brand, corporate heritage, corporate identity and corporate marketing scholarship” and provide a synopsis of the five articles constituting this symposium. By means of context, this article celebrates the anniversaries of four marketing milestones apropos the formal introduction of the corporate brand concept (1995), the formal introduction of the corporate heritage notion (2006), the first special edition (in this journal) devoted to corporate identity (1997) and the formal introduction of the corporate marketing philosophical approach (1998). The latter – corporate marketing – can be viewed as a revolution in marketing thought by noting that mutually beneficial company–stakeholder relationship can be based on corporate identities and corporate brands are not restricted to products and/or services.

Taking a retrospective, this paper explains the four marketing milestones detailed above and notes the revolutionary notion of corporate marketing. All of the aforementioned have meaningfully advanced marketing scholarship over the last 20 years.

This study provides 18 reflections of developments with the corporate brand and corporate identity fields. It also shows the seminal importance of European Journal of Marketing (EJM) special editions on the territory dating back to 1997.

This paper discusses how corporate identity, corporate branding, corporate heritage, corporate identity and corporate marketing have, increasingly, become mainstream marketing concerns.

In marking these milestones, this celebratory EJM symposium comprises cutting-edge scholarship on the aforementioned areas, penned by renowned and prominent scholars from Australia, England, Germany and the USA.

Business faces formidable challenges in the 1990s. With these challenges will come greater requirements for relevant market information, quality offerings, increased productivity, leadership, and consumer orientation. As new technology and computers are designed to help meet the ever‐increasing information needs of society, personal, professional, and industrial consumers will search for better ways to identify the computers and related high‐tech products which will enable them to meet their individual and organizational needs. In this search, consumers will look for traditional brand name recognition of new products, user friendliness, functionability, and product positioning that meets their individual expectations. Examines the emergence of brands in the marketing of computers and related high‐tech products so as to explore the trends of developments in this vital area.

This paper aims to evaluate and structure the basic heuristics consumers use in evaluating word-of-mouth (WOM) about luxury hotel brands while analyzing the impact of deception in online consumer reviews.

The research used a two-study mixed-methods approach, using interpersonal deception theory and social proof theory as lenses to conduct our analysis. For the first study, a qualitative conceptual mapping analysis was conducted, examining online consumer reviews to identify key concepts and their relationships in the context of luxury hotel brands. In the second study, the themes were further examined using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze their causal complexity and association between variables to determine how they influence the perceived helpfulness of online reviews for luxury hotel brands.

The results underline the importance of functional, objective variables, such as the number of reviews and stars, as social proof heuristics and other factors, including clout, authenticity and analytic tone, as interpersonal communication heuristics. Therefore, consumers use a combination of social and interpersonal communication heuristics to extract information from reviews and manage deception risk.

The paper contributes to the consumer–brand relationship literature by assessing the heuristics consumers use in evaluating online reviews and provides additional information for research in online reputation management.

This study’s results can help marketing practitioners and brand managers manage their online reputations better. It can also aid managers in improving their messaging on hotel websites to entice consumers to complete bookings. Heuristics play an essential role in such messaging and understanding them can help marketers appeal directly to their target market.

This study contributes to the literature on consumer–brand relationships by providing a framework of heuristics that consumers use when evaluating luxury service brands and contributes to WOM and online reputation research by highlighting factors that may make online reviews more helpful.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the variables of brand equity measurement for Greek companies quoted in the Greek exchange stock market.

The measurement of brand equity has been a hot issue both for marketing and financial practitioners. Different attempts to measure brand equity have been made by both sides. The present study, by the use of Tobin's Q methodology, tries to measure brand equity for Greek firms in the stock market. The present study tries to adopt both a methodology related to marketing and financial literature.

Tobin's q can be a measure of brand equity for firms in the stock market. The variables which need to be examined are related to research and development but also to financial and marketing activities.

Simone and Sallivan tried to measure brand equity throughout Tobin's q. The present paper is an international attempt to measure brand equity thorough Tobin's q in Greece. Another attempt related to Simon and Sallivan's research had never been done, either in marketing or financial literature.

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.