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1 – 10 of over 2000Wang-Sheng Chen and Kuen-Hung Tsai
This study empirically tests a brand ownership framework based on psychological ownership theory. It examines the role of participative brand development in developing brand…
Abstract
Purpose
This study empirically tests a brand ownership framework based on psychological ownership theory. It examines the role of participative brand development in developing brand ownership among different social value orientation (i.e. proself and prosocial). Furthermore, it examines brand ownership's effects on various food brand supportive behaviours and the moderating role of consumer perceived ethicality.
Design/methodology/approach
To understand the participative brand development effect on brand ownership and brand supportive behaviours of organic food and local cultural food from the consumer perspective, primary data collected via 668 valid questionnaires tested the conceptual model using partial least squares structural equation modelling.
Findings
Participative brand development has a significant influence on brand ownership. Moreover, brand ownership is an important factor in affecting brand supportive behaviours. The negative relationship between brand ownership and positive word of mouth for those who have higher consumer perceived ethicality is significant. Moreover, social value orientation, the relationships between participative brand development and brand ownership differ significantly.
Research limitations/implications
First, it only focusses on the antecedents of brand ownership among different proself and prosocial groups in Taiwan. However, Taipei, as an important city in Taiwan, is a microcosm of Taiwan's food development. It can reflect the problems existing in Taiwan's current food development process from one side. Second, customer perceived ethicality was moderated into the psychological ownership model to extend it. Future studies may consider sustainable consumer behaviour (White et al., 2019) and other variables to explain the antecedents and consequences of brand ownership on the moderating role. Third, more multi-group analyses may explore the antecedents of brand ownership of more and different groups.
Practical implications
First, the participative brand development of proself groups (such as organic food marketers) towards brand ownership should emphasize the health and safety associated benefits of organic foods. If consumers perceive more health and safety benefits from adopting organic foods regarding their well-being needs, they will be more willing to increase their use of organic foods. Second, local cultural food marketers play a significant role in promoting processed foods, creative gourmet, rural leisure and festival events. In the current stage of local cultural food development, the more immediate consequences of pro-environmental behaviours for a given city, region or neighbourhood can make environmental actions and outcomes seem more tangible and relevant (Scannell and Gifford, 2013). Organic and local cultural food marketers should also pay attention to the change in the psychology of different group members and adjust marketing strategies appropriately.
Social implications
Consumers who are convinced that organic foods strongly adhere to the environmental and ethical principles they value may intensify their organic buying behaviour. Drawing on people's attachments to a specific place (Gifford, 2014), festival events can lead to engagement in local cultural products consumption. People may be subject to the opinions of important people, such as family members, relatives and friends. Therefore, communities could advocate for local cultural food via word of mouth and consume local cultural food daily to create a good pro-environmental atmosphere.
Originality/value
This is the first study to investigate the antecedents and consequences of brand ownership and the moderators of these relationships in the context of organic food and local cultural food.
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This study aims to investigate the moderating role of cultural value orientations on the relationship between brand ownership and customer brand engagement behavior through brand…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the moderating role of cultural value orientations on the relationship between brand ownership and customer brand engagement behavior through brand responsibility and self-enhancement.
Design/methodology/approach
Respondents came from firm-managed online smartphone brand communities in South Korea and the USA. Convenience sampling yielded 197 valid responses, with 98 coming from South Korea and 99 coming from the USA.
Findings
The study results provide empirical evidence that cultural value orientations influence customer brand engagement behavior. As expected, the findings indicate that individualism-collectivism and power distance significantly moderate the indirect effect of brand responsibility and self-enhancement on the relationship between brand ownership and customer brand engagement behavior.
Originality/value
Prior research has focused mainly on customer engagement behaviors that target the firm, employees and other customers, with little research examining customer engagement behavior that targeted the brand (customer brand engagement behavior). This exploration is important because customers could serve as brand missionaries, become less apt to switch brands and provide feedback, leading to a sustainable competitive advantage.
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James M. Wilkerson, Frank M. Sorokach and Marwan A. Wafa
The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between local entrepreneurs’ perception of the city’s decline and their place attachment (measured in terms of commitment…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between local entrepreneurs’ perception of the city’s decline and their place attachment (measured in terms of commitment to the declining city and sense of how the declining city compares to other cities).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors surveyed entrepreneurs in a relatively small sample (N = 105) from a declining city of about 78,000 residents in the USA.
Findings
The authors found significant inverse correlations and found that, after controlling for length of residency, the entrepreneur’s perception of the city’s decline predicted lower place attachment. The authors also tested a moderation hypothesis and observed that, whereas professional-service entrepreneurs with both stronger and weaker perceptions of the city’s decline showed similar place attachment, non-professional entrepreneurs showed significantly more variation, displaying both the highest place attachment when weak in perceptions of the city’s decline and the lowest place attachment when strong in perceptions of the city’s decline.
Research limitations/implications
The authors discuss implications for place attachment, place image and place branding research, as well as for the study of place context’s effects on entrepreneurship.
Practical implications
Results hold implications for place branding’s participative development and for reasons to expect some difficulty in place branding when the context is a declining city.
Originality/value
Relative to prior research in place management, the research features a neglected segment of the city’s population, business owners, to study place attachment. Relative to prior entrepreneurship research, the authors advance the study of context’s effects on entrepreneurship by extending it to the place context of declining cities, which are not usually featured in entrepreneurship studies.
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Sanjit Kumar Roy, Vaibhav Shekhar, Ali Quazi and Mohammed Quaddus
The purpose of the study is to investigate the role of service convenience in the relationship between organizational characteristics (such as brand equity, store ambiance, store…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the study is to investigate the role of service convenience in the relationship between organizational characteristics (such as brand equity, store ambiance, store layout, customer information and employee responsiveness) on customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), including service improvement, customer cooperation, positive word-of-mouth and customer helping customers. It examines two research models, with service convenience as a separate antecedent of CEBs (model A) and as a mediating variable between organizational characteristics and CEBs (model B).
Design/methodology/approach
Using a positivist paradigm, data were collected from 384 respondents representing the existing customers of grocery retailers based in India via a survey instrument. Data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling.
Findings
Results demonstrate service convenience as a motivational driver of CEBs. Results also show that the organizational characteristics significantly influence service convenience which in turn impacts CEBs.
Practical implications
The findings have important implications for store managers in effective management of customers' time and effort in terms of saving customers' time and effort as well as motivating customers to elicit their engagement behaviors.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in identifying the impact of organizational characteristics in helping customers to save time and effort in their shopping activities and thereby elicit various types of CEBs. The paper also adds to knowledge by examining the role of service convenience in the nexus between organizational characteristics and CEB types.
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Marcelo Royo‐Vela and Paolo Casamassima
This paper aims to explore some of the effects of belonging to a virtual brand community on consumer behaviour. It also proposes the concept of belonging as a three‐dimensional…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore some of the effects of belonging to a virtual brand community on consumer behaviour. It also proposes the concept of belonging as a three‐dimensional construct.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper proposes that belonging to a virtual community has positive effects on consumer satisfaction, affective commitment and word‐of‐mouth behaviour. After validation of the measurement scales the hypotheses are contrasted through modelling.
Findings
The data show that belonging to a virtual community may enhance consumer satisfaction, affective commitment and word‐of‐mouth advertising towards the brand around which the community is developed. In addition, the paper introduces a third dimension to the construct of belonging, called non‐participative belonging. Active participative belonging influences the level of satisfaction and affective commitment more positively than passive and non‐participative belonging.
Research limitations/implications
Data were obtained through surveys, web surveys and online interviews. There were also limitations of sample size and sampling procedure.
Practical implications
Managers may enhance consumer satisfaction, affective commitment and word‐of‐mouth advertising by developing virtual brand communities and promoting consumers' participation in them.
Originality/value
Previous works that have focused on virtual brand communities have never concentrated on virtual brand communities within Facebook. In addition, prior to this study, belonging to a virtual brand community was a two‐dimensional construct: active and passive participative belonging. The paper identifies a third dimension as non‐participative belonging. Thus this paper offers new areas for future research.
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Narcís Bassols and Thomas Leicht
This paper aims to analyze the case of Cartagena, Colombia, as a case of a failed destination branding. It also broadens the findings by connecting them to the extant literature…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to analyze the case of Cartagena, Colombia, as a case of a failed destination branding. It also broadens the findings by connecting them to the extant literature about place branding, thus making this paper more explanatory. It tries to fit the fieldwork’s findings into the two main streams of branding research (bottom-up vs top-down). This paper also gives practical insights into the destination’s network of stakeholders and discusses ways to improve the destination’s management and branding.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a mixed methodology approach. Field work consisted of online questionnaire to hospitality employees in the city plus semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 “expert” stakeholders in the destination. This paper is of empirical nature.
Findings
The main cause of the destination’s brand failure is found to be the top-down approach to the place brand strategy. The literature shows that cases such as this one are more common than assumed, and a possible way out of the problem is the application of bottom-up or “mixed” approaches, as these may circumvent the problems found.
Research limitations/implications
Cases like this one illustrate very well a local context but might be difficult to transfer to other contexts, so the generalization power of this paper is limited to similar places in the sociopolitical sense of the term.
Practical implications
For place branding practitioners and destination management organizations , this paper is a call for participative approaches which include all of the stakeholders of a place.
Originality/value
This paper offers an in-depth study of a branding case in Latin America, a part of the world relatively unexplored in the branding literature. On the basis of the presented case, this paper pitches top-down versus bottom-up approaches. Finally, it explains the findings by connecting the place to its broad geographical context.
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This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and…
Abstract
This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.
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Maria Lichrou, Lisa O’Malley and Maurice Patterson
Strategic analyses of Mediterranean destinations have well documented the impacts of mass tourism, including high levels of seasonality and landscape degradation as a result of…
Abstract
Purpose
Strategic analyses of Mediterranean destinations have well documented the impacts of mass tourism, including high levels of seasonality and landscape degradation as a result of the “anarchic” nature of tourism development in these destinations. The lack of a strategic framework is widely recognised in academic and popular discourse. What is often missing, however, is local voice and attention to the local particularities that have shaped the course of tourism development in these places. Focusing on narratives of people living and working in Santorini, Greece, this paper aims to examine tourism development as a particular cultural experience of development.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted narrative interviews with 22 local residents and entrepreneurs. Participants belonged to different occupational sectors and age groups. These are supplemented with secondary data, consisting of books, guides, documentaries and online news articles on Santorini.
Findings
The analysis and interpretation by the authors identify remembered, experienced and imagined phases of tourism development, which we label as romancing tourism, disenchantment and reimagining tourism.
Research limitations/implications
Professionalisation has certainly allowed the improvement of quality standards, but in transforming hosts into service providers, a distance and objectivity is created that results in a loss of authenticity. Authenticity is not just about what the tourists seek but also about what a place is or can be, and the “sense of place” that residents have and use in their everyday lives.
Social implications
Local narratives offer insights into the particularities of tourism development and the varied, contested and dynamic meanings of places. Place narratives can therefore be a useful tool in developing a reflexive and participative place-making process.
Originality/value
The study serves the understanding of how tourism, subject to the global-local relations, is a particular experience of development that shapes a place’s identity. The case of Santorini shows how place-making involves changing, multilayered desires and contradictory visions of tourism and development. This makes socio-cultural and environmental challenges hard to resolve. It is thus challenging to change the course of development, as various actors at the local level and beyond have diverse interests and interpretations of what is desirable for the place.
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This paper aims to describe the development and evaluation of a process model to transform brand strategy into service experiences during the front end of new service development…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to describe the development and evaluation of a process model to transform brand strategy into service experiences during the front end of new service development (NSD). This is an important yet poorly understood transformation that occurs early in service development projects. The paper also aims to describe the theoretical basis for this transformation, and introduces a process model that has been developed to understand and assist with this. Further, it seeks to describe early evaluation results and reflections upon its use.
Design/methodology/approach
A research through design approach using participatory co‐design led to the development of the new process. The development was iterative and carried out together with three service providers. The process model was evaluated using a combination of qualitative methods, including interviews, observation and participatory observation.
Findings
This work underlines the importance of aligning the customer experience to the company brand and suggests how this can be achieved. A key element in this is the development of a service personality and consideration of service touch‐point behaviours through a combination of analytical work and experience prototyping. The suggested process model has received positive evaluation when used in commercial projects, in terms of brand congruence, project team cohesiveness and experiential result. The work advocates tighter integration between brand management and NSD, and has identified multiple issues regarding the content of a service brand strategy. These include the ways in which a brand department should communicate its brand strategy, and how it should be involved in NSD projects to ensure brand alignment.
Research limitations/implications
The evaluation of the model has limitations, both in terms of number of cases and downstream/long term effects. This should therefore be considered an initial evaluation of the model, requiring further verification.
Practical implications
The paper describes a structured three‐stage experience‐centric process that improves brand alignment in projects. Further, the work shows that brand specifications for services should increasingly focus upon desired customer experiences, service touch‐points and touch‐point behaviours rather than the current focus upon visual identity.
Originality/value
This is the first paper to suggest a process that transforms a brand strategy into customer experiences during NSD. It also adds original insights into the transition from brand to concept, bridging branding, service design and NSD.
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The purpose of this paper is to understand the character of activities performed by project managers (PMs) in the early phases of product development in an interorganizational…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand the character of activities performed by project managers (PMs) in the early phases of product development in an interorganizational, multi‐project setting. The aim is to contribute to the extant literature on boundary work in projects by providing a typology of boundary activities and by presenting a conceptual model in which the relationship between these boundary activities is established.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on an explorative, in‐depth case study of a multi‐project setting where PMs assigned to three projects developed new products while simultaneously competing and collaborating. Each project's concept phase was followed by participative observations and ongoing interviews over a 15‐week period at two sites and in two countries.
Findings
It is understood that PMs in organizations collaborate and perform balancing activities. These balancing activities are part of a refinement process, which is created through three intertwined dimensions of boundary activities: administrative, sharing, and tuning. These, in turn, are constructed through complementary micro activities. These micro activities are politically colored and do not necessarily follow a prescribed and orderly path; instead, they are situation contingent and iterative in their character.
Research limitations/implications
The character of boundary activities in coopetitive project settings should be further studied to better understand the early phases of product development.
Practical implications
The political dimension of product development activities in the early phases of product development should be acknowledged. By acknowledging the presence of politics, PMs will be more prepared to deal with the complexity and ambiguity that follows when trying to collaborate and compete simultaneously.
Originality/value
This paper takes a practice perspective and focuses on what people do in interorganizational new product development in situations characterised by coopetition.
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