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Personal branding becomes a new in-demand skill for all professionals today. To be well-known helps to achieve success in the networked business environment. Personal relationships and a good reputation in the reality of network economy help young artists and art designers move up the career ladder. This paper aims to discuss a problem of artists who often find it difficult to define their artistic and self-distinction identities. The concept of personal brand and branding seems quite irrelevant, especially in reference to their own selves. People usually associate branding with marketing, which in our minds is usually the same as “pushy” and aggressive sales practices. Their find problematic to promote themselves. The purpose of this paper is to highlight that, based on existing theories, artistic identity creation in connection with the skill of personal branding is crucial for personal success in the profession of today’s young artists and art designers.

The study was conducted based on the data originally collected among artists, designers, architecture professionals and students. The data have been analyzed with the equal structural equation modeling method.

This paper presents empirical evidence that if artists view themselves as personal brands, it affects their personal performance in a positive way.

Authors claim that a teaching curriculum for young adult artists should include a personal branding program, to help them find and support their artistic identity and express their personal values and self-brand distinction, and leverage them to build their professional career.

This is one of the first studies to quantify the self-brand performance of young art designers as a benefit of being self-brand oriented.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which traditional marketing theory and practice can be applied in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consider how owner-managers perceive their own role in marketing within a small business setting.

–A qualitative exploratory approach using semi-structured in-depth interviews amongst owner-managers of SMEs in the UK.

SME marketing is effective in that it embraces some relevant concepts of traditional marketing, tailors activities to match its customers and adds its own unique attribute of self-branding as bestowed by the SME owner-manager.

The study was limited to the UK and to a small sample of SMEs and as such the findings are not necessarily generalisable.

A “4Ps” model for SME self-branding is proposed, which encompasses the attributes of personal branding, (co)production, perseverance and practice.

The cultivation and maintenance of a brand is becoming increasingly important as politicians seek to connect with constituents. Through the lens of social cognition and group dynamics, this paper aims to understand the impact of evaluations of politician brands on voter intentions.

Three studies utilize the social cognition constructs of warmth and competence from the stereotype content model (SCM) and Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF) to evaluate the impact of brand perceptions on voting intentions, comparing fit between the models. The first study establishes the impact of these perceptions on existing politicians. The second study replicates these effects while controlling for party affiliation and extraneous factors and explicitly studies politicians as brands. The third study examines the formation of perceptions and assumptions when full information is unavailable.

Social cognition and group dynamics drive responses to politician brands. The data herein support perceptions of warmth and competence as significant predictors of voting intentions. Dependent upon whether the politician is being evaluated as a brand or a person, BIAF or SCM predicts the dimension that will be most impactful. These patterns persist in the absence of full information. As expected, voting intentions increased significantly when the voter was of the same (vs opposing) party as that of the candidate.

Conducted during an election year, evaluations of politicians are susceptible to the current political climate and the predominantly two party political system in which the studies were conducted. The design of Studies 2 and 3 addresses some of these limitations. Results point toward the interrelated nature of warmth and competence perceptions and the usefulness of applying both BIAF and SCM to understand how voters view politicians and the drivers of voting intentions.

This study evidences the depth to which perceptions of candidates impact voting intent, establishing politicians’ unique position as both brands and people. These findings prove useful in interpreting the outcome of elections this year, and beyond.

Expanding a limited body of existing research, this work contributes to our understanding of the application of SCM within the context of politician brands. As the first concurrent investigation of SCM and BIAF, these findings are of value to political strategists and academics alike. The contribution is augmented by the consideration of the impact of party affiliation and missing information.

While in common English-language parlance speaking of “online celebrities” encourages the conflation of new forms of famousness with existing discourses on mass media stardom and fandom, the Mandarin Chinese term wanghong, a shorthand term for wangluo hongren (literally “person popular on the internet”), frames the enticing shores of online celebrity through the peculiar lexical domain of a grassroots popularity. The figure of the wanghong has in recent years accompanied the development of social media platforms in China, becoming a profitable profession, an inspirational role model, a morally condemnable by-product of internet economies, and in general a widely debated social phenomenon among local users. Drawing on interviews with more and less successful local online celebrities and discussions with their audiences, this chapter offers an up-to-date portrayal of the various forms of wanghong currently vying for attention on Chinese social media platforms, illustrating how popularity is crafted along with narratives of professionalism and economic aspirations intimately connected to the sociotechnical contexts of contemporary China.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

This paper aims to examine the sources of consumer‐brand relationship investment, specifically isolating the sources and outcomes of communality and exchange relationship characteristics.

The paper utilizes a survey‐based empirical study and subsequent structural modeling approach to test a series of hypotheses concerning how brand performance perceptions influence the development of consumer relationship connections.

The paper finds that perceptions of product performance and service quality influence the development of brand reliability and brand fidelity respectively. Similarly, brand reliability is the primary source of an exchange orientation, while brand fidelity leads to communal brand connections and, ultimately, consumer‐brand relationship investment.

This research is limited by the scope of the sample, fast food restaurants. Future research should explore consumer relationship investment in other product and service categories in order to determine the extent to which relationship development processes vary by product category.

Brands that wish to develop enduring relationships with their customers must understand the relative impact of both personal and functional (exchange) relationship characteristics on the development of relationship investment. Each has a specific role to play and the roles of each vary at different relationship stages.

This research offers at least three significant contributions to the marketing discipline and marketing practice. First, it introduces constructs and associated scales for brand fidelity, communality, exchange and relationship investment. Second, it demonstrates how brand service and product performance differentially contribute to two dimensions of consumer‐brand relationships. Finally, it describes three discrete relationship development stages that play specific roles in the evolution of consumer‐brand relationship investment.

The chapter focuses on brand image and its role in business relationship initiation. The chapter takes the perspective of personal brands, CEO branding in particular, and discusses how brand image of the CEO affects the establishment of new relationships. The corporate brand image provides a first insight into, for instance, perceived quality, while the CEO brand is a strategic combination of the CEO image and CEO reputation. An empirical case study exemplifies and illustrates how the corporate brand and the CEO brand interlink. The reader learns that a strong CEO brand may outperform the corporate brand in the initial stage of establishing new business relationships. Trust and commitment are highlighted through the case, inducing that business relationship performance is dependent on personal interaction and network bonds between the actors. The personal brand of the CEO is an important element in branding strategies and a strategic tool for organizations active in the B2B domain. This relates specially to partner selection and the stage of initiating business relationships. Furthermore, both rational and emotional factors are considered when business partners evaluate each other, in search for information and cues as regards the history of the partner. Eventually, trust is created between the partners, and the relationship is initiated.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.