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Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.

This research aims to explore generation (Gen) Z's personal branding on social media when job seeking.

Gen Z students, in their final year of university, were interviewed about personal branding, as well as recruiters and career advisors to gain insights into the recruitment process and expectations of online personal brands. Before interviewing, Gen Z students' LinkedIn profiles were examined, and then fed into the interview process.

Using impression management theory, the findings show that Gen Z perceive online personal brands as a crucial tool to gain more advantage in job markets. A gap was found between desired and perceived selves in Gen Z's online personal brands. Strategies such as effective self-reflection, authentic communication, self-promotion processes, awareness of risks and constantly controlling digital footprints were suggested to build stronger and more coherent personal brands. Gen Z are in favour of a more dynamic, interactive, work-in-process of authentic personal brands.

This research demonstrates the importance of authentically building online personal branding strategies and tactics to bridge the divide between Gen Z's desired and perceived images in personal branding on social media when job seeking.

The increased importance of sports and athlete brands highlights the need for athletes to pay attention to branding as it has positive impacts. As athletes, Muslim women have not succeeded in building their brands. This study aims to understand the branding challenges facing Muslim female athletes and how to overcome them.

These branding obstacles and guidelines were explored using qualitative methods – specifically semi-structured interviews with Muslim female athletes and focus groups with experts. Data were analysed using open and axial coding to identify the codes.

The study identifies three major obstacles to branding by Muslim female athletes. Self-related obstacles, such as knowledge of brand building, social media, personal pressure and a lack of role models, impact the brand-building decision. Social-related (family and society) and sport-related obstacles (participation as women and as Muslims) further complicate this task. Experts provide additional insights regarding these obstacles, suggesting strategies to overcome them.

The research focuses on athletes from one geographical area and has limitations associated with using qualitative methods.

The study suggests how self-, social- and sport-related obstacles are faced by athletes. It provides suggestions for federations, sports codes and other stakeholders to support athletes to overcome these barriers.

This study expands the understanding of the struggles Muslim women face in building their brands as part of an under-represented group.

The study aims to determine the role of online retail website experience on brand happiness and willingness to share personal information using the theoretical lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework. Further, it explores the role of brand intimacy and brand partner quality in mediating the path between brand happiness and willingness to share personal information.

This study used a cross-sectional survey design to collect data from 439 online retail consumers in India, using an online questionnaire. The data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling in IBM Amos.

The present study found that online retail website experience is significantly related to brand happiness. The finding also supports that brand happiness was positively and significantly related to ‘consumers' willingness to share personal information. This relationship was fully mediated by brand intimacy. Brand happiness also mediated the relationship between website experience and the willingness to share personal information.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on brand happiness and willingness to share personal information. It establishes a central role of brand happiness as a driver and a mediator of consumers' willingness to share personal information with e-commerce retailers, extending the stimulus-organism-response framework in the context of brand happiness and willingness to share personal information. Further, the study establishes the role of website experience as a marketer (and brand) led driver of brand happiness.

The results have implications for the role of the website in enhancing the consumer experience, which in turn is a driver of brand happiness. Further, managers need to promote brand happiness with the help of website experience to enable consumers’ willingness to share personal information and help organizations customize their marketing campaigns.

This is among the first studies to evaluate brand happiness from the perspective of an online retail website experience and consider consumers’ willingness to share personal information from a branding rather than a technological perspective. Additionally, the study introduces the SOR framework in the context of brand happiness, with website experience acting as a stimulus for consumers, resulting in brand happiness, which is mediated by brand partner quality and brand intimacy (organism), leads to consumers' willingness to share personal information with online retail brands (response).

This study evaluates the factors related to the creation of a human brand in the brand inception stage.

Employing content analysis of expert reviews, we establish the role played by valence (positiveness), depth (number of statements) and timing of subjective and objective critical reviews for human brands. To address these issues, we employ generalized estimating equations to model numerical ratings of celebrity reviews evaluating a nascent human brand.

The findings show that subjective reviews have the potential to influence the probability of survival of a human brand in the brand inception period, are increasingly consequential during the inception period stages and are more influential than objective reviews. We also found that the valence of objective reviews can negatively and significantly relate to human brands in their late inception stage.

This is the first research to demonstrate the importance of critical reviews in building human brands, with a focus on the first moment of a brand's inception. More importantly, this research enriches our understanding of the larger process of personal brand building as it may emerge over time.

Employer branding is a topic that has gained relevance in the organisational world. Currently, organisations need to differentiate themselves, and one of their biggest challenges is the search and retention of talent. One of the factors that have been associated with attracting talent is employer branding. However, studies that explore the relationship between this, corporate reputation and the intention to apply for a job are scarce. As such, this study aims to analyse the mediating role of corporate reputation in the relationship between employer branding and the intention to apply for a job offer.

To achieve the goals, data were collected from 225 Portuguese adults. The response rate was 75%. Based on a survey, respondents reported their perceptions of employer branding of a specific organisation, and they rated the organisation’s reputation and their intention to apply to that organisation.

The results showed that employer branding (interest value; social value; economic value; development value; application value) positively influenced an organisation’s corporate reputation, which, in turn, increased an individual’s intention to apply for an employment offer in that organisation.

The present study is a contribution to the literature on employer branding, as it reinforced the importance that employer branding and corporate reputation play in the intention of applying for a job offer.

Drawing upon social judgment theory, the research examines whether changes in psychological involvement with a sport human brand owing to their sporting success can generate spillover effects on people's national pride, a proxy for the collective level of well-being and whether the individual's behavioral engagement in sport spectating will moderate this relationship.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment grounded in the 2021 Indian Premier League championship, the authors solicit responses from 296 representative individuals residing in India twice using a two-wave panel design. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, repeated measures T-test, latent change score analysis, and structural regression analysis to examine the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride.

The results demonstrate a positive association between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride. Further, the findings indicate that an increase in psychological involvement with sport human brand was associated with an increase in national pride due to the successful athletic endeavor involving the sport human brand. However, the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride was invariant irrespective of patrons' spectatorship behavior.

This research demonstrates that sport human brands possess transformative soft power that extends their prerogative cultural identity personified by their athletic ability and success, allowing them to shape public sentiments of national pride via their profound influence through and beyond the complex network of brand ecosystems.

Moral transgressions committed by person-brands can negatively impact consumers through the transgression’s diagnosticity (severity, centrality and consistency). This paper aims to test how a transgression’s centrality and consistency impact important consumer perceptions and behavioral intentions toward a person-brand, holding constant the transgression in question. These outcomes are crucial for person-brands to understand how to minimize and manage the impact of a given transgression.

This paper uses three online consumer experiments to manipulate transgression diagnosticity via centrality and consistency and identifies the resulting impact on consumer-brand identification, trustworthiness and consumer digital engagement intentions through PROCESS models.

High-diagnosticity transgressions lower consumer digital engagement intentions regarding the person-brand and their endorsed products. This effect is serially mediated by consumer-brand identification, as predicted by social identity theory, and by perceived trustworthiness of the person-brand.

Person-brands should emphasize the nondiagnostic nature of any transgressions in which they are involved, including a lack of centrality and consistency with their brand, and guard against the appearance of diagnostic transgressions.

This paper shows that transgression diagnosticity impacts consumer engagement through the pathway of consumer-brand identification and trustworthiness. It also manipulates aspects of diagnosticity that can be influenced by the person-brand (centrality and consistency) while holding the transgression constant. As such, this paper extends the literature on transgressions, on person-branding strategy, and on social identity theory.

Digital influencers, besides being a personal branding phenomenon, constitute, nowadays, important partners for brands in the digital environment. Despite the benefits for both parties, the brand and the endorser, there is a risk when the individuals or the brand take part in some scandal or questionable activity, which causes a loss of credibility and reputation. The contagious effect of personal or corporate brand crisis with the partners is well reported in the literature. However, there are no studies about such occurrence in the digital environment, considering that the phenomenon of digital influence has some particularities differing from traditional celebrity endorsement. This chapter focuses on the research of the consequences of a change in the credibility of influencers or brands, after the occurrence of a negative situation, and the way in which this change affects the two parties involved, the brand and the influencer. We conducted a netnographic study of the social media pages of three digital influencers and the social media pages of a recognized fast fashion brand recognized in the digital world. We analyzed 1500 social media comments from their audiences and found that influencers suffer from a loss in sympathy and credibility by scandals while crisis communication strategies in corporate brands can prevent such damages. Strategic implications for brand managers and digital influencers managing their endorsements are addressed in the discussion.

This study aims to clarify identity building and authenticity management in human brand research, focusing on inside operators managing corporate accounts on social media. Conventional human brand research analyzes online influencers, and there is a research gap in whether these previous findings apply to corporate accounts.

Using netnography and interview data, this study analyzes Japanese corporate accounts on Twitter.

A corporate account’s identity is constructed under the influence of not only the brand but also the actual inside operator, called naka-no-hito, and other accounts that interact on social media. Corporate accounts are able to exhibit humanistic passion through the inside operator’s personality and maintain a distance from commerciality – to manage their authenticity. These activities attract general and other corporate and media accounts, and interactions with them re-create promotion effects.

This study observed that corporate accounts’ authenticity is not a trade-off between passion and commercial transparency but a compatibility achieved by coordinating interests among actors, together with the presence of inside operators.