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Customization allows brands to provide goods that match customers’ preferences, but its impact on consumer–brand relationships is unclear. This study aims to examine the impact of two key moderators on the effectiveness of customization to enhance brand’s perceived partner quality, which mediates the relationship between customization and brand attitude.

Study 1 (n = 219) tests the moderated–mediation relationship, the effect of customization (IV) on perceived partner quality (mediator), and its indirect effect on brand attitude (DV), which is moderated by consumers’ self-construal orientation (Moderator 1). Study 2 (n = 416) extends the model tested in Study 1 by including an additional moderator, shopping task context (Moderator 2).

Results empirically demonstrate the impact of self-construal and shopping task context on the effectiveness of customization in improved customer–brand partner quality and eventual brand attitude.

Customization may not appeal to every customer for the same reason. Marketers must target customers’ individual traits (independents vs interdependents) and understand the context of the shopping task context (self-purchase vs gift-giving).

The work reveals how brands can enhance consumers’ perceptions of the brand by allowing them to customize the product. It is novel in demonstrating that customization is not just a fine-grained segmentation strategy but a brand building tool. It highlights contextual factors affecting the outcome of customization by demonstrating the conditions under which it is most effective.

Increasing industry interest in visual artists and commercial brand collaborations has heightened the need for research on exactly how visual art can add meaning to brands in ways that enhance brand value to existing consumers and potentially reach new consumers. Consumers are known to select brands on the basis of how well these brands reflect their own personalities. The purpose of this research is to understand whether brand alliances with artists exhibiting distinct personalities can make brands more attractive to consumers whose personalities do not currently match the brand.

Two experiments are used to examine the impact of artists’ personality (in)congruence on consumers’ perceptions of the brand and purchase intentions of the brand’s products.

The results show that consumers whose personalities do not match the brand’s current personality are likely to alter their view of a brand when the brand partners with an artist whose personality matches with that of the consumers’. This happens without negatively affecting the brand personality perceptions of current consumers who already identify with the brand.

When seeking to attract a new target segment, brands can ally with visual artists who convey a personality that matches that of the new target segment.

This paper adds to a nascent literature on the power of artist–brand alliances, and demonstrates that these partnerships need not only be between artists and brands with consistent personalities but can also effectively be used to target new consumers.

The state of interactive digital technology is evolving rapidly and has shifted the ways in which customers shop dramatically. This trend heightens the need for research that examines the latest interactive digital technology tools adopted in fashion retailing. In response, the purpose of this paper was to examine fashion retailers’ incorporation of new interactive digital technology – in both online and offline retailing formats, and including new hybrid contexts – and its results in providing new experiential quality that contributes strongly to engage with customers.

The paper first reviews the literature and then proposes the research questions. This is followed by exploratory substantiation of those propositions with the findings from case studies that examined the new interactive digital technology implemented by six leading fashion retailers.

Various digital technology tools implemented in brick-to-click, click-to-brick and brick-and-mortar retailing offer customers a variety of experiential qualities that allow them to co-create products, engage in emotion-driven sensational and personalized shopping experiences and seamless shopping virtually, all of which derive from interactive digital technology implemented to enhance customer engagement.

This research examined the implementation of interactive digital technologies across the full spectrum of the fashion retail settings above. This paper makes an original contribution by adopting a customer-centric perspective and assessing the advantages technology provides to customer’s engagement quality in shopping, which differs from the traditional firm-centric perspective that views technology as a way to innovate retailers’ operations.

This paper aims to present historical examples of collaborations between brand strategists and artists; provide an extensive, structured overview of existing published research on such collaborations and their effects; present seven papers comprising this special issue; and discuss ideas for further research into brand–art collaboration.

This is an editorial based mainly on an extensive and broad literature review.

First, this editorial underpins the relevance of brand–art collaboration in the past and present by reference to real examples. Second, it structures the diverse literature into four key aspects of the topic: inspiration, insights, identity and image. Third, it provides a glimpse of the seven papers selected for this special issue. Fourth and finally, it identifies a total of 16 avenues for further research, on four levels (artist, brand owner, consumer and cooperation process).

This editorial and the entire special issue together represent the first anthology on the topic of the interface between brand management and arts. The collection and classification of the existing literature, the formulation of ideas for future research and the content of the seven papers are collectively excellent starting springboards for new and fresh brand research projects.