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Berthon and Pitt (2018) recently highlighted the symbiotic relationship between fake news and brands. This paper aims to draw on semiotics to refine the fake/real news dichotomy to a fourfold typology.

First, the authors turn to semiotics and review Greimas’ (1966) semiotic square. Second, they use this framework to refine the fake/real news dichotomy into a four-fold typology. Third, they illustrate each type with a news report on the topic of climate change. Fourth, they apply this framework to reveal four types of brand: real, fake, empty and ironic.

Given that brand communications are heterogeneous, the authors suggest that the typology can be reconceptualized as dimensions and brands communications decoded accordingly. They conclude by exploring further opportunities offered by the semiotic square for interpretive investigation.

The value of the paper lies in the novel use of the semiotic square to shed light on both news and brand communications.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an instrument to measure employer branding in the information age. Firms increasingly migrate from matter-intensive business models to information-intensive models, where value lies in information rather than the physical objects. This shift has, in turn, led to a change in employee work skills. This is particularly true in the information technology (IT) sector, where firms rely on a limited supply of skilled labor. Employer branding, a firm’s reputation as a place to work, is an important strategy to attract and retain employees.

From the literature, the authors developed and refined an instrument to measure key value propositions of employer brands. The potential IT employees surveyed in the study were students enrolled in the disciplines of computer science and information systems at a comprehensive university in North America. The study went through three stages resulting in an instrument for psychometric properties.

This research revealed eight employer branding value propositions that future IT employees care about. These dimensions are important for both IT firms and industries competing for skilled IT labor to understand and manage.

This paper extends the work of Berthon et al. (2005) on employer branding to the information intensive age and particularly the IT sector. It allows executives to manage and measure their employer brand so as to maximize competitive advantage in attracting and retaining skilled employees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the mechanisms that organizations use to keep their innovations secret. This paper examines how, when and why secrecy appropriation mechanisms (SAMs) can enable innovators to appropriate value from their innovations.

Building from an extensive literature review of innovation and secrecy, the paper presents a number of implications for theory and research in the form of testable propositions.

This conceptualization proposes that SAMs can have both positive and negative effects on a number of organizational dynamics. SAMs involve tradeoffs, and the key to understanding whether they create value to organizations lies in understanding that these tradeoffs exist and the nature of these tradeoffs.

While most managers recognize the importance of secrecy in innovations, many struggle with the practical challenges of doing so. The paper presents guidance for managers to overcome these challenges.

This paper adds to previous research that has identified secrecy as an important appropriation mechanism for firms by digging deeper into the details of SAMs and exploring their sources, characteristics and effects.

This paper aims to explore the effect of employees’ state mindfulness, a short period of mindful presence, on the quality of the service they provide in a service encounter.

Three studies are conducted. A pilot study explores the relationship between state mindfulness and service encounter quality. Experiment 1 examines whether a 15-min mindfulness exercise results in an increase in service employees’ state mindfulness. Experiment 2 tests whether induced state mindfulness produces higher service quality and whether a reminding technique can prolong state mindfulness between service encounters.

The results demonstrate the following. First, that more mindful employees provide better service quality. Second, that a short, easily implemented, mindfulness exercise can reliably increase employees’ state mindfulness. Third, induced mindfulness has an impact on subsequent service quality in terms of reliability, assurance, empathy and responsiveness. These effects persist regardless of the service encounter structure (high vs low structure) or the degree of emotional labor involved (high vs low emotionally charged). Finally, the reminding technique developed as part of this research suggests that state mindfulness can be maintained between service encounters.

As simulated (programmed) customers are used, independent evaluators to assess service quality are used. Service providers in this study are college students; future field studies should consider a wider range of service providers. The research focuses on state mindfulness; exploration of trait mindfulness offers future research opportunities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to empirically examine the link between mindfulness and service quality. It shows that mindfulness can be induced, and through a reminding technique be maintained, and improve service quality across service interactions. This is a powerful finding for marketing managers, for it offers a new method to enhance service provision. Moreover, this research implies that the increase in service quality is likely to be accompanied by reduced job burnout: a double win for employees, employers and customers.

The purpose of this paper is to address the issues of luxury gift giving and the giving of luxury wines as gifts from a conceptual perspective.

The article considers the OA (aesthetic and ontology) model as proposed by Berthon et al. that permits the integration of various conceptualisations of different authors in the area of luxury branding. The model offers a typology of luxury brands that draws on Heidegger's theory of arts and Whitehead's process philosophy. This means that one can differentiate luxury brands along two dimensions: aesthetics and ontology.

The paper contends that the four modes as set out in the AO model of Berthon et al. can be used as a typology of luxury wines, from both gift giving, and gift receiving, perspectives.

Luxury wine marketers can make use of the proposed typology to target wine gift givers effectively, by understanding where on the proposed matrix both the giver and the receiver are positioned. The four modes that emerge can be seen as different target markets, with different motivations and different behaviors with regard to luxury wines as gifts.

By applying the OA model to luxury wines and specifically to the giving and receiving of luxury wines, this paper offers wine marketers the insight to formulate different marketing mix strategies based on the different target markets that emerge from the proposed model.

Explores the problems of “counting” hits and visits to Web sites on the World Wide Web. Nominally, cyberspace offers unrivalled monitoring and tracking potential when compared with other marketing media. However, further inspection reveals some complicating factors. Identifies the phenomenon of cache memory, the use of proxy servers and trawler software and explores their influence on under‐ and over‐counting. Drawing on the hierarchy of effects model developed by Berthon et al. (1996), presents a series of correction factors. Concludes that the problem of accurate counting on the Web is a new manifestation of an old problem: old wine in new bottles.

This paper explores the contrast between marketing and innovation orientations and develops a model that provides an inclusive paradigm. The resulting archetypes and their inter‐relationships are discussed. A measurement scale, ICON, is developed to assess the extent to which a firm or a business corresponds to the resulting archetypes. An empirical test of reliability and validity resulted in four clearly defined factors that correspond to the archetypes in the model. A refined version of the scale is then used to examine the relationship between the strategic archetypes and firm performance.

This paper aims to report on the construction of a scale to measure a firm's stance towards creative consumers; that is, customers who adapt, modify or transform a proprietary offering.

A measurement instrument, called the 3As, is developed to assess the extent to which an organization is aware of its creative customers, its attitude towards its creative customers, and finally the action it takes in response to its creative customers. A total of 178 Executive MBA students were used to fine‐tune a set of items using exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

An empirical test of reliability and validity resulted in three clearly defined factors or dimensions, which correspond to the three constructs of awareness, attitude and action. The relationship between the scales' prediction of stances and a manager's self typing of the organization is assessed, and the relationship between firm stance, environmental turbulence, and performance explored.

This paper provides the first scale for measuring a firm's stance toward creative consumers.