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The innovation of meaning paradigm is a strategy to radically innovate product and service meanings. While researchers have focussed on the role of product and retail space meanings as interlinked in the pursuit of innovation, no investigation has been directed towards understanding when the two meanings differ. This research explores how companies can manage two different meanings offered through their retail services and the products sold.

Due to the highly intangible and subjective nature of meaning, as well as the exploratory aim of the research, a case study approach has been adopted. In particular, the research compares two case studies of similar companies in the beauty industry. Data were triangulated across three different sources: a panel of experts, ethnographic research in the two companies' stores and extensive academic and practitioner publications.

Findings suggest that innovating the service meaning can be a viable strategy to differentiate a retail offering the product meaning which is no longer perceived as different with respect to competitors.

The study applies the innovation of meaning concept to retail services, distinguishing the meaning given to the store from that given to products, thereby offering managers a strategy to innovate a suffering retail format.

Analyses successful international ads for alcoholic drinks, cigarettes and corporate identity to determine the core meanings for each product. Argues that these meanings constitute “cultural definitions” of the products, and that they represent a significant aspect of marketing information. Concludes that the meaning exemplars discerned in each category define parameters for advertising appeals, but still leave a lot of decision latitude about how to target within the market.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether negative meanings consumers attribute to a corporation transfer to the endorser and to examine the moderating effects of corporate-specific and product-specific negative meanings on an endorser’s credibility.

Following a protocol designed by Till and Shimp (1998), two experiments were conducted to examine if meaning transfer exists (experiment 1) and if meaning type moderates reverse meaning transfer (experiment 2). A doubly repeated multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate changes in the endorser’s credibility and attitudes toward the brand.

The results revealed that the negative meanings consumers associated with these corporate crises influence consumer perceptions of the endorser as well as attitude toward the brand.

This finding supports the position that meaning type moderates reverse meaning transfer and may explain variances in the literature on the significance of reverse meaning transfer. Based on these findings, brand crises have a negative effect on the endorser’s credibility.

The results lead the authors to suggest that endorsers as well as marketers should closely scrutinize brand partnerships, as the relationship may positively and negatively influence consumer perceptions of the athlete endorser.

Based on the findings from this study, brand managers need to appreciate differences in brand crisis type by tailoring brand image remediation strategies to fit the type(s) of meaning(s) associated with a specific controversy.

The results from the current study add, significantly, to the literature by being the first to evidence that different meanings associated with different types of brand crises produce different attitudes toward the brand.

The purpose of this study is to conceptualize the paradigm of meaningful innovation (MI) by exploring the theoretical basis, identifying its core concepts and key processes, and supporting it with evidence from leading world-class enterprises.

Based on a systemic literature review on the evolution of innovation paradigms, this study builds a conceptual framework to explicate the core concepts and process of MI. Moreover, a horizontal embedded case study of GREE electric appliances is conducted to further enrich, refine and support the proposed framework.

The main finding of this study is that MI could be regarded as a process of integrating innovation elements (resources, capabilities, systems, etc.) with internal and external innovation meaning to obtain outcomes with both economic value and social significance. As a “long-termism” paradigm with meaning identification and conversion as its core, MI is driven by the collaboration of “deductive mechanism” and “reflective mechanism.”

Based on the previous studies concerning innovation paradigms on the internal and external meaning, this paper proposes an integrated framework of MI. In this framework, enterprises can consider internal and external meanings through deductive and reflective mechanisms, to better coordinate resources, capabilities, institutions, markets and other factors to achieve higher innovation performance.

The present studies provide support for a functional approach to instrumental and terminal values and the value‐attitude‐behaviour system. Study 1 surveyed individuals’ human values, the type of meaning to which they prefer to attend in products (i.e. utilitarian or symbolic), and how they choose to evaluate the products (i.e. a piecemeal or affective judgement). The study found that individuals who favoured instrumental to terminal human values showed a predisposition to attend to the utilitarian meanings of products and make piecemeal judgements. In contrast, individuals who favoured terminal over instrumental values preferred symbolic meanings, affective judgements, and human values in general. Study 2 found that individuals who favoured instrumental to terminal values had stronger instrumental attitudes towards cars and sun‐glasses. The results suggest that: psychological functions are not limited to attitudes or human values but span the breadth of the value‐attitude‐behaviour system; that two such psychological functions are instrumental and expressive; and that instrumental and terminal values serve instrumental and expressive functions, respectively.

In the stream of works showing the semantic dimension as a core concept of the product innovation (e.g. design driven innovation), the paper aims to present a new business modeling approach driven by design and meanings. Similarly to the concept that the product is not represented only by form and function but also by meaning, the entire business model of a company does not transmit economic and technological value only, but tells a lot of the company from a semantic point of view. The work seeks to point out that companies can focus on the management of meanings to “make sense” of their entire business model moulded in building blocks, and realize what the authors called meaning strategy.

After a detailed overview of the theoretical background grounded in the strategy literature and design one, to support the authors' perspective, an in‐depth study of meaning strategy performed by illycaffè is presented.

The value of the work lies in underlining that the design driven (product) innovation's application can be extended further than only describing successful (product) strategies of design‐intensive manufactures and in the suggestions on how to implement a meaning strategy, creating new meanings not only in the products, but also in the building blocks of a company's business model.

The meaning strategy content and action‐oriented framework proposed and the matrix business model meanings versus building blocks can become tools to communicate the company strategy's pivotal elements and its evolution and they can drive strategists in developing and managing new/existing meanings and building blocks.

Innovation dynamics have been the object of study of several researchers, focusing in particular on technological innovation and the emergence of a dominant design. However, these models have been challenged by how the pervasiveness of digital technologies is speeding up the pace at which innovation evolves. On the other hand, a growing body of literature in innovation management has started underlining the relevance of new product and service meanings as a source of innovation.

This research aims to study the different innovation dynamics within an industry, investigating not only how companies react to fast-changing functional advancements but rather how their behavior changes as shifts in meaning occur. To properly assess the phenomenon, this longitudinal study analyzes the social media industry, strongly subjected to continuous functional advancements, through a deep dive in the 160 innovations introduced between 2003 and 2017 by the eight leading players in the industry.

Our results illustrate the co-existence of different approaches to innovation within an industry and hint that consequent and fast cycles of innovation in both functionalities and meanings discourage the emergence of a dominant design.

Our results help managers and innovators acknowledge the possibility to leverage not just on the technological dimension of innovation but also the reason why people use a given product or service, innovating its meaning. Furthermore, our results recognize the co-existence of different innovation streams upon which innovators can act.

This research contributes to the extant literature in innovation management, extending the classical models of innovation dynamics by including the evolution of innovations of meaning in relation to technological innovation.

This paper aims to analyse the valuation of cultural products and explores what this process means for organizations involved in their production and marketing.

The authors develop the arguments using a number of mini-cases and industry examples.

The main thesis is that the meaningfulness and value ambiguity of cultural products shift the focus of valuation away from the products themselves towards how certain agents in the socio-cultural environment identify and certify these products. This paper discuss how valuation takes place via selection systems and how the nature of cultural products drives the dominance of one selection system over others.

Theories on value creation needs to take consideration of the critical role played by the selection system instead of just the firms that produce these products.

Organizations engaged in producing highly symbolic products need to manage selection systems and related industry dynamics to establish an enduring competitive advantage.

Value creation is a collective social efforts. Every member of the society can play a central role in this process. Better engaging various member of the society to enable them actively participate in the value creation process is what organizations today need to consider, instead of just treating individuals in the society as a “customer” who only passively consume. This research calls for the true empowerment of every member of the society to facilitate collective creativity and participation in the value creation endeavour that benefits the entire society as a whole.

It is the first paper that has created a conceptual link between the type of selection system and product categories. In other words, it takes existing literature on value creation and selection system one step further by creating the alignment or match between types of selection system and types of product categories. Therefore, it offers academics and practitioners a much detailed understanding on how value creation is conducted across different product categories.

The concept design-driven innovation focuses on innovating product meanings. It has been studied from a variety of perspectives and contexts since the early 2000s. However, a complete overview of the literature published in this area is currently missing. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how design-driven innovation contributes to value creation in product development.

In this systematic literature review, 57 papers and book chapters that cover design-driven innovation were identified and analyzed. An iterative coding process was followed to derive five facets of design-driven innovation that contribute to value creation.

Design-driven innovation creates value by focusing on the intangible values of products. The following five facets of design-driven innovation that contribute to value creation were identified: development of new product meanings, knowledge generation, actors and collaborations, capabilities and process. These facets and their interrelations are presented in a theoretical framework.

The main practical implication of this study is that it is now clear that the five facets of design-driven innovation are interrelated and reinforce each other. Therefore, companies need to approach design-driven innovation from a holistic perspective.

This paper contributes to theory by presenting the theoretical framework that provides an overview of available knowledge and that creates a context for future research.