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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the customer engagement and customer self-brand connection on customer advocacy and firms’ financial performance. The research focuses on the financial sector and studies a complex organization with a uniform strategy, but which attends the public in different centers (bank branches).

A theoretical model of effects is tested using dyadic methodology, with 225 dyads (bank branch manager – average of five customers). The authors use structural equation modeling (EQS6.1) to test the relationships.

The results corroborate the hypotheses, with the exception of the influence of customer self-brand connection on financial performance. These analyses show that in the banking sector, where the intensive use of new information and technologies has led to a reduction in direct physical contact with the customer, the off-line experience continues to have a notable economic impact. Furthermore, investment in the brand from an experiential approach determines customer advocacy.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. This research analyzes from a theoretical and empirical perspective the impact of the customer engagement and customer self-brand connection on customer advocacy and firms’ financial performance.

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 propose cultural equity as a construct to better understand the characteristics that define a culturally symbolic brand and the downstream consequences for consumer behavior and nation branding in the era of globalization.

This paper is an empirical investigation of the knowledge and outcome aspects of cultural equity with a total of 1,771 consumers located in three different countries/continents, 77 different brands as stimuli, and using a variety of measures, surveys, lab experiments, procedures and consumer contexts.

Cultural equity is the facet of brand equity attributed to the brand's cultural symbolism or the favorable responses by consumers to the cultural symbolism of a brand. A brand has cultural equity if it has a distinctive cultural symbolism in consumers' minds (brand knowledge aspect of cultural equity: association with the central concept that defines the culture, embodiment of culturally relevant values and embeddedness in a cultural knowledge network), and such symbolism elicits a favorable consumer response to the marketing of the brand (outcome aspect of cultural equity: favorable evaluations and strong self-brand connections).

This paper offers a framework that allows marketers to develop cultural positioning strategies in hyper-competitive and globalized markets and identify ways for building and protecting their brands' cultural equity.

This paper advances our understanding of brands as cultural symbols by introducing cultural equity and integrates prior research on brand equity, cross-cultural differences in consumer behavior, country-of-origin effects and nation branding.

This study aims to follow a rigorous approach to identify, critically analyze and synthesize 75 papers published from 2000 to 2022.

The study presents a systematic literature review on identity expressiveness (IE), clarifying and expanding what is currently known about the concept.

To synthesize current knowledge on IE, the study uses the overarching framework of antecedents-phenomenon-consequences, using this same framework to identify gaps and future research directions. The findings show individual and brand-related factors such as the need for uniqueness and anthropomorphism as antecedents of IE, and eWOM/WOM, impulse purchases and upgrading to more exclusive lines as consequences of IE.

The study contributes to theory by synthesizing and mapping current understanding of the state of knowledge on the concept of IE while highlighting gaps in the extant literature and paving future research directions for scholars in the field.

The study offers useful insights for practitioners, broadening marketers’ actionable options in identity-based marketing. Marketers can use insights from this study to inform marketing strategy and communication campaigns for different types of brands.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind and offers an integrative review of the current literature on IE, thus enhancing understanding of the concept, its antecedents and consequences. The study also contributes to knowledge by highlighting future research priorities for researchers in this field of enquiry.

This paper aims to investigate the key characteristics of parent brands and the relationships among customer perceived value (a second-order construct containing financial, functional, individual and social attributes), parent brand loyalty and the willingness to pay for a premium extended brand. Moreover, the moderating effect of self–brand integration on the influences in the model is examined.

Data were collected in two countries, the USA (n = 535) and China (n = 511), through an online survey. Structural equation modeling and a multi-group analysis were used to analyze the data.

The results show that perceived quality and premium brand authenticity are two important predictors of perceived value. The relationships among perceived value, parent brand loyalty and willingness to pay for an extended premium brand were significantly supported. In addition, self–brand integration was found to moderate the relationship between perceived value and loyalty to the parent brand.

Wine marketers and managers can use recommendations to establish effective brand extension strategies to help the industry know what essential characteristics of a parent brand to focus on and maintain sustainable development through the customer–extended brand relationship.

Previous researchers have discussed wine consumption behaviors or branding strategies. By limiting combining two theories (flow theory and the theory of planned behavior), this paper proposes a chain of behaviors to optimize customer experience to develop a brand extension strategy based on key characteristics of the parent brand.

This chapter explores women leaders’ outward appearance in the male-dominated world of rail, through the lenses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Drawing on 31 interviews with women leaders in rail, it maps how a postfeminist logic is evident in women leaders’ narratives of aesthetic femininity. Aesthetic femininity refers to women leaders’ outward appearance which they describe as feminine. The research participants justify their feminine ‘work style’ through postfeminist themes of individual choice, natural sex differences, irony, personal initiative, skill and empowerment. The findings also show a patterning of justification around aesthetic femininity that fits a neoliberal self-governance as enterprise, self-flexibility and self-confidence. It is argued that whilst these iterations of aesthetic femininity are rooted in postfeminist and neoliberal contexts, they have consequences for sustaining gendered inequalities and traditional feminine norms in the highly masculinised culture of rail. Women’s narratives, whereby gender inequalities are acknowledged then subsumed into individualised agency through dress and appearance, do little to challenge the gendered culture in this sector.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the theory and practice of luxury and masstige brand advertising effectiveness by decoding symbolism imbedded in fashion advertising.

This research employs a semiotic analysis of masstige brand advertising to discover those messages and themes that emerge and that communicate masstige values.

The research identifies identitary values that are exclusive to masstige brands, and those they share with luxury brands.

The purpose of this research is not to make generalizations; rather, its purpose is to offer insights into those themes that define luxury and masstige brand identitary values.

The research provides insights into the key identifiers, which may inspire further research and provide marketing insights for the operation management in luxury fashion.

The research contributes to luxury and masstige retail brand research by identifying the symbolic meaning of luxury advertising.

While extant service-centric research has largely focussed on managerial advantages, few studies have addressed how brand engagement emerges in the broader context of consumer lives. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel intersubjective hermeneutic framework that bridges the socially constructed as well as the individualised meanings of brand engagement in the context of service research.

This conceptual paper adopts a theory-building approach based on recent developments in the service-centric marketing literature.

The authors offer a novel theoretical perspective that recognises the intersubjective and phenomenological nature of individual and collective consumer brand experiences, and show how such experiences emerge from socially constructed brand engagement practices using the co-constituting lens of value-in-use.

The proposed conceptual framework invites further empirical and contextual investigations of intersubjective brand engagement in both online and offline contexts.

The contribution of this framework is twofold. First, the authors draw on the intersubjective orientation and hermeneutic framework to provide conceptual clarity in relation to the nature of brand engagement practices, brand experiences, and value-in-use, and discuss their interrelationships. Second, the authors address the nature of meaning ascribed to engagement beyond customer-firm-brand relationships, and discuss why any given consumer’s experience of brand engagement reflects a complex dialectic between socially constructed and individualised brand meanings. In doing so, the integrative framework recognises the interplay between the intersubjective and phenomenological natures of consumer brand experiences, and offers insights as to how these experiences are framed by broader socially constructed engagement practices.