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This study matches destination brand components with motives and identifies those components that are most important for the consumer during various stages of the decision process. This study also aims to classify various functional and symbolic brand components. The findings take the customers' point‐of‐view in identifying those descriptors that affect consumer choice preference and create destination loyalty.

The research is exploratory. Through a detailed literature review, destination brand components are identified, simplified and then classified as symbolic or functional. They are also classified by motive. The review is followed by a quantitative study that uses open‐ended questions to find the relationship between destination brand components and the stage of decision making. This study also presents a conceptual model with taxonomy of brand components.

Functional brand components seem to play a major role in a consumer's description of place brands during the various decision making stages. This finding highlights the importance of stressing functional components in the destination's branding strategy.

This study is the first of its type and can serve as a platform for future research, practically helping destinations create more effective communication.

The aim of this paper is to address three broad questions: Are preferences for branding attributes similar for entry and for retention? Are there generational and career stage differences in one's entry and exit priorities? How is current satisfaction with brand image attributes related to overall commitment, satisfaction and retention?

This paper reports on the results of a survey of 144 workers employed at 37 day care centers in a medium sized Canadian city.

Although the level of respondents' priorities for entry and exit differed, most priorities remained in the same order. However, their perspectives were more disaggregated for entry than for exit, where branding attributes were more strongly correlated. Consistent with the exploration stage of career development, younger people planned to stay a shorter length of time with a particular center.

This study includes only child care workers in a small geographic region. Future research should be undertaken in larger scale firms that also offer greater heterogeneity in professions as well as career options. Also, a longitudinal study that follows new entrants for several years, using both instrumental and symbolic measures, would provide information on what attracted individuals and what influenced their intention to leave.

Although there were few differences by age or career stage, the variation within each factor suggests that a brand image may need to be relatively broad to accommodate diversity. HR practitioners can use the practice symbolic pattern to build and maintain a culture that is attractive to present and prospective employees. The opposite symbolic practice pattern may help current employees understand reasons for new practices.

Organizations face significant challenges in designing programs for recruitment and retention. This study considers how employees' to two questions – “why do people enter the organization” and “why do people remain?” – may differ.

This research seeks to investigate how in-store mobile use affects store loyalty directly or indirectly via the mediation of store value and whether social influence moderates such relationships.

Based on a sample of 862 actual customers from a market research company panel, we used structural equation modelling to test a series of research hypotheses.

The results show a positive but weak effect of in-store smartphone use on loyalty. This effect is significantly mediated by the store’s hedonic and symbolic value dimensions, but not by its utilitarian value. This research also uncovers significant moderation effects of social influence on the relationships investigated. The effect of in-store smartphone use on store loyalty is stronger when social influence is lower. However, the effects of hedonic and symbolic store value are stronger when social influence is higher.

This research is carried out in one country (France). It focuses on social influence through in-store mobile phone use; it would also be useful to consider physical social influence.

Retailers should position their stores on specific value dimensions and use social influence appropriately to improve loyalty. For instance, utilitarian value should be offered to customers with low social influence. To prevent negative social influence, retailers could develop “controlled” social influence through their own private mobile app to favour interaction.

This research underlines the critical role of store value and social influence on the relationships between smartphone use and store loyalty. It shows that the effects of value dimensions (utilitarian, hedonic and symbolic) on loyalty differ depending on social influence level.

This study proposes a new construct and a measure for understanding the embeddedness of public relations capability at the organisation level. The public relations orientation measure assesses the degree to which organisations (1) pursue both behavioural and symbolic relationships with publics, (2) set public relations goals to support organisational goals and facilitate effective use of public relations information within the organisation, (3) provide adequate resources for public relations, and (4) engage in dialogue with the publics on whom their success or failure depends. Suggestions are given for how public relations orientation (PRO) can be used as a diagnostic and benchmarking tool in organisations.

This study's aim is to apply the personal involvement approach to store brand products' buying proneness. With respect to the conflicting perspectives of narrow “latitudes of acceptance” and “extensive search”, are presumed different levels and different types of personal involvement. The aim is to formulate a conceptual framework integrating three types of relevant consumer values: functional involvement, symbolic involvement and economic involvement, along with two well established mediating variables, and two consumer characteristics as exogenous variables.

Data were collected through a survey of 914 shoppers randomly recruited from 11 grocery stores. The study employs an exploratory factor analysis method following path analysis, using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results show the significance of a multifaceted perspective of consumers' personal involvement in grocery shopping conditions. This perspective leads to the possibility of high personal involvement in grocery products shopping. Regarding consumers' store brand buying intention, personal involvement facets have only a marginal effect, while the direct substantial effects are derived from familiarity and value for money.

Retailers are advised to go beyond their efforts to persuade consumers that their products have economic value; they should encourage consumers to compare and evaluate the functional attributes of their store brands. For the social-symbolic consumer, they should employ different products' quality layers and different appealing brand names.

The originality of this study lies in the multifaceted alternative approach of consumers' personal involvement in grocery shopping processes, and the conceptual framework proposed to examine the effect of personal involvement facets on store brand buying intentions.

Based on the assumption that the identity and self-understanding of an academic discipline determines how it conceptualizes different domains of social reality, including how it imports and/or exports concepts from or to other disciplines, this chapter presents some of the findings of a major ongoing comparative and cross-disciplinary study of how five key concepts within the combined fields of crisis management and reputation management are applied in three different disciplinary contexts. In this chapter, however, the focus is on just one of these concepts: the concept of reputation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a parallel review of the role and processes of monitoring and regulation of corporate identities, examining both the communication and the performance measurement literature.

Two questions are posed: Is it possible to effectively monitor and regulate corporate identities as a management control process? and, What is the relationship between corporate identity and performance measurement?

Corporate identity management is positioned as a strategically complex task embracing the shaping of a range of dimensions of organisational life. The performance measurement literature likewise now emphasises organisational ability to incorporate both financial and “soft” non‐financial performance measures. Consequently, the balanced scorecard has the potential to play multiple roles in monitoring and regulating the key dimensions of corporate identities. These shifts in direction in both fields suggest that performance measurement systems, as self‐producing and self‐referencing systems, have the potential to become both organic and powerful as organisational symbols and communication tools. Through this process of understanding and mobilising the interaction of both approaches to management, it may be possible to create a less obtrusive and more subtle way to control the nature of the organisation.

This paper attempts the theoretical and practical fusion of disciplinary knowledge around corporate identities and performance measurement systems, potentially making a significant contribution to understanding, shaping and managing organisational identities.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the most relevant quality factors and communication activities that are suitable as competitive levers in dentistry.

The research is based on a model that highlights the reciprocal influence between patient satisfaction and dentist reputation. The model points out that experience/behaviours, explicit communication and word‐of‐mouth are antecedents of both patient satisfaction and dentist reputation. This research is based on interviews with senior dentists, focus groups with patients and a survey of dentistry patients.

The most important quality factors for patient satisfaction are the doctor‐patient relationship and the clarity of information about treatment and cost. Key communication levers are first, the implicit communication that arises from successful treatment and overall service quality; second, the explicit communication that arises from interpersonal relations with the dentist and the staff, and the referrals of previous patients.

In order to gain competitive advantages, dentists should achieve an average level of patient satisfaction for “given” and “secondary” factors; to pay careful attention to “strategic factors”; and to explicitly communicate “opportunity factors” since patients are usually unaware of their value. Furthermore, dentists should emphasize interpersonal, experiential and third‐party communication with patients.

The paper puts forward a model that integrates previous service quality and reputation management models, and makes suggestions for the improvement of service quality management and communication in dentistry.

The symbolic value of wine is a relevant research topic and raises the interest in studies in both the enological and market areas. In this context, this study aims to understand the role of the symbolic value of wine and its relationship to the product purchase intention.

The study is based on a survey of 269 wine consumers from Brazil. The basic theoretical framework includes three latent constructs (symbolic value, consumer attitude and product-norm experience) and three moderators (consumer involvement, willingness to pay and consumer preference). Relations between these are analyzed using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the moderated mediation analyses using Haye’s process.

This research identified that the symbolic value is totally mediated by consumers’ attitudes and product-norm experiences. However, such a relationship occurs directly for consumers with higher involvement with the product, higher willingness to pay, and who assume that wine is their preferred alcoholic beverage.

One of the contributions is to emphasize the symbolic value of wine and highlight how the relationship with different factors can interfere and explain consumer purchase intention and can influence the strategies, actions and investments of companies in the sector.

Middle-aged and elderly users become an important group on short-video platforms, however, the research on determinants of their video-creating intention is limited. Based on lifespan development theories, this study examines the impact of aging experiences on their video-creating intention, considering internal generative motivations as mediators and age as a moderator.

To test this study’s hypotheses, survey data from 321 Chinese middle-aged and elderly short-video users were collected and partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to analyze these data.

Middle-aged and elderly users' aging experiences of social loss and personal growth are positively related to their video-creating intention. Aging experiences (i.e. physical loss, social loss, and personal growth) are positively related to internal generative motivations (i.e. need to be needed and symbolic immortality), and need to be needed is positively related to video-creating intention. Via the mediation of need to be needed, physical loss and personal growth are indirectly positively related to video-creating intention. Personal growth strengthens the relationship between physical loss and symbolic immortality, but weakens the associations of social loss with need to be needed and symbolic immortality. Age weakens the relationship between symbolic immortality and video-creating intention.

This study is the first wave to introduce and integrate lifespan theories such as selective optimization with compensation model, socioemotional selectivity theory, and generativity theory to explore the impacts of aging experiences on middle-aged and elderly users' video-creating intention by considering generativity motivations as mediators and age as a moderator.