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Business organizations are evermore expected to behave conscientiously, but a lack of clarity remains regarding this strategy for business-to-business (B2B) brands. This paper aims to develop and validate a B2B brand conscientiousness model that identifies what factors are driving this approach.

The research model is validated through a three-stage study that collects insights from high-level executives, mid-level managers and employees in B2B firms. Whereas the first two exploratory stages follow a qualitative approach to identify what factors motivate B2B firms to be conscientious and develop a model, the third stage empirically tests the proposed model through structural equation modeling.

The results suggest that brand conscientiousness is viewed as an important strategy by B2B stakeholders. Whereas perceived risk discourages, external and internal stakeholder expectations and a firm’s financial commitment to a cause encourage, brands to pursue a conscientious approach. Furthermore, a B2B conscientious strategy must be perceived as authentic. Long-term commitment to the cause, strategic alignment of brand values with the cause and a congruent delivery of the brand’s promise are the drivers of this perceived authenticity.

This paper contributes to the emerging knowledge on B2B conscientious brands by confirming the importance of this approach in a B2B context, identifying the factors that B2B stakeholders – executives, managers and employees – believe are driving it and highlighting the importance and identifying the factors that drive its perceived authenticity.

This paper aims to offer practical, data-led guidance for the decolonisation of marketing strategy, especially as it relates to customer engagement. It does so with an acute understanding of the constraints of brand legitimacy.

The findings of this paper are informed both by a conceptual unpacking of institutional, decolonisation and customer engagement literature, as well as an empirical methodology that presents an embedded single case study of a top-ranking banking brand, using in-depth qualitative interviews as well as content analyses of brand communications.

The paper examines the notion of institutional brand legitimacy alongside the decolonisation of customer engagement. It offers five empirically driven decisions that marketers must consider when they attempt to decolonise their customer engagement strategies. These revolve around a decolonised bottom-up approach; establishing new biases for customer insights; the management of opposing forces; being strategically transformative; and going beyond diversity.

A single brand case study is offered that uses a relatively small sample of interviewees and does not include customers of the brand. Further research is therefore needed to reflect other organisational contexts and stakeholders. Just so, the paper specifically looks at the ways in which decolonisation and institutional legitimacy intersect for customer engagement. Further studies that focus on other organisational concepts impacted by decolonisation would be thought-provoking.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation that offers practical guidance for the decolonisation of marketing strategies – as it relates to customer engagement or any other facets of marketing.

Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory historical overview briefly discusses coloniality, capitalism, eugenics, modernism, transhumanism, neo-liberalism, and liquid racism. Then, the special issue articles on colonial-based commodity racism, racial beauty imagery, implicit racial bias, linguistic racism and racial imagery in ads are introduced.

The historical introduction is grounded in a review of relevant literature.

Anti-racism efforts must tackle the intersection between neo-liberalism and racial injustice, the “raceless state” myth should be re-addressed, and cultural pedagogy’s role in normalizing racism should be investigated.

To stop perpetuating raced markets, educators should mainstream anti-racism and marketing. Commodity racism provides a historical and contemporary window into university-taught marketing skills.

Anti-racism efforts must recognize neo-liberalism’s pervasive role in normalizing raced markets and reject conventional wisdom about a raceless cultural pedagogy, especially with the emergence of platform economies.

Little previous research has tackled the history of commodity racism, white privilege, white ideology, and instituting teaching practices sensitive to minority group experiences.

This study aims to focus on the information sharing behavior of employees in the context of online brand advocacy based on the cognition–affection–behavior framework.

Online surveys were distributed to 840 employees, and the gathered data was analyzed by using structural equation modeling.

The effects of perceived organizational justice, employee emotions, organizational trust on online brand advocacy and the moderating role of organizational identification were empirically supported in this study. Noteworthy exceptions to these findings included the lack of evidence of the effect of informational justice on emotions, the effect of procedural justice on negative emotion and the effect of negative emotion on online brand advocacy.

This study expands brand activism research by investigating online brand advocacy and the employee context. Moreover, this work also extends online brand advocacy research through the employee points of view.

Hospitality firms adopted diverse hiring policies and public declarations of support for LGBTQ+ causes through brand activism. The impact of activism on LGBTQ+ employees’ workplace experiences has been ambiguous. This study aims to examine the hospitality and tourism employees’ perceptions of gay and lesbian leaders as token-hires among hospitality employees and the spillover effect on company’s motives for hiring the leaders. This study further explores LGBTQ+ employees’ reactions to token-hiring as a form of activism, and how workplace interactions as passing/revealing LGBTQ+ individuals shaped their career development.

This research adopted a sequential mixed-methods design. An experiment examines how employees judge gay vs lesbian hospitality leaders as token hires, contingent on their own gender identity. It further tests the conditional mediation of tokenism on company’s egoistic motives for activism. A qualitative study explores the reactions to token-hiring as activism from the perspective of LGBTQ+ leaders who reflect on their own careers and workplace experiences.

Tokenism in the hospitality workplace is recognized as the phenomenon attributed to groups at the intersection of identities (e.g. gay men). Findings demonstrate the spillover effect of tokenism perceptions of gay male leaders by other men on company’s egoistic motives for activism. This effect is not observed for a lesbian female leader. Results from interviews suggest that hospitality and tourism LGBTQ+ employees predominantly take the post-gay vs political approach when managing their sexual identities at work and feel ambivalent toward token-hiring as LGBTQ+ brand activism.

This research contributes to understanding workplace challenges of LGBTQ+ employees and how they are perceived by others contingent on gender identity. It also explores the role of tokenism in their experiences.

This study aims to comprehend luxury brands' corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. In addition to facing a demand for new CSR strategies (consumer-centric CSR), changes in CSR discourse among luxury brands are observed. This study examines how CSR-related and luxury-related agendas relate in the news media, especially concerning the difference between traditional and new luxury brands.

A total of 117,171 fashion-related news articles were collected from January 2016 to December 2020. The word2vec method was used to determine the relationship between CSR and luxury agendas.

The results indicate that company-centric CSR is more prominent with traditional luxury brands, while consumer-centric CSR is more relevant for new luxury brands. In addition, specific CSR attributes and luxury-related attributes are associated with media discourse, which means that CSR and luxury are compatible.

Studies on CSR in the luxury industry are not extensive in the literature. This study addresses this gap through a unique framework that combines agenda-setting theory and existing CSR literature and applies them to the luxury industry. Specifically, this study captures the development of each construct (company-centric CSR to consumer-centric CSR and traditional luxury to new luxury) and identifies the specific relationships between them. This result provides a novel view of the luxury industry indicating that it has evolved to encompass CSR-related values. The empirical results also offer practical implications for luxury marketing.

The study was conducted to investigate the impact of Generation Z's perceptions of brand activism on brand loyalty through the mediating role of brand attitude and brand trust.

The study first reviewed previous research and developed hypotheses related to the research objectives. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted to test the hypotheses with the survey data of 1,133 individuals from Generation Z in Vietnam.

First, the findings indicated that: perceived argument quality, perceived authenticity, and perceived altruistic motives have a significant positive effect on brand attitude and brand trust. In addition, perceived self-interest motives have a significant positive effect on brand attitude. Brand trust has a significant positive effect on brand attitude. Finally, brand attitude and brand trust have a significant positive effect on brand loyalty. The study's empirical analysis carries implications for brand managers when implementing brand activism campaigns.

There is a paucity of research that investigates customers' perceptions of brand activism through perceived argument quality, perceived authenticity, perceived altruistic motives, and perceived self-interest motives and the influences of these on brand loyalty. The main contribution of this study is to fill this gap.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and others (LGBTQI+) movement has been the focus of companies that seek to win over consumers by supporting diversity. Any positioning, however, that is not perceived as being consistent and genuine can harm the brand's image. Through a queer theoretical perspective, the authors explore perceptions of LGBTQI+ consumers regarding brand activism.

Qualitative research was carried out that involved interviewing Brazilian consumers who are part of the LGBTQI+ community.

Aspects of the identity of these individuals draw closer to those brands that share the same values the individuals have. Brand activism is perceived positively in terms of the brand's representativeness and social impact. When activism is perceived as inauthentic, activism generates a backlash and consumers begin to boycott brands as the consumers associate positioning with woke-washing practices.

The results indicate that to adopt an activist stance with regard to the LGBTQI+ public, brands need to be consistent in the brands' communication and advertising and in brands' organizational culture and diversity. This research provides important indicators for brands that genuinely want to support the LGBTQI+ community and is the first to use queer theory to analyze brand activism.