Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. Fashion companies disagree. Despite the controversy, actual research has been scarce. This study compares the sizes of clothes that the four leading mass-marketing fashion retailers in Sweden offer to the body sizes of the population. Although branding theory would support the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands, such practices were not evident. The main contribution of this article is that it provides the first quantified empirical evidence on the theory of typical user imagery. In the discussion, it is posited that, although mass-market fashion brands should be susceptible to negative user imagery related to overweight and obese users, the companies avoid such problems by making garments that are not directly attributable to a specific brand, thus mitigating the negative effect of overweight and obese user imagery. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. Fashion companies disagree. Despite the controversy, actual research has been scarce. This study compares the sizes of clothes that the four leading mass-marketing fashion retailers in Sweden offer to the body sizes of the population. Although branding theory would support the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands, such practices were not evident. The main contribution of this article is that it provides the first quantified empirical evidence on the theory of typical user imagery. In the discussion, it is posited that, although mass-market fashion brands should be susceptible to negative user imagery related to overweight and obese users, the companies avoid such problems by making garments that are not directly attributable to a specific brand, thus mitigating the negative effect of overweight and obese user imagery.
Fit or co-alignment between company and customer perspectives is an important theoretical proposition in corporate branding theory. Utilizing three corporate brands in the Australian automobile industry, this research conceptualizes co-alignment as profile deviation and examines the effects of deviation from the company-specified corporate brand on customer loyalty and satisfaction. Management practice tells us that organizations invest significant resources to encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty. From the comparison of congruence models, this study demonstrates that in addition to the quantum of spend, alignment of company and customer corporate brand perspectives can be an important source of customer satisfaction and loyalty. The ideal corporate brand, as specified by senior management was used as a benchmark. The corporate brand construct included corporate associations, corporate personality and customer benefits. The results, which were robust across three corporate brands, generally support the hypotheses of negative performance impact of company-customer misalignment. However, positive performance implications of customer deviation on corporate personality suggest that the effects of misalignment are complex and that it is useful to explore corporate brand dimensions individually.
Brand love is a recent marketing construct, which has been shown to infl uence important marketing variables such as brand loyalty and word-of-mouth. Although this knowledge is academically interesting, its managerial relevance depends on the identifi cation of actionable antecedents of brand love. This study adds to the understanding of the managerial potential of brand love by proposing and testing two actionable antecedents of brand love: Brand identifi cation and sense of community. The study uses the Partial Least Squares approach to structural equation modelling to analyze data from two survey-based studies. The study tests two conceptual models using data for six different brands. The results show that brand dentifi cation and sense of community both have a positive infl uence on brand love, which in turn has a positive infl uence on brand loyalty and active engagement. These findings form the basis for a discussion of the use of image extensions and market shielding to strengthen brand identifi cation and sense of community – with the purpose of elaborating and building brand love.
The main aim of the study is to examine the structural composition of brand equity and the interrelationships between the dimensions of brand equity in the business-to-business (B2B) context. A total of 647 customers of one of the Big Four auditing firms in Sweden served as respondents in this study. Structural equation modeling was used to examine a one-dimensional model and a multidimensional model of brand equity. The multidimensional model was based on the hierarchy of effects between brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality and brand loyalty. The findings indicate that the multidimensional model of brand equity considering the hierarchical effects between the four dimensions of brand equity performs better in the B2B context. The study contributes to branding research by providing empirical evidence about the multidimensionality of B2B brand equity and the existence of hierarchy of effects between the four dimensions of brand equity.
The majority of studies on internal brand equity examine its various dimensions and relationships between them. While prior research specifies organizational practices relevant for successful internal branding, the insights about the impact of essential organizational factors on internal brand equity are still limited. This study focuses on organizational resilience that is vital for the existence of organizations not only during a crisis, but also during everyday operations. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of organizational resilience on internal brand equity considering the effects triggered by self-service technology (SST) in retailing. Since retailing had been significantly transformed by technological innovations over the past decade, we explore the effects of employees’ perceptions about performance of SST. The results of a survey conducted among retail employees in Sweden demonstrate that organizational resilience and employees’ perceptions about technological innovations are critical for enhancing internal brand equity, which includes brand orientation, internal brand knowledge, internal brand involvement, and internal brand commitment.
The main purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of customer experience on brand equity in a business-to-business (B2B) services setting. The conceptual model illustrates the impact of customer experience on the formation of brand equity, which is assessed through a hierarchy of effects between brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality and brand loyalty. Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed model in the B2B setting. The findings of the study indicate that customer experience has a positive effect on the four dimensions of brand equity. The study provides marketing managers with a clear understanding of how customer experience affects brand equity in the B2B context. The study portrays the importance of creating a positive customer experience through a direct interaction of customers with the company and its brand. The study advances the current state of knowledge by analyzing the impact of customer experience on all dimensions of brand equity and by including a hierarchy of effects between different dimensions in one conceptual model.
This article examines the phenomenon of invented corporate heritage brands, i.e. heritage that is made up, exaggerated or far-fetched, to an extent that stakeholders may challenge its accuracy. Along six empirical cases, three dimensions characterizing invented heritage are identified, namely facticity, historical connectedness/disconnectedness, and temporal expansion/contraction. Companies draw on three different strategies to build invented corporate heritage brands: The appropriation strategy builds a heritage brand by leveraging the past of organizations that are forerunners of the present firm The forgetting strategy omits or tones down parts of the past that are deemed as not being useful for the brand. Eventually, the fantasizing strategy constructs a brand based on a purely invented past. Overall, the article provides evidence of the high degree of pragmatic flexibility (Burghausen and Balmer in Corporate Communications: an International Journal 19: 384–402, 2014a) inherent in corporate heritage. It also demonstrates how young brands can be infused with heritage, by appropriating the past of historical forerunners that are meaningfully connected to the brand.
In the light of climate change and ever-increasing evidence of the need for urgently changing food production and consumption, how do brands enter and leverage this debate? How can brands become activists by mobilizing debates around a political cause, and how can those debates promote the legitimacy of emerging industry practices? Through a case study of the now-famous food and beverage brand Oatly, this paper describes how brand-induced political activism can challenge consumption, production, policy, and ideologies. It can promote brand development and positioning, provided that the brand has earned legitimacy. This study suggests that the new branding principle in the age of the climate crisis and eco-anxiety can be characterized as ‘citizen activist,’ in which consumer culture goes beyond the cultivation of self, focusing instead on systemic changes in production and consumption.
The increased interest of public organizations in using corporate branding principles creates a need to understand how to implement such principles effectively. Although previous research investigates challenges related to branding in this context, the findings provide contradictory evidence and opposing recommendations. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of literature on branding in the public sector and to explore directions for future research. The results demonstrate that owing to the distinct differences between the private and public sectors, there is a need to adapt branding principles to meet the sector-specific challenges faced by public organizations. However, the extent of the required changes needs further research. This literature review presents a number of potential directions for future studies, which focus on diverse topics related to the internal and external aspects that are crucial to the successful branding of public organizations.
Branding in the public sector is emerging as an interesting area of research, as diverse organisations find themselves using branding principles to promote a consistent, clear brand. However, very little is known how public organisations could, or should, manage their brands. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to explore brand management processes in the public sector, and its implication for brand architecture, from an employee perspective. With a qualitative approach, the study argues that branding is important not only for the organisation, but also for individual departments. Further, unlike branding in the private sector, public organisations may be more concerned with supporting a positive perception and organisational attractiveness rather than a unique and differentiated brand. This may have implications for brand architecture. By allowing individual departments to manage their brand with support from organisational structures that provide alignment and focus, organisations can form a brand architecture that supports a strong organisational brand and employee brand commitment.
This study extends the conceptualisation and measurement of brand personality to the online environment. We contend that websites are an important element of corporate identity management in today's competitive environment. We investigated the websites of South African Business Schools in order to find out what brand personality each school features. Our multistage methodology revealed a measure of business school brand personality that to some extent portrays the dimensions Aaker postulated. This study illustrates a powerful, but simple and relatively inexpensive way business school managers can study communicated brand personality. The results also offer new ways for business schools (and other organisations) to strengthen their brand and market position in a competitive environment. It also is a relatively simple way to differentiate their school in the crowded MBA education marketplace.
Spending in virtually every category of non-essential offerings declines during economic downturn. The recent global recession has confronted the luxury goods industry with questions of how well luxury brands do in times of economic downturn, and what kinds of strategies luxury brand managers implement in order to deal with economic asperity. In this article we address the relationship between the performance of luxury brands and the economic cycle, specifically the effect that recessions have on luxury brands, by means of an exploratory qualitative study. We evaluate the luxury goods industry as well as changes within it in recent years. We further consider luxury consumers and the effect the recent recession has had on their behavior, and outline a study of executives within the luxury goods industry designed to capture their impressions of the effects of an economic downturn on the brands they manage. The conclusions and managerial implications of the article afford managers of luxury brands some insight into strategies followed by luxury brands during the recession, as well as some interesting elements of consumer behavior during this time.
This article develops a conceptual foundation for Conscientious Corporate Brands (CCBs) by exploring the role that (i) environmental and (ii) climate change issues, and that (iii) internal and (iv) external corporate codes of ethics play as dimensions of CCBs. The article's aim is to extend previous research in ethical branding by proposing an empirically grounded conceptual foundation of the conscientious dimension of a corporate brand. The empirical context is based on Nordic business-to-business relationships. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
This research investigates the mediating role of perceived brand authenticity (PBA) between brand experience (BE) and brand love (BL) of global high-tech brands Apple and Samsung. A quantitative study was conducted in Japan, India, and Portugal. The research found evidence that PBA is a multidimensional, reflective-formative higher-order construct composed of two lower-order components namely PBA Core and PBA Peripheral. The findings also contribute to understand how consumers are impacted by different BE and PBA dimensions using the lens of consumer culture theory and how BL is formed as a social-cultural phenomena. Finally, the study demonstrates for the first time that relationship intensity and self-authenticity moderate the effect of BE on PBA. Although limited to three countries and high-tech brands, the findings are of relevance to global brands by raising awareness that culture plays a key role in how consumers perceive authentic brand experiences and how passionate feelings for global brands can be strengthened.
The need for reliable and valid metrics for tracking consumers' experiences of products and brands cross-nationally is becoming ever more important as companies are increasingly operating in international markets. Brand experiences associated with global brands can manifest themselves very differently in different parts of the world; thus, the scales developed to track brand experiences should be validated cross-nationally. This research tests and revises an existing brand experience measurement scale cross-nationally in two countries that have very different cultural settings. Based on the findings from a survey with a sample of 1008 respondents, the authors propose a revised and shortened scale that provides more reliable and valid measurement results of brand experiences of global high-tech brands. In general, the results demonstrate the need for tests on the cross-national applicability of measurement scales and, even further, they underline the importance of replication research.
The role of virtual communities in marketing development and brand management is gaining growing attention both from scholars and practitioners. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs[1]) often lack organizational readiness and pre-adoption awareness related to new tools available online. This article presents an in-depth case study on how a small company transforms itself into an interactive platform on the web from merely a provider of online information to help customers participate actively in bathroom design. Online design community hosted by the small bathroom supplier combines social network features and toolkits for 3D bathroom design, attracting both hobbyists and professionals. The study shows that the company benefits from the its move to interactivity with the community perceiving and providing a brand strengthening tool. However, the study also shows relative reluctance on the part of the company towards exploiting the full range of possibilities available online.
The purpose of the paper is to analyze how different dimensions of the relationship between banks and small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) influence the SMEs’ loyalty towards the banks. A survey was administered to 1024 CEOs of Swedish SMEs. In the questionnaire, a number of aspects of the relationship with the bank were examined, especially how banks contribute to the development of the SMEs, and how this affects the SMEs’ loyalty. This paper posits The Close Relationship Strategy, which implies that by being more active in the relationship, banks could create more satisfied and loyal SME customers. The study has relevance for banks that are trying to develop their corporate brands through a closer relationship with SMEs. The paper provides a framework for understanding how banks can achieve customer loyalty and develop their brands by focusing on important aspects of the relationship with their SME customers. This study provides important insights into SMEs’ perceptions of their banks’ capacity to deliver meaningful advice, and how a positive relationship can create more loyal customers.
There is consensus that every organisation needs to develop a strong brand as part of its business strategy. It is, however, unclear how corporate brands can be effectively developed. The aim of this study is to empirically explore the internal corporate brand-building process in Swedish service firms. This process refers to activities that occur before the implementation of the brand. This is a qualitative study in which three case studies are presented and in which purposive sampling was applied. The study's aim was to find illustrative cases of firms that had recently conducted an internal, corporate brand-building process. The selected firms had initiated the process based on different circumstances (ie due to a crisis, geographical expansion or strategic repositioning). Personal interviews were used as the main data collection method. Three concurrent flows of activities, that is, data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis. All firms aimed to strengthen the corporate brand in their brand portfolio by reducing sub-brands, and by updating their brand identity and brand position statements. Findings show that even though the three firms had initiated the internal corporate brand-building process for different reasons, the three stages in the process, that is, brand audit, brand identity and brand position statements, could still be identified. Differences, however, occurred within the stages.
Consumers express themselves through the brands they desire, purchase and consume. Self-expression, therefore, can be an important driver of consumer preferences and choices. Despite the importance, few multi-country comparative studies have examined how people use brands to express themselves, although there are indications that the importance of brands for self-expression differs across cultures. This study investigates whether female consumers, on average, in six Asia-Pacific nations differ in the extent to which they express themselves in using their favorite brand of beauty care products. We conducted an email survey, which shows that the importance of these brands as a vehicle of self-expression differs significantly across the six countries, and three clusters could be found. Women in India, China and the Philippines, on average, perceived these brands as more important for self-expression than women in Malaysia, Japan and Australia. Women in Japan and Australia, on average, perceived these brands as less important for self-expression than Malaysian women. We discuss whether economic similarities between the countries can explain these results, which could indicate a high negative correlation between brand expression and wealth. We also consider cultural differences across countries in the form of power distance and uncertainty avoidance as a possible explanation.
There is consensus that every organisation needs to develop a strong brand as part of its business strategy. It is, however, unclear how corporate brands can be effectively developed. The aim of this study is to empirically explore the internal corporate brand-building process in Swedish service firms. This process refers to activities that occur before the implementation of the brand. This is a qualitative study in which three case studies are presented and in which purposive sampling was applied. The study ’ s aim was to find illustrative cases of firms that had recently conducted an internal, corporate brand-building process. The selected firms had initiated the process based on different circumstances (ie due to a crisis, geographical expansion or strategic repositioning). Personal interviews were used as the main data collection method. Three concurrent flows of activities, that is, data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis. All firms aimed to strengthen the corporate brand in their brand portfolio by
reducing sub-brands, and by updating their brand identity and brand position statements. Findings show that even though the three firms had initiated the internal corporate brand-building process for different reasons, the three stages in the process, that is, brand audit, brand identity and brand position statements, could still be identified. Differences, however, occurred within the stages.
Traditional research in brand architecture has primarily focused on bipolar, structural models describing brand constellations viewed from the brand owner's angle of incidence. This paper further extends previous theorization within strategic brand management by offering the Conceptual Integrated Multi-dimensional Architecture (CIMA) model as an incorporation of existing research in brand architecture, arranged according to hierarchical structure, degree of collaboration with third parties and alignment with consumer perceptions. Traditional brand architecture is broadened using two additional dimensions-the level of intercompany partnerships and perceptional congruency between stakeholders-to produce a model that distinguishes between open and closed brand structures and includes the consumers' perceptions as a mediator of brand strategy efficiency. The CIMA model implies that strategic brand management should consider the possible effects of third-party collaboration, in conjunction with consumer beliefs, on the efficiency of the pursued brand strategy and selected go-to-market approach. By including these two additional dimensions, marketing executives may find a more nuanced view of the potential challenges and obstacles that stand in the way of successful brand strategy execution. The paper is concluded by discussing the implications of this conceptual model and suggests a number of future research directions for brand architecture and brand portfolio management.