Editorial

Citation

Veloutsou, C. and Guzman, F. (2016), "Editorial", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 25 No. 5, pp. 401-401. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-06-2016-1201

Welcome to Vol 25, Issue 5 of the Journal of Product and Brand Management. This issue has in total eight contributions. The 18 authors who have authored the papers in this issue are based in universities from seven different countries. One of the authors of this issue is a member of the Senior Advisory Board of the Journal. In this issue, half of the manuscripts focus on consumer engagement and brand experience, two papers focus on luxury branding and two papers focus on issues related to employees and branding.

Bill Merrilees (member of the Senior Advisory Board) is re-approaching brand experience, brand engagement and brand co-creation from a theoretical perspective and with the use of illustrative examples. The paper suggests that available interactive functions, together with brand experience and engagement, will lead to brand co-creation. The nature or facets of the interactive functions and the brand experience and engagement vary between functional and hedonic brands leading to different levels of co-creation (moderate or strong).

Staying on the topic of engagement, Carina Simon, Tim Oliver Brexendorf and Martin Fassnacht use data collected from 460 Facebook brand fans to examine brand community engagement. The findings of this study suggest that external social forces, and primarily social demostrance of a brand, drive internal personal forces, conceptualized here as consumer brand identification and self-image enhancement value, that predict brand community engagement.

Consumer engagement and brand experience, in the context of Facebook brand pages, are also the focus of the paper from Wondwesen Tafesse. The paper specifically examines whether different types of affordances generate higher consumer engagement with Facebook brand pages in terms of brand post likes and brand post shares. The data were collected from the pages themselves and indicate that brands that facilitate a greater proportion of experiential affordances on their Facebook pages generate higher levels of consumer engagement.

Imran Khan and Zillur Rahman are developing a scale to measure Retail Brand Experience in the fourth paper of the issue. The seven dimensions (brand name influence, consumer billing order and application forms, mass media impression, point-of-sales assistance, recommendations by a salesperson, emotional event experience and brand stories connectedness) were developed through six studies and are measured with 22 items.

Ilaria Baghi, Veronica Gabrielli and Silvia Grappi examine the role of counterfeiting awareness on advocacy behaviour for actual and potential consumers of luxury brands. The findings of their study indicate that consumer-based brand equity can sum up the impact of counterfeiting. The study reports interesting results for all kinds of consumers and for consumers who are buying both genuine and counterfeit products.

Sreejesh S. Pillai, Abhigyan Sarkar and Subhadip Roy develop and validate a brand aspiration scale in the context of luxury branding. The developed scale consists of 14 items and has four first-order dimensions: identity signaling, social recognition, self-esteem and achievement signalling. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 Academy of Marketing Science conference in Indianapolis.

Given that company employees are an important group of people that companies want to have support from, Charles Bodkin, Cara Peters and Jane Thomas examine factors that may influence the willingness of employees to buy merchandise from the company’s stores, a topic that has not been widely researched. Employee-work perceptions are considered as potential antecedents of the employee company store purchase intention, mediated by personal factors and company factors. The findings reveal that organisational identification and job satisfaction are the best predictors of employee company store purchase intention. This relationship is moderated by personal factors (gender, education, marital status and years of work experience) and company factors (firm size and employee rank).

In the final paper of this issue, Athanasios Poulis and Zazli Wisker using data collected from fast moving consumer good companies in the UK and the UAE suggest that employee-based brand equity (brand endorsement, brand allegiance and brand-consistent behaviour) and perceived environmental uncertainty (government and policy, macro-environment, resources and services, product and market demand, competition and technology) have a significant impact on firm performance.

We would like to thank the reviewers involved in the assessment of the papers in this issue for providing guidance to the authors on how to improve their submissions. The people who reviewed papers in this issue are based in universities from six different countries and are listed below in alphabetical order:

• Sharifah Alwi, Brunel University London, UK

• Sally Baalbaki, Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA

• Xuemei Bian, University of Kent, UK

• Achilleas Boukis, Sussex University, UK

• Arezoo Davari, University of North Texas, USA

• Linda Hollebeek, University of Waikato, New Zealand

• Carmen Lopez, Plymouth University, UK

• Sahar Mousavi, University of Manchester, UK

• Jaywant Singh, Kingston University, UK

• Stoettinger, Barbara, Wu Vienna, Austria

• Tracy Suter, Oklahoma State University, USA

• Mark Uncles, UNSW Business School, Australia

• Yong Wang, Ohio University, USA

• Kim Willems, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue.