Editorial

Citation

Guzman, F. and Veloutsou, C. (2018), "Editorial", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 101-102. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-01-2018-1721

Welcome to the second issue of Volume 27 of the Journal of Product and Brand Management. This issue has in total nine contributions, all on current and relevant brand and product management topics. We hope that you find this issue enjoyable and useful for your research. The authors of the nine papers in this issue are researchers based at universities from ten different countries.

Gary Davies, José Rojas-Méndez (member of the JPBM Editorial Review Board), Susan Whelan, Melisa Mete and Theresa Loo review published measures of brand personality and re-analyze two existing data bases and one new database to argue and test for brand personality dimensions derived from perception theory. They find that three dimensions, generic and relevant to all contexts and cultures, derived from signaling and associated theory emerge: sincerity, competence and status.

Nazuk Sharma investigates the impact of incorporating product shadows in brand advertising on consumer brand evaluations. Through three studies, the study demonstrates how the presence of a product’s cast shadow in a brand’s promotional frame implicitly influences brand evaluations differently for experiential versus functional brands. The findings highlight the importance of using appropriate visual elements (especially subtle elements like product shadows) to ensure communication consistency of the firm-formulated brand concept to the consumer-perceived brand image.

Xian Liu, Helena Lischka and Peter Kenning explore the cognitive and emotional effects of values-related and performance-related negative brand publicity, and investigate how the psychological effects translate into different behavioral outcomes through two experimental studies. Their results suggest that values-related negative brand publicity is perceived as more diagnostic and elicits a stronger emotion of contempt, but a weaker emotion of pity than performance-related negative brand publicity. Whereas, values-related negative brand publicity has a stronger negative impact on consumer responses than does performance-related negative brand publicity.

Juan Mundel, Patricia Huddleston, Bridget Behe, Lynnell Sage and Caroline Latona test the relationship between consumers’ perceptions of product type (utilitarian vs hedonic) and the attentional processes that underlie decision-making among minimally branded products. The study uses eye tracking measures (i.e. total fixation duration) and data collected through an online survey. Their findings show that consumers spend more time looking at hedonic (vs utilitarian) and branded (vs unbranded) products, influencing perceptions of quality.

Claudia Costa and Rita Coelho do Vale analyze the implications of communicating customer involvement in the ideation and concept stage of new product development. The study assesses the extent to which the awareness that a product was co-created jointly by company professional designers and consumers affects observer consumers’ attitudes toward the product and the company. Their findings suggest that there are benefits at the corporate level (higher perceptions of innovation ability) to inform the market about consumer involvement, but that these benefits are not universal and that product complexity is a critical boundary condition.

Liezl-Marie Kruger explores how self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty through brand experience. With data obtained from 317 adults through paid Facebook Boosting of an online survey, the analysis confirms that brand experience fully mediates the association between self-brand connection and brand loyalty. This paper is the first to apply self-verification theory to the self-brand connection–loyalty relationship by explicating brand experience as a mediator of this relationship.

Holger Schmidt and Jörn Redler contrast research streams in corporate brand management (CBM) and an orientation toward general strategy to examine whether CBM research is as diverse as research on general strategy and to identify potentially new research perspectives within CBM. Their analysis suggests that most schools of CBM are built on rational and prescriptive approaches, while political and emergent conceptions are hardly addressed, resulting in mostly homogenous approaches. This is the first paper to apply reasoning and perspectives that have contributed to significant developments in general strategy research to the current situation in CBM research. It introduces a novel way to analyze and discuss developments between and within CBM schools of thought.

Stefan Scheidt, Carsten Gelhard, Juliane Strotzer and Jörg Henseler explore the co-branding of celebrity CEOs and corporate brands, integrating endorsement theory and the concept of meaning transfer at a level of brand attributes. Through two between-subjects experimental studies, they confirm meaning transfer effects at the brand attribute level in both the celebrity-CEO-to-corporate-brand and corporate-brand-to-celebrity-CEO direction. The paper provides managerial guidance for building celebrity CEOs and corporate brands in consideration of meaning transfer effects.

Finally, Elif Karaosmanoglu, Didem Isiksal and Nesenur Altinigne test whether extrinsically religious people tolerate corporate brands more than intrinsically religious individuals at different transgression levels (severe and mild) and punish them less than the latter. Through a 2 × 2 experimental design, they find that while the main effect of corporate brand transgression on punishing behavior does not appear in the analysis, religiosity’s main effect on the latter does. Unexpectedly, extrinsically religious consumers punish corporate brand transgressors more than their intrinsically religious counterparts regardless of the transgression severity levels.

For this issue, the Journal of Product and Brand Management relied on the help of 24 reviewers based in 11 different countries. They are listed below in alphabetical order:

• Clinton Amos, Weber State University, USA;

• Maureen Benson-Rea, University of Auckland, New Zealand;

• Adam Brasel, Boston College, USA;

• George Chrysochoidis, University of Kent, UK;

• Catherine Da Silveira, Universdade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal;

• Roy Donald, Middle Tennessee State University, USA;

• Elena Fernández Blanco, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain;

• Nicholas Ind, Oslo School of Management, Norway;

• Flora Kokkinaki, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece;

• Adam Mills, Loyola University New Orleans, USA;

• Michela Mingione, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy;

• Andreas Munzel, Toulouse School of Management, France;

• Muralidharan Muralidharan, Southern Methodist University, USA;

• Fon Sim Ong, University of Nottingham-Malaysia Campus, Malaysia;

• Luca Petruzzellis, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy;

• Simona Romani, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy;

• Sara Rosenberg, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden;

• Herb Rotfeld, Auburn University, USA;

• Carla Ruiz, University of Valencia, Spain;

• Haytham Siala, Roehampton University, UK;

• Ioannis Thanos, Lancaster University, UK;

• Uchila Umesh, Washington State University, USA;

• Mats Urde, Lund University, Sweden; and

• Anna Zarkada, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece.

We would like to thank all these reviewers for helping the Journal to improve the quality of its content by providing their time and expertise.

We hope that you find reading this issue intellectually stimulating and enjoyable.