Based on the Stereotype Content Model and the credibility and persuasion literature, this study examines the influence of COO on advertising claim credibility and purchase intentions. A set of hypotheses were developed and tested with an experimental design on a British sample of consumers.

Every day, large amounts of personal information are collected by private companies from consumers through multiple sources. Loyalty programs are one of the most popular tools, used to gather such information. Information that is used to offer more personalised options and to target more effectively their promotions. However, many consumers are still attracted to such programs because of the rewards and other benefits offered. Privacy concerns over loyalty programs seem to take their toll. According to a Colloquy (2015) report the numbers of active members is dropping and one of the main reasons cited in the report is privacy concerns. Declining numbers and increased privacy concerns raise the question of how concerned consumers appreciate the benefits offered by loyalty programs and how their satisfaction and loyalty are affected. Apparently, loyalty programs cannot always guarantee loyalty (Nielsen, 2013) as a large portion of consumers demand better protection of their privacy (Madden, 2014) and decline to subscribe to such programs over privacy concerns (Maritz, 2013). The objectives of this study are firstly to examine the underlying reasons behind consumers’ privacy perceptions and secondly to investigate how such perceptions alter consumers’ appraisal of the benefits offered by the loyalty program as well as satisfaction with the program and consumer loyalty. Based on a review of the relevant literature a set of testable hypotheses was developed.

Brand placements, by providing endorsement opportunities for the placed brands, are becoming instrumental in influencing the buying behaviour of ad-savvy consumers. As this marketing tool gains momentum, with the regulatory barriers against the placement beginning to obliterate globally, product placement strategies such as TV placements have become an important choice for practitioners (PQ media 2012). Brand placements are unique in their capacity to include brands as verbal, visual or both, often, as a part of the plotline-the latter has been acknowledged as important factor in influencing placement effectiveness (Russell, 2002; Waiguny, Nelson and Marko, 2013). Within TV shows and movies, plot modality entails pairing of the brands with desirable characters (Karrh 1998) and embedding them in an emotive story. Emotions have been known to play an important role in the consumer information processing (Lau-Gesk and Meyers-Levy 2009). Studies exploring the memory effects largely rely on measures such as recognition or recall. However, if brand placements operate less consciously, explicit measures may be inadequate and implicit measures for memory become desirous (Yang, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Dinu and Arpan, 2006). This study examines the impact of positive emotions (Happiness, Interest) and degree of plot modality (character-brand integration) on consumers' implicit attitudes towards placed brands. In the experiments conducted, it was observed that participants exposed to placement sequences evoking positive emotions were more likely to form favourable implicit attitudes towards the placed brands, especially when the character interaction with the placed brand was low. The findings underscore the need to better understand the interplay of positive emotions and character-brands integration within placements to augment their effectiveness.

The paper examines how culture and desire for status influence the consumption of luxury brands in two culturally dissimilar countries: Vietnam and USA. Based on survey data from the two countries, results confirm that desire for status is a key factor for the consumption of luxuries in both countries. The cultural context of collectivism reinforces the effect of desire for status. Of all the collectivist/individualist orientations, vertical individualism was found to increase desire for status.

As the rapid adoption of the Internet around the globe made digital marketing an indispensable means of gaining competitive advantage for many sectors (Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlstrom, & Freundt, 2014), its appropriateness for luxury products remains debatable. The main lures to luxury products for many consumers are their exclusivity and rarity, two valuable attributes that are at odds with digital medias’ ubiquitousness and pervasiveness (Hennigs, Wiedmann, & Klarmann, 2012). The main purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of online promotion of luxury brands on different aspects of their brand image. Additionally, the paper checks how the impact of the Internet on luxuries’ brand image varies across different segments of luxury consumers and levels of brand luxuriousness. The main hypothesis of the study, that the Internet affects luxury brand image, is grounded in the McLuhan’s (1964) assertion that "the medium is the message". The congruence of the medium to the advertised brand has a positive effect on brand evaluations (Dahlén, 2005). Given that the Internet could serve as a tool for luxury firms to enhance their creative aspects (Okonkwo, 2009), the question arises as to how congruent the Internet is as a medium to luxury brands that sell on the basis of their exclusivity. The congruence of the Internet to the luxury brands is moderated by: the level of luxuriousness of the brand and the perceived luxury values. Dahlén, Granlund & Grenros (2009) have shown that the use of new media benefit more the “low reputation” brands rather than the “high reputation” ones. In high reputation brands consumers have expectations of higher standards from the medium and are more attentive to changes in the advertising medium. Moreover, by definition the higher the level of brand luxuriousness the higher its exclusivity and rarity. Hence, it is hypothesized that the Internet’s appropriateness as a medium will be negatively related to the luxuriousness of the brand. Luxury values influence consumer choices for luxury brands and brand image perceptions. Luxury value activation by contextual cues like the advertising medium is expected to align image perceptions to the expressed values. As a result, we expect brand image attributes that express specific luxury values to be influenced by the extent to which the medium promotes or inhibits the expression of such values. In luxuries, Wiedmann, Hennings and Siebels (2007) identified four categories of luxury values (financial, functional, individual and social) that are hypothesized to have a differential impact on the effect of the Internet to luxury brand image. To test the hypothesized relationships, an experimental design was used. Facebook was selected as a platform for “online” promotion and the stimuli were luxury watches. The results indicated online luxury promotion adversely affects luxury brand’s perceptions hedonism and uniqueness. The effects were more pronounced to the most luxurious brands and to specific luxury value segments. The results provide useful insights for the development of luxury brand strategies.

In the last decade loyalty programs have gained popularity across various industries. They are one of the most popular marketing tools that companies use to increase retention, enhance loyalty and gather ‘big data’. The number of companies adopting loyalty programs is rapidly increasing with fashion department stores grown their loyalty program subscriptions by 70% between 2010 and 2012 (Colloquy, 2013). One of the main reasons for this growth can be attributed to the benefits fashion retailers offer to their customers. A new body of current research had directed its attention to a comprehensive set of benefits offered by loyalty programs as well as their potential to increase customer retention and profitability (Evanschitzky et al., 2012). Until recently, it was debatable if loyalty programs can be effective and appropriate in luxury retailing (Lowenstein, 2009), despite research evidence showing a positive effect of loyalty programs’ benefits on customer retention (e.g. Mimouni-Chaabane & Volle, 2010). Traditionally, luxury companies and retailers build loyalty through top-end and differentiated customer experiences. If loyalty schemes were to succeed in the luxury sector they had to deliver the kind of recognition and rewards that make luxury shoppers feel remarkable. Given the growing interest in loyalty programs and scarcity of research related to their effectiveness in the luxury fashion department stores, this study comes to examine the effectiveness of such programs. In particular, this research examines how the utilitarian, hedonic and symbolic perceived benefits from loyalty programs can influence the satisfaction and trust with the program and consequently store loyalty. These relationships are compared between high- and low-end fashion department stores and the differences in their effectiveness are reported. To test these relationships data were collected form a sample of 984 consumers from an online panel in US, using a structured questionnaire. A range of different department stores that offer loyalty programs were pre-selected through a rater procedure to represent the high- and low- fashion department stores. Using structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis, findings support that the effectiveness of loyalty programs is important to both high-and low-end fashion retailing settings but the strength of this effectiveness varies across the two settings. Specifically, hedonic and symbolic benefits derived from loyalty programs found to be more important in the high-end rather than the low-end fashion retailers. In contrast, utilitarian benefits found to be much more effective in influencing customers’ satisfaction with the program in the low-end fashion retailing. The results of this research address an important research gap and help to better understand customers' perceptions of loyalty program benefits obtained from high- and low-end fashion department stores. Finally, the findings provide clear guidelines for managers in both high- and low-end fashion retailing on how to design effectively their loyalty program rewards, by strategically allocating their resources to the benefits that are more important in their setting.

Luxury industry is one of the fastest growing fields in marketing research in which many studies have examined how consumers' background affects their preference for luxury products and luxury brands. Classical theories focused on the affluent social classes and their tendency to consume luxury products to consciously or unconsciously signal their wealth. Other studies argued that the internalised culture developed during the socialisation years may influence one’s tastes and preferences for luxuries. Whereas, “costly signal theory” and “affirmation resource theory” suggest that luxury consumption extends beyond the traditional symbolic value of luxury brands and the habituated taste consumption drivers. Despite the wealth of current theoretical approaches, there is little research on the context of status rankings of luxuries and luxury brands. Thus, main objective of the present study is to develop and empirically test a conceptual framework that links consumption of at different rungs of the luxury brand ladder to a number of variables that may act as moderators which will be defined below. The key predictors are economic resources, cultural capital, perceived social status and desired status. The dependent variable is consumption of luxury brands at different rungs in the luxury ladder. A number of hypotheses are proposed and empirically tested. The dependent variable was measured by survey data collected from a sample of US consumers. The results confirm that the frequency of luxury brand purchases is significantly and positively related to consumers’ economic resources and desire for status. The hierarchy of luxury brands consumed is driven by consumers’ economic resources, cultural capital and desire for social status. Regardless of economic resources and perceived social status, consumers with high desire for social status are more likely to buy brands which represent high level of luxury. Likewise, people with higher cultural capital would buy higher luxury grading brands regardless of their economic capabilities. Moreover, results showed that perceived social status is negatively correlated with preferences for higher tier luxury brands of cars. In particular, desire for social status seems to moderates the effect of perceived social status on the hierarchy of brand of luxury car preferences. Desire for status combined with high perceived social status leads to higher preference for higher tier luxury products. It can be concluded that economic resources are responsible for the frequency people buy luxury brands, whereas cultural capital is responsible for the luxury hierarchy of the consumed brands. Frequent consumption of luxury brands reflects one’s economic status whereas the grade of luxury brands his/her cultural status. However, desire for status seems to be a key variable as it affects both frequency and the ranks of luxury brands purchased. This is an important variable as desire for status is not related with neither the actual social status (i.e., economic resources and cultural capital) nor perceived social status.

One of the main priorities for many service companies is the development and maintenance of long term relationship with valuable customers. A common research route is the hourglass approach where general hypotheses are developed, then they are tested on a single type of service and finally the findings are taken as generalised across the whole spectrum of services. It is well recognised that customer relationships are multi-sided and contingent to the nature of the services, but still the empirical research on the moderating role of service types is limited. Additionally, the actual bonds that tie the service provider to the customer, have received limited attention by the scholars. Thus, this paper attempts to address the issue of relevance and relative importance of the different types of relational bonds between hedonic and utilitarian services. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) together with longitudinal qualitative research was used to develop a set of hypotheses that was empirically tested in a large sample of consumers. The basic premise of TPB is that attitudes together with subjective norms and perceived control can predict intentions, and actual behaviours. However, TPB has been criticised that it does not incorporate a full set of attitudinal drivers towards intentions. Responding to this criticism, this study developed (through qualitative research and literature review) an extensive set of relational bonds found to be important in different service contexts. These bonds are: switching costs, economic, social, confidence, convenience, emotional and habit bonds. Together with subjective norms and perceived difficulty, relational bonds were examined in relation to repurchase intentions across hedonic and utilitarian services, based on a survey (sample size: 548), through multi-group analysis and structural equation modelling. Based on the results, the drivers of repurchase intentions can be classified into three categories: 1) universal drivers of repurchase intentions that transcend service categories (emotional, subjective norms and perceived difficulty) 2) service specific bonds (confidence, convenience, and habitual bonds) and 3) inconsequential relational bonds (switching cost, economic bonds and social bonds). Explanations of these differences lie in the nature and the value customers derive for the two different types of services. Initial findings suggest that many of the generally accepted theoretical relations in this field are service context specific. This is the first attempt to get a relational bonding footprint of different types of services in an effort to develop granular theories that take into account the nature and context of service typologies. From a managerial perspective findings qualify general theories of customer relationship management and make them more usable for the specific contexts of services.

This paper attempts to develop a new more representative typology exclusively for luxury brand personalities addressing the conceptual and methodological limitations of previous works. Existing brand personality measures (e.g. Aaker, 1997; Geuens, Weijters, & Wulf, 2009; Sweeney & Brandon, 2006) are grounded on human personality taxonomies, thereby rendering their ability to accurately capture the essence of luxury brand personality doubtful. They also inherit some of the conceptual and methodological issues from Aaker’s (1997) work, for which it has been recently criticised. This evidence points towards the need for a new measurement tool for luxury brands developed from scratch. Recognising the need to provide solid foundations of the luxury brand personality traits, the present paper uses lexical approach similar to the way it was used in the human personality scale development research (Cattell, 1943; Goldberg, 1982; John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988). The main reason for using natural language as a source of luxury brand personality attributes is based on the key assumption behind the lexical approach that most important individual differences will be encrypted into the language in the course of time (John et al., 1988). Embracing this assumption, we believe that the use of luxury brand personality descriptors in the natural language will determine their importance. The first step involved doing online text mining to learn how consumers describe various luxury brands, thereby generating a pool of items. Also, in-depth interviews were undertaken with frequent luxury buyers using Kelly’s repertory grid technique to facilitate construct elicitation. Next, the list of characteristics was screened against Norman’s (1967) comprehensive list of personality traits to ensure that only personality traits were retained in the pool. Finally, a new framework was developed by means of assigning items into different dimensions based on semantic similarities of traits and was juxtaposed with existing brand personality measures. Luxury brand personality appears to comprise twelve salient personality dimensions that cannot be directly matched with existing personality measures. The new typology reveals some unique traits and dimensions that could improve the construct’s content validity and facilitate marketers’ branding decisions. Comparisons with other frameworks support the view that luxury brand personalities are different in consumers’ common parlance and require a separate measure. Some concerns related to the consistency and also content and construct validity are highlighted in this work and call for further examination.

Today's dynamic market necessitates the need for the marketing communication stimuli, which engages with the audience as consumers have become less attentive to traditional advertising. It is imperative to gain deeper understanding of how brand evaluations and subsequently brand relationships are created to allow for a successful marketing strategy. Within that context, the role of characters becomes important in placing brands in TV programmes as results of this study indicate that only character interacting with the placed brands were significant for the audience's likelihood to talk about the brands shown in a given placement sequence. Thus, industry practitioners may need to identify clear outcomes for the placed brand (generate awareness, enduring attitude/likability) before adopting the placement modality and media vehicle for its execution. The findings from this study provide promising results to strengthen the growing evidence of the importance engaging consumer experiences for effective buzz-marketing.

The limited available empirical evidence indicates that consumer ethnocentrism does not have a uniform effect on consumer buying (e.g., Klein, Ettenson & Morris 1998; Suh & Kwon 2002). The paper comes to address this gap by investigating the inconsistency of ethnocentric behaviours and the factors underlying such inconsistencies. More specifically, brand, product category and country of origin (COO) effects are examined for their impact on behavioural consumer ethnocentric bias. Contrary to the main stream of research in this area, which concentrates on general attitudes towards the products or buying intentions (e.g., Balabanis & Diamantopoulos 2004; Poon et al. 2010; Sharma etal. 1995; Shimp & Sharma 1987; Verlegh 2007; Wang & Chen 2004) this paper focuses on behavioural outcomes of consumer ethnocentrism. In addition, it adopts a more focused approach and examines the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on the purchase of specific brands, rather than the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on general product categorisations or simple foreigndomestic product dichotomies. Hypotheses are developed to explain observed differences in the behavioural effects of consumer ethnocentrism. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 468 US consumers involving purchases in 10 product categories, 432 brands and 22 countries of origin. Results confirm that product category is an important determinant of the behavioural effects of consumer ethnocentrism. Consumer ethnocentrism was found to have an impact on the purchases of the most expensive product categories rather than the frequently purchase convenient items. There is also some limited evidence regarding the moderating role of globalness of brands on the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and purchase behaviour. The cultural proximity of the country of origin of foreign brands was found to have no effect on the purchasing behaviour of ethnocentric consumers.

Understanding the richness and complexity of consumers’ memory structures for a country is important for governments, tourist boards, investment promotion agencies, cultural institutes, exporter associations, Ministries of Foreign Affairs and NGOs in order to increase tourism, exports, inward investment, etc. The image of the country is a key asset that, beyond its symbolic value to the pride and confidence of a nation, has an impact on the welfare and the economic development. Understanding and specifying which levers have a disproportionate effect on generic county evaluations and country image perception is invaluable to both practitioners and academics. Associative network analysis can be helpful to identify the key levers that shape a country’s image. While a number of studies conceptualise brand image from an associative network perspective, based on cognitive psychology, only a few researchers (Henderson, Iacobucci, & Calder 1998; Teichert, & Schöntag 2010) combine this psychological approach with a network analysis perspective applying it at the product brand level. The use of such a combined approach offers certain advantages and more informed insights of image concepts in comparison to a mono-method perspective. This research uses the combined methodology to examine country image associations, and offer new insights on the construct of country image, and on the future development of a more customised approach to the country image measures.