Service failure of high severity can lead to high recovery satisfaction when recovery efforts are seen very fair. Customers satisfied with recovery efforts and displaying high attachment anxiety will continue to repurchase. Attachment avoidance did not have an impact on the behavioural intentions and neither did the brand authenticity perception.

Recently, brand managers have widely adopted brand anthropomorphism as positioning strategies to differentiate from other competitors. Aggarwal and McGill (2012) anthropomorphized brand as two specific roles. Brand-as-partner refers its role as “the co-producer of benefits”, a relationship in which the brand and consumers work together to co-create the benefits as equals. However, brand-as-servant represents its role as “the outsourced provider of benefits”, a hierarchical relationship in which the brand works for consumers to create benefits. Our research extends prior literature by investigating how a brand can improve consumers’ responses with the anthropomorphization of being either a collaborative partner or a supportive servant, depending on consumer’s mind-set  aptly termed implicit theories. Implicit theories are the beliefs that people have about the nature of human characteristics. In specific, entity theorists believe human traits are relatively fixed and stable; and incremental theorists believe human traits are substantially changeable (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). These two implicit theories trigger many distinctive cognitive and behavioral patterns. For example, entity theorists prefer effortless success and receiving assurances to signal their abilities. In contrast, incremental theories emphasize on self-improvement through high effort to realize their self-enhancement and intentions (Park & John, 2014). We generalize this theory to anthropomorphic brand positioning and adopt consumer’s efficacy (confidence) to explain the underlying mechanism. We hypothesize a servant brand is more appealing to entity theorists, because they prefer situations in which they are guaranteed of being satisfied effortlessly (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Therefore, they are more confident about their abilities when a servant brand acts as an assurance for providing benefits. In contrast, a partner brand may be more attractive to incremental theorists, because they believe their abilities can be improved through working with the partner brand. Thus, they should be more self-assured about their abilities, and increase their perceived efficacy to realize their intentions. Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses by both manipulating and measuring implicit theories. The consistent results revealed the significant interactions between brand roles and implicit theories on brand evaluation as well as the mediation effect of consumer efficacy. In sum, this research contributes to brand managers by advising them to cultivate appropriate brand role position in accordance with the target and potential consumer’s distinct mind-set.

Customer engagement (CE) has commonly defined as a psychological state or process that leads to customer loyalty (Brodie, Hollebeek, Juric, & Ilic, 2011). CE research has received increasing attention due to its critical role in luring favorable customer experience and outcomes such as brand trust, affection, and future purchase intention (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017; So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016). Despite scholars’ continuous efforts in advancing the CE field of study, several limitations remain unaddressed. First, empirical research focuses primarily on antecedents and consequences of CE that are derived from individual dispositions (Harrigan, et al., 2017); thus, customer actual behavioral outcomes of CE are generally unexplored. Second, most, if not all, empirical research investigates the nomological network of CE based on individual-level factors (Khan, Rahman, & Fatma, 2016; So, King, & Sparks, 2014). Such an individual-level approach is important as it builds the necessary foundation of the CE domain of study. Yet, the roles of organizational strategic position are largely ignored, while organizational-level situational factors are rarely considered. This research aims to bridge the aforementioned research gaps by constructing both individual-level dispositions and organizational-level situational factors into an integrated framework. In particular, this research seeks to explore the roles of two organizational strategic initiatives – service environment and brand equity – on customer engagement and its impact on customer behaviors.

Drawing both on international marketing literature (Steenkamp, Batra, & Alden, 2003) and value/risk research (Sweeny & Soutar, 2001; Mitchell, 1999), the current study investigates (1) how consumers’ perceptions of brand globalness/localness (PBG/PBL) influence their assessment of different dimensions of perceived value as well as the risk associated with making a purchase decision; and (2) how these value and risk assessments mediate the relationships between PBG/PBL and brand purchase intentions. We apply signaling theory (Kirmani & Rao, 2000) to relate PBG and PBL to consumers’ perceptions of risk as well as their perceptions of functional, emotional and social value. For empirical verification of the hypothesized relationships, we use comparable samples from two European countries that vary substantially in terms of economic development (Slovenia and Bosnia & Herzegovina). Results show that only emotional value serves as a consistent mediator of PBG and PBL on purchase intentions in both countries, whereas no mediating role could be identified for perceived risk. In terms of managerial implications, our findings reveal the importance of emphasizing the emotional value of a brand, which serves as a stable facilitator through which PBG/PBL influence consumers’ purchase intentions across the distinct market settings.

This study (i) examines the main effect of how a customer’s trust in the service personnel could affect his/her service co-designing and co-delivering behavior; and (ii) investigates how the main effect could vary by the customer’s trust in the service brand, and the types of customer contact service contexts. Keywords: customer participation, co-

In this paper we explore the relationships between brand-centered human resource management (HRM) and brand citizenship behavior. The roles of person-brand fit and brand commitment are discussed, and seven hypotheses presented. Using multilevel analysis, we test whether these concepts mediate the relationship between brand-centered HRM and brand citizenship behavior.

This article aims to explore the interactive roles of types of primed identity (local versus global identity) and types of ad framing on brand evaluations. The authors designed 2 experiments in which each experiment followed a 2×2 between-subject design. The empirical results showed that a gain-framed ad induced more positive emotional responses than a loss-framed ad, and the positive affective responses lead to more favorable brand evaluation. Furthermore, the results showed that there were interactive effects of primed identity and types of advertisement frame on brand evaluation. In the additional analysis, the results showed that when people with local identity were exposed to the gain-framed ad, they would engage in a higher level of integration processing than those in the control group, which in turn induced more favorable evaluation to the local brand. That is, the integration processing mode played a mediating role between the interaction (local id priming × ad frame) and the local brand evaluation. However, in the case of global brand evaluation, the integration processing mode did not play such a mediating role.

Purpose - Current study aimed at investigating the symbolic and evaluation relevance to global luxury brands as the causes of inducing social identity verification, and also explored whether the social identity verification will affect the attitude toward the brands. Research design, data, and methodology - 323 questionaries from Chinese consumers were used to test hypotheses by structural equation model of AMOS 22.0. Results - First, social identity verification positively affected on the brand attitude. Second, both the symbolic relevance and the evaluation relevance positively affected on social identity verification. Third, the mediation roles of social identity verification were identified. Social identity verification played a full mediation role in the effect of the symbolic relevance on the brand attitude, and played a partial mediation role in the effect of the evaluation relevance on the brand attitude. Conclusions - This study could contribute to the advancement of theory concerned with the roles of consumers’ social identity verification which induces positive attitude toward the global luxury brands. Global brand managers in China should try to search ways by which consumers can feel both the symbolic relevance and evaluation relevance to their luxury brands, and should make efforts to improve the symbolic relevance and evaluation relevance to their brand.