Personality,person–brand fit,and brand community: An investigation of individuals,brands, and brand communities

Abstract

Brand communities have received considerable and warranted attention from marketing researchers and practitioners. Brand communities can be important sources of information for both the firm and other customers, and they play an important role in building and maintaining strong brands. Nevertheless, the antecedents of brand community identification, such as individual differences across consumers in the propensity to connect with brand communities, are not as well understood. We hypothesise that the enduring personality traits extraversion and agreeableness predict identification with the [brand] community, which in turn, and along with product attachment, will be related to brand trust and brand loyalty. Product attachment itself is hypothesised to be a function of person–brand congruity, the perceived fit between the person and the brand. Those relationships are tested and supported in data from a sample of 662 car enthusiasts attending a large brand community meeting or ‘brandfest’.     

About the authors

The article deals with the problem of diagnosing cultural change necessitated by a shift in market strategy and the measurement of adaptability of an existing corporate culture. Starting from the proposition that there has to be a fit between strategic goals, goal‐relevant norms of behaviour followed by the employees, and their attitudes concerning the contents of the norms in order to be able to successfully implement a new market strategy, the authors develop an approach for measuring discrepancies between these variables. Describing an empirical study run in a middle‐sized Austrian company they show how the approach may work in practice. The degree of cultural change required is delected and located. An evaluation of the existing culture's adaptability clearly indicates that necessary changes may encounter higher risks of failure.     

Ausländische Unternehmen und Übernahmeeffekte — neue Fakten für Deutschland

Surprisingly, relatively little is known about foreign-controlled firms’ activities in the German economy, although Germany is one of the most important FDI inflow countries worldwide. Recently, a new database on foreign ownership became available in the framework of German official statistics. The first econometric analyses of this database find evidence for the superior productivity and significantly lower profitability of foreign firms compared to their German counterparts. Furthermore, foreign takeovers are on average followed by much larger employment declines than German takeovers and show no productivity improvements.     

Using customer lifetime value to plan optimal promotions

The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology to guide managers in determining the optimal promotion campaigns to be directed towards different market segments in order to maximize the value of customers. For the purposes of this study, a two-step methodology is used, based on stochastic dynamic programming and the classification and regression tree. This methodology groups the customers according to their value. Within this framework, an experiment is conducted in which each of the different promotion campaigns is assigned to different randomly selected groups. The impact of each type of promotion on each type of market segment is analysed in order to find the optimal promotion campaigns appropriate for each. In contrast to previous research, this study takes into account a firm that provides more than one specific type of product or service. In addition, it analyses the impact of widely used types of promotion campaigns compared with the narrow scope of those investigated in previous studies. Therefore, this research presents important insights into managing relations with the customers in a more interactive and profitable way.     

Trust types,distrust, and performance outcomes in small business relationships: the pharmacy–drug warehouse case

This study attempts to investigate the linkage among trust types, distrust, and relationship performance outcomes in the context of long-term supply agreement-type alliances between small business dyads. The results suggest a significant positive relationship among goodwill trust and risk-taking tendency, cooperation, satisfaction, and conflict resolution and a negative relationship between goodwill trust and transaction costs. Competence trust is found to have a positive relationship with cooperation, conflict resolution, and satisfaction and a negative relationship with transaction costs. However, no significant relationship is found between competence trust and risk-taking tendency. Distrust, on the other hand, is found to have a negative relationship with cooperation, satisfaction, and conflict resolution and a significant positive relationship with transaction costs with no effect on risk-taking tendency.     

Anlageverhalten auf Finanzmärkten

Despite a global homogenisation of financial markets, some characteristic national structures of private investors’ behaviour have been preserved. The underlying persistence of observable differences is due to the embeddedness of these markets in historical, institutional and cultural frameworks. Thus, the perception of financial risk is a function of culturally inherited social norms and conventions attached to different financial risk-taking domains. Private investors’ behaviour is guided by heterogeneous versions of rationality, thus explaining why households in bank-based systems like Germany provide banks with “patient capital” even at the price of lower return expectations.     

The fourth première of the Human Development Index

The United Nations Development Program has published its Human Development Index values for most countries of the world for the past five years. It claims the index provides information that goes beyond the widely-used GDP data and is relevant for policy-making. Critical examination shows that the index does not yet live up to this claim.     

Prices and promotions in U.S. retail markets

We provide generalizable results on the price and promotion tactics employed in the U.S. retail grocery industry. First, we document a large degree of price dispersion for UPCs and brands across stores, both nationally and at the local market level. Base price differences across stores and price promotions contribute to the overall price variance, and we show how to decompose the price variance into base price and promotion components. Second, we document that a large percentage of the variation in prices and promotion tactics across stores can be explained by retail chain and especially market/chain factors, whereas market factors explain only smaller percentage of the variation. Third, we show that the chain-level price and promotions similarity can be explained by similarity in demand. In particular, a large percentage of the variance in price elasticities and promotion effects can be explained by retail chain and especially market/retail chain factors. Further, price elasticities and promotion effects across stores of the same chain are hard to distinguish from the chain-market-level mean, and cross-price elasticities are typically imprecisely estimated. These findings suggest that retail managers may plausibly consider price discrimination across stores to be infeasible.

     

On the different “worlds” of intra-organizational knowledge management: Understanding idiosyncratic variation in MNC cross-site knowledge-sharing practices

This qualitative field study investigated cross-site knowledge sharing in a small sample of multinational corporations in three different MNC business contexts (global, multidomestic, transnational). The results disclose heterogeneous “worlds” of MNC knowledge sharing, ultimately raising the question as to whether the whole concept of MNC knowledge sharing covers a sufficiently unitary phenomenon to be meaningful. We derive a non-exhaustive typology of MNC knowledge-sharing practices: self-organizing knowledge sharing, technocratic knowledge sharing, and best practice knowledge sharing. Despite its limitations, this typology helps to elucidate a number of issues, including the latent conflict between two disparate theories of MNC knowledge sharing, namely “sender–receiver” and “social learning” theories (Noorderhaven & Harzing, 2009). More generally, we develop the term “knowledge contextualization” to highlight the way that firm-specific organizational features pre-define which knowledge is considered to be of special relevance for intra-organizational sharing.