توصیف : رهبری فکری در مدیریت نام تجاری Introduction: Thought leadership in brand management

abstract Available online 20 August 2011 Keywords: Thought leadership Brand management Conference special issue This special issue contains fifteen articles developed from presentations at the sixth annual Thought Leaders’ International Conference on Brand Management, held at Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland in April 2010. The conference received 154 submissions and following a double blind reviewing process, a little under half of these, 75 papers, were accepted and presented at the conference. The authors of the accepted conference papers had the opportunity to revise their papers after the conference and submit them for possible inclusion in this special issue. A further round of rigorous double-blind reviewing resulted in the selection of these fifteen articles. This introduction presents an overview of this thought-leading research into brand management. Crown Copyright © ۲۰۱۱ Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The articles in this special issue reflect the diversity and breadth of current research into brand management. Some articles shed useful new light on long-standing problems in our understanding of how brands work and others bring new issues and innovative methodologies to light. Reflecting the diversity of scholars attending the conference, the authors are from nine different countries and the papers here vary similarly. Conflict is an unfortunate fact of modern life — perhaps society has never known a period without conflict. More positively, perhaps, conflict and rivalry are among the main reasons why human beings form themselves into groups and how those groups behave. In the first paper in this special issue, Ewing, Wagstaff and Powell investigate how conflict and oppositional loyalty, or rivalry, manifest themselves both between and within brand communities. Their theoretical foundation is social identity, social comparison, selfcategorization and brand culture theory. They use this to inform a netnographic study of the communities that have formed around two locally strong mass-market motor vehicle brands in Australia, the local branches of Ford and General Motors (known locally as Holden). They show that the underlying conflict and rivalry is continuous and deep-rooted, but is mostly evidenced in humorous name-calling and ridicule. However, certain events and occasions can heighten the latent tensions between the communities, escalating the manifestation of the rivalry into malicious behavior and remarkable outright hostility. At the other end of the spectrum, even non-users of the brands can vicariously align themselves with one or other brand community, which is interesting since both brands are commonplace, mass-market players. In contrast to conflict between members of brand communities, the second article investigates a conflict between academic ideas. In this article, Urde, Baumgarth, and Merrilees stimulate thinking about brand orientation, comparing its underlying philosophy with that of market orientation using the varied perspectives of theoretical foundation, corporate culture, behavior, and performance outcomes and also linking the strategic orientations of brand and market orientation to classical thinking in marketing. Urde, Baumgarth, and Merrilees discuss four ways of understanding the relationship between the two orientations — as two separate strategic options, as a process of natural evolution, as options for some but not others, and as a symbiotic or synergistic mutually beneficial relationship. Ultimately, they see brand orientation as an inside-out and brand identity driven approach that regards brands as a hub for an organization and its strategy. This might at first seem in contrast to market orientation, an outside-in and brand image driven approach, but they move beyond a simple dichotomous conflict and develop the idea of a more dynamic and helpful interaction between the two paradigms. The third article is similarly integrative, drawing on ideas from two disciplines to develop our understanding of how brands work online. It combines insights from marketing and information systems research to arrive at an integrative model of online brand experience. Morgan-Thomas and Veloutsou build on the established understanding of technology acceptance and supplement it with emotional aspects of brand relationship, using empirical data from a survey of Journal of Business Research 66 (2013) 1–۳ ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 3 9903 2304. E-mail addresses: colin.jevons@monash.edu (C. Jevons), ibuil@unizar.es (I. Buil), bill.merrilees@griffith.edu.au (B. Merrilees), dechernatony@btinternet.com (L. de Chernatony). 1 Tel.: +34 976 761000; fax: +34 976 761767. 2 Tel.: +61 7 55527176; fax: +61 7 55528085. 3 Tel.: +44 121 204 3147; fax: +44 121 449 0104. 0148-2963/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright © ۲۰۱۱ Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.07.016 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Business Research users of online search engines. They show that trust and perceived usefulness positively affect online brand experience. These positive experiences result in satisfaction and behavioral intentions, which in turn lead to the formation of an online brand relationship. Brand reputation then emerges as an important antecedent of trust and perceived ease of use of an online brand, representing an interesting advance. The fourth article develops the concept of brand identity itself. da Silveira, Lages and Simoes challenge the common perspective of brand identity as unilateral and aspirational– what managers want the brand to be – while emphasizing the need for stability over time, pointing out that the increasingly dynamic environment and the rising role of consumers as co-contributors in brand construction and development require a fresh approach. Drawing on the sociology as well as the strategy literature, they show that brand identity is a dynamic process constructed over time through mutually influencing inputs from brand managers and other social constituents, notably consumers. The required consistency in identity management and presentation necessitates being adaptive to contextual changes while preserving a stable sense of self. Their contribution is showing how to cope with an unstable and unpredictable environment, which is becoming increasingly common. Should the brand identity remain fixed over time to create long lasting references for consumers, or should it instead be flexible and adaptable? They suggest that this depends on the meaning of the enduring identity attribute, which should be dynamic and flexible in a changing environment. They propose a brand identity framework consisting of the dimensions of brand identity, brand face, consumers’ face, encounters and contextual factors such as competition for environments such as these. A much-needed conceptual advance is to develop a robust framework for place and city branding. In the fifth article in this special issue Merrilees, Miller and Herington contribute to this by investigating the nature of a stressed satellite city brand profile that augments the core city brand development. They develop a common stressed satellite city brand profile that will help policymakers address the problems of stressed satellite cities in a way that will allow more insightful and structured government interventions instead of the previously applied piecemeal, unsustainable practices. In differentiating between self-sustaining cities and stressed satellite cities, their paper adds depth to the nascent place and city branding literature.