Editorial

Citation

Veloutsou, C. and Guzmán, F. (2017), "Editorial", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 1-1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-01-2017-1397

Welcome to the first issue of Volume 26 of the Journal of Product and Brand Management. This issue has in total eight contributions. After a year of celebration, it is time to move forward towards the next 25 years of the journal. This issue thus starts with a paper, authored by the two Editors-in-Chief, that outlines the development of the brand management thinking and the contribution of the Journal of Product and Brand Management in the area of branding during the past 25 years and presents some overarching research topics that will hopefully stimulate future research. The remaining seven papers of the issue are contributed by researchers based at universities from seven different countries.

The following two papers analyse brand relationships. Sabrina Hegner, Marc Fetscherin and Marianne van Delzen focus on negative brand relationships and in particular on brand hate. This work conceptualizes brand hate as a one-dimensional construct, suggesting that brand hate is triggered by three determinants (negative past experience, symbolic incongruity and ideological incompatibility), which leads to three behavioural outcomes (brand avoidance, negative word-of-mouth and brand retaliation).

Sabrina Hegner, Anna Fenko and Annemiek ter Avest, on the other hand, focus on positive brand relationships and in particular on brand love. This work uses the theory of planned behaviour and provides insights on the influence of attitude towards loving a brand, subjective norm and perceived control factors, namely, the propensity to anthropomorphize and the affordability of the brand on brand love. This work also studies the influence of brand love on brand forgiveness and the effect of involvement with the product category on the proposed relationship.

The work by Theo Lynn, Laurent Muzellec, Barbara Caemmerer and Darach Turley focuses on the behaviour of early adopters on social network cites. With data collected from Twitter and Google+ users, the study reveals that early adopters’ information-sharing and user-sharing generate high social network site influence.

Timo Muhonen, Saku Hirvonen and Tommi Laukkanen test whether brand identity, conceptualized as brand positioning, brand values and brand vision, mediates the relationship between brand orientation and brand performance. They further test whether brand performance leads to better financial performance for SMEs in Finland. The results support most of the suggested relationships between these variables, indicating that the focus on branding is crucial for achieving financial results.

Eric Kennedy uses experiments to examine the effects of co-creation posts in social media and compares direct consumer interaction and celebrity endorsement messages. The results indicate that active co-creation posts initiated from brands increase consumers’ brand commitment and purchase intention. The results indicate that direct brand interaction is more effective in increasing brand commitment and purchase intention than a celebrity-endorsed message.

The last two papers present research that is related to wine and bottles that contain liquids, including wine. Laurence Carsana and Alain Jolibert examine the importance of the brand and the quality cues for different consumer groups when purchasing red wine. The results indicate that consumers place different emphases on the various characteristics of the offer depending on their brand schematicity and their degree of expertise in the product category.

Magnus Söderlund, Jonas Colliander, John Karsberg, Karina Liljedal, Erik Modig, Sara Rosengren, Sofie Sagfossen, Stefan Szugalski and Nina Åkestam focus on wine packaging. They examine the role of the perceived effort when evaluating a bottle and its packaging, and the overall evaluations and the mediation effect of product quality perceptions in this relationship, finding significant effects.

For this issue, the Journal of Product and Brand Management relied on the help of 17 reviewers, who are based in ten different countries. They are listed below:

Albert Bemmaor, ESSEC Business School, France.

Isabel Buil, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain.

Rita Coelho do Vale, Catholic University of Portugal, Portugal.

Armando Corsi, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science, Australia.

Keith Dinnie, Middlesex University, UK.

Frank Huber, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Germany.

Colin Jevons, Monash University, Australia.

Hans Kaufmann, University of Nicosia, Cyprus.

Huda Khan, University of South Australia, Australia.

Sheena Leek, University of Birmingham, UK.

Josselin Masson, University of Haute-Alsace, France.

Anna Morgan-Thomas, University of Glasgow, UK.

Anthony Patino, University of Baltimore, USA.

Lamprini Piha, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece.

Carla Ruiz, University of Valencia, Spain.

Juhi Sarkar, IBS, India.

Lia Zarantonello, University of Roehampton, UK.

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.