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To facilitate a goal of hiring more employees with work passion, this research investigates the content job seekers include in recruiting messages to determine if this content changes with job seekers’ work passion.

Study participants were full-time professionals who wrote recruiting messages for their current jobs and answered questions about their work passion and work histories. These recruiting messages were content analyzed for themes. The percentages of recruiting message content for each theme were entered as endogenous variables in a structural equation model with harmonious and obsessive work passion are exogenous variables.

A significantly positive relationship was found between participants’ harmonious work passion and the amount of passion-related content in their recruiting messages.

Findings suggest that organizations may consider including more passion-related content in recruiting messages, if their recruiting strategy aims to attract more high-work-passion job applicants.

This is one of the first studies on the role of work passion in recruiting messages. This study also uses a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses.

This paper investigates how stockist brand equity is created in the unorganized pharma retail sector in emerging markets despite the absence of any proactive brand-building efforts by distribution firms (stockists). In addition, this study also aims to unravel the sources of stockist brand equity.

Drawing from grounded theory, a qualitative research design using semi-structured interviews was conducted, and a theoretical saturation approach was used for this purpose. The retailer–stockist (business-to-business [B2B]) relationship in the Indian pharmaceutical market context was used as the study context.

The findings show that in the absence of any brand-building activities, stockists’ sales representatives play an important role in creating stockist brand awareness. In addition, word of mouth from other retailers also plays a minor role. Rational and emotional brand associations which are strong, favorable and unique are created 1) directly by the services provided by stockists, which includes product availability, deliverability, accuracy in billing and batch numbers, credit facilities and discounts, handling issues such as product expiry, and 2) indirectly by the services provided by stockists’ sales representatives which includes their frequency of visits, proactive customer orientation rather than sales orientation, fulfilling commitments and relationship with retailers. The strength of the retailer–stockist (B2B) relationship also depends on retailer-driven factors and other external factors discussed in this study.

Strong stockist brand equity helps build trust and loyalty with pharmacies, ensuring a consistent and timely supply of medicinal products, which will benefit their end consumers or society.

This study identifies the antecedents determining the strength of the retailer–stockist (B2B) relationship, a precursor for establishing retailer-based stockist brand equity in the unorganized sector. This study also highlights the consequences of establishing strong retailer-based stockist brand equity.