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Coffee shops are becoming more aware that brand loyalty can be an effective strategy for securing a competitive edge in business. To supplement current understanding of the importance of coffee shop branding, this study investigates the role of personality traits and congruity in the formation of brand loyalty. This study finds that personality traits have direct effects on congruity and customer satisfaction, the two defining factors of brand loyalty. Overall, our results suggest that the interaction of personality traits, congruity, and satisfaction is essential to the process of influencing coffee shop customers’ brand loyalty.

Despite the growing research into luxury symbolism and its influence on consumer behavior, few studies have investigated the underlying psychological processes that occur in different cultural contexts. This study investigates the relationships among luxury symbolism, psychological underpinnings of self-congruity, self-affirmation and customer loyalty, especially regarding how these relationships differ between consumers in China and those in the US.

Sample data were collected through surveys administered to 653 participants (327 in China and 326 in the US). A multi-group structural equation model was adopted to examine the conceptual model and proposed hypotheses.

The results show that luxury symbolism positively influences self-consistency, social consistency, social approval and self-esteem, and subsequently impacts self-affirmation and customer loyalty. However, for US consumers, self-esteem and social approval have significantly negative impacts on self-affirmation, while for Chinese consumers, social approval has no significant impact on self-affirmation. The authors also find that interdependent self-construal positively moderates the relationship between luxury symbolism, and social approval and social consistency. Independent self-construal positively moderates the relationship between luxury symbolism and self-consistency, and negatively influences the relationship between luxury symbolism and self-esteem.

Based on the theory of self-congruity and self-affirmation, this study fills a literature gap by revealing the psychological underpinnings regarding luxury symbolism and customer loyalty. It extends extant studies in luxury consumption by introducing self-construal (independent self vs interdependent self) as an important cultural moderator in luxury symbolism. This paper provides insights for luxury practitioners to create efficient marketing strategies by satisfying consumers' psychological needs in different cultures.

This paper proposes - through the integration of self-congruence, brand personality, sponsorship and sports spectator behaviour literatures - a conceptual framework to extend our current understanding of self-congruence in specific consumption situations. Initial empirical results support the proposed framework which shows that self-congruence based consumers' orientation towards sports and brand personality is positively associated with sponsorship outcomes.

Analyses the advertising content of three self‐image projective products (perfume, cosmetics, and women′s apparel) in the UK, German, French, Spanish, and Italian editions of Vogue magazine. Tests for the degree of standardisation versus localisation of the advertising of these products. Suggests that marketers/advertisers standardise perfume advertisements to a greater degree and apparel to a lesser degree.

Although shopping well-being has become a focal construct in retail shopping studies, little is known about the key drivers of this construct. This study aims to further discern some of the key antecedents of shopping well-being by particularly focusing on the role of congruity. Furthermore, the study explores whether shoppers’ demographic characteristics moderate the effects of congruity on shopping well-being.

Data were collected from a survey of actual shoppers in two urban Canadian shopping malls via a mall intercept. Structural equation modeling using SmartPLS was conducted to validate the study’s model.

Functional congruity has a stronger effect than self-congruity on shopping well-being. Shoppers’ demographic variables do not generally act as moderators in the investigated linkages.

This study can help mall managers formulate better marketing programs that would ultimately enhance shopping well-being.

The study advances the retailing literature by putting forward a conceptual model that remedies identified shortcomings related to functional and self-congruity and establishes new linkages between functional congruity, self-congruity and shopping well-being. Furthermore, the study explores whether shoppers’ demographic variables moderate the effects of functional and self-congruity on shopping well-being.

A critical concern for corporations test marketing new products involves test market city evaluation. In order for test marketing to be successful, corporations must identify cities that offer a good fit with the firm’s overall product strategy. Unfortunately, little has been written to aid corporations in making complex test city selection decisions. Presents a model that combines the concepts of marketing, the management science technique of goal programming, and microcomputer technology to provide managers with a more effective and efficient method for evaluating test cities and making selection decisions. Extends the existing literature on test market evaluation by applying a computer optimization model to test market evaluation in a way that has not been done before.

The purpose of this study is to examine likeable executional techniques in advertising across five Asian countries and their impact on purchase intentions.

A total of 1,000 urban young adults in five Asian countries (HK, China, Indonesia, Thailand and India) were telephone interviewed on their thoughts about the TV advertisement/s that they liked, product that was being advertised and purchase intention. Their responses were summarised into seven likeable executional techniques and product categories.

There is not a specific likeable executional technique that influences a purchase in four of the five countries. India is the only country where significant but weak overall model fit observed. These results demonstrate that, while there are differences among the countries, people in the same cohort broadly share the same values. For product categories, our findings demonstrate that product nature may moderate cultural influence on advertising effectiveness.

International advertisers who are vying for a share of the largely‐untapped Asian market can benefit by understanding the target country's cultural values and using it as a guideline for creating effective executional techniques in advertising.

This study extends the existing knowledge which demonstrates that, in Asia, persuasive executional techniques differ depending on the product category.

This study aims to propose and test a parsimonious framework for self-congruity, albeit in the context of luxury branding. This paper is the first to propose an integrated model focusing on the drivers and consequences of self-congruity. The model is further applied to explain how self-congruity may motivate future experiences with the luxury brand, mainly by influencing self-perception. Although a substantive marketing literature on self-congruity currently exists, there is a lack of an integrated framework, a gap that the current work addresses.

A paper and pencil survey was conducted among female subjects only, and structural path relationships were tested using AMOS.

Consumers’ self-congruity with a luxury brand (non-luxury brand) is positively (negatively) influenced by its antecedents: social desirability, need for uniqueness and status consumption. Self-congruity with a luxury (non-luxury) brand is found to enhance (undermine) consumers’ self-perceptions. This, in turn, is found to have a stronger (weaker) positive impact on consumers’ motivation to re-use a shopping bag from luxury brand (non-luxury brand) for hedonic purpose. Mediation analyses show that self-congruity has a positive (negative) indirect effect on hedonic use via self-perception for luxury (non-luxury) brand.

Future studies may involve actual shoppers, causal design and additional variables like “utilitarian usage “of shopping bags to extend the proposed framework.

A better understanding of the findings has implications for brand positioning, advertising and packaging.

Till date, no research has examined a parsimonious model for self-congruity complete with its antecedents and consequences and tested it in the context of a luxury versus non-luxury brand.

This study investigated the viability of using a Pan‐European approach for professional service offerings in Europe by first establishing measurement equivalence and then exploring the influence of culture on service quality and customer satisfaction. Utilizing scenarios involving a dental office visit, respondents from Portugal, France, and Germany participated in a 2X2 factorial experiment in which the researchers manipulated both expectations (low/high) and service performance (low/high). Respondents from France and Portugal expressed similar levels of customer satisfaction and perceived service quality, which were significantly different from those of the German respondents except when both expectations and performance were low.

This study examines consumer brand associations, focusing on the differences between association held for western brands and eastern brands by young Singaporeans under the country‐of‐origin umbrella. The study also examines consumer ethnocentric tendencies (CET), finding very low levels of ethnocentrism among respondents, and results indicate CET had no effect on brand preference or purchase intention.