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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between an organization’s human resource management (HRM) image and its customer-based brand equity. Research into HRM in relation to branding has mostly dealt with how to attract and maintain employees through employer branding. The present study attempts to link HRM directly to marketing and branding aimed at customers as an altruistic dimension of the brand image and as something that applies to customers’ sociological needs.

The study is based on a survey of Swedish customers in two different retail categories: groceries and home decoration.

The results show that HRM image is distinct from a more traditional service image and that there is a significant relationship between favourable customer perceptions of an organization’s HRM and customers’ willingness to buy and pay a premium for products provided by the retail chain. This finding leads to the conclusion that HRM is not only relevant for employer branding, internal branding and operations management but also plays a significant role in building customer-based brand equity. The results show that further integration of HRM and brand management is needed, both in theory and practice.

This study takes a holistic approach to marketing and is one of the first attempts to incorporate HRM and employer branding into the customer-based brand equity framework. Implications for future research, retailing and other businesses are discussed in the conclusion.

The aim is to understand customers' willingness, or unwillingness, to pay a price premium in the market for consumer packaged food and what kind of images brands can use in order to achieve a price premium.

The study is based on a quantitative survey of brand images found in food and branding literature and their impact on loyalty as well as customers' willingness to pay a price premium for consumer packaged food.

The survey shows that quality is a significant determinant of price premium, but adding other image dimensions doubles the predictability and understanding about price premium. The strongest determinants of price premium are social image, uniqueness and home country origin. Other significant determinants are corporate social responsibility (CSR) and awareness.

The results help brand managers to recognise the importance of incorporating price premium and to develop a better understanding of what drives price premium in addition to more traditional dimensions as quality and loyalty.

In grocery retailing, the competition for customers, margins and price premiums between manufacturer and private labels is fierce. Traditionally, the literature on this competition has focused on quality and product improvements as the main tool for creating distance to low priced competition. This study looks into other more branding related dimensions to distance from price competition.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the ways in which food companies can work with branding to perform better in the market. The authors achieve this purpose by comparing how different managers of food brands prioritise and evaluate their brands, in relation to a theoretical ideal framework.

A survey of 77 managers of domestic and international brands.

Beliefs and priorities are similar between managers. What differs is how they measure and monitor their brands. Managers of high performing brands, for example, in general measure brand equity to a greater extent than other managers, and they focus significantly more on monitoring typical brand equity elements such as brand awareness, uniqueness, and feelings. Also managers of international brands measure and monitor more intensively than those of domestic brands.

Weaker and domestic brands could learn from the better-performing brands, by becoming more oriented towards key brand equity elements when performing monitoring, rather than focusing mainly on perceived quality.

A comparative and systematic method that suggests an alternative and analytical approach to strengthening domestic and weaker brands

This paper seeks to develop a framework for understanding what drives customer‐based brand equity and price premium for grocery products.

The paper reviews empirical studies made within the area of brand equity and studies of grocery products. It compares and analyses the results from an explorative and qualitative field study with previous research on brand equity and food quality.

The study finds that brand equity and price premium focusing on the grocery sector specifically highlights the role of uniqueness, together with the four traditionally basic dimensions of brand equity proposed: awareness, qualities, associations and loyalty. Relevant brand associations (origin, health, environment/animal friendliness, organisational associations and social image), and quality attributes (taste, odour, consistency/texture, appearance, function, packaging and ingredients) specific to groceries are identified and proposed for future measurement scales and model validating research.

The development of a customer‐based brand equity model, that adds awareness, associations and loyalty to previous discussions on price and quality, brings to the table a more nuanced and multi‐faced tool for marketing of consumer packaged food.

The paper provides a framework for understanding, evaluating, measuring and managing brand equity for grocery products. As this paper presents the first conceptual brand equity framework for groceries, there is a contribution to research on food branding. Also, there is a contribution to the general field of brand equity as previous models have been very general.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how well grocery stores' motives to implement private labels (create margins and customer perceived brand value, compete with market leading brands, develop store image, enhance store loyalty) are realized, through exploring consumers' attitudes, preferences and behaviour.

The paper is based on the case of Sweden and interviews with the primary grocery purchaser in 300 households who have visited an ICA store (a Swedish supermarket chain) within a time period of the previous 30 days before the interview.

The study shows that there is a correlation between perceived quality and the price customers are willing to pay for private label products. Results also show that there is a strong correlation between perceived value of private label products in specific categories and the stores' overall product variety image. The study further supports the assumption that store loyalty is influenced by the perceived value of the grocery retailer's private label products.

The study is limited to Sweden and to only one retail chain. Also, it is an attitude‐ and survey‐based approach rather than based on observation or actual spending data.

The results will guide retailers if and how they are fulfilling their ambitions regarding their private label merchandises. The study could provide manufacturers and consumer organizations an insight into how consumers respond to this new phenomenon.

It is a report beyond the dominating empirical research contexts of the UK and USA. From a conceptual point of view, the paper adopts a more holistic approach investigating the four major retailer motives simultaneously.

The overall purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of customer perceived service quality within grocery retailing in a North European context. We do this by comparing customer perceived service quality evaluations of the traditional supermarket store with evaluations of the discount store.

This study is based on empirical data from four store cases (two traditional and two discount stores), including information gained from a total of 542 respondents. In the study, we have used and tested a model of grocery store service quality, presented in Vázquez et al. (2001), with structural equation modelling (LISREL) and traditional multivariate analysis (SPSS).

The ability of the Vázquez et al. (2001) model to capture customer perceived quality was below 40 per cent for both concepts which signals limited relevance and that important dimensions in the service evaluation could be missing for both of the two concepts, at least in a North European context. The results show that the traditional supermarket outperforms the discount stores on all service aspects but availability and reliability. When comparing the determinants of the service quality evaluation, the two concepts are very similar. Finally, the overall results regarding determinants of service quality show resemblance to retail studies in other countries and cultures.

This study has been limited to investigate service quality in Sweden and from two out of at least five possible retail concepts. As the explanatory power of the model is limited, future studies should explore other possible determinants of service quality, e.g. the role of technological innovations.

Kotler and Keller (2012) proposes five generic differentiation strategies: product, service, people, channels and image. The results suggest that traditional grocery stores that choose to differentiate and position themselves by focusing on service rather than physical product differentiation should work with assortment issues as well. In order to decide which aspect of service to choose and promote, companies should emphasise differences that are considered important by customers, distinct from competitors and superior in terms of delivering the overall benefit – in this case – in terms of service quality. The results show that the policy dimension would satisfy all three criterions.

The study enhances the understanding of customer perceived service quality within grocery retailing, specifically in comparison between the supermarket and the discount store concept.

This study is the first to focus on whether there is a divergence in service quality and service quality measuring between the traditional supermarket concept and the growing discount concept, and if so to what extent. Furthermore, it is a test of a model that has gained acceptance in Latin and South European countries, but in the context of Northern Europe.

This study aims to enhance the understanding of what significance consumers place on different aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) when evaluating and purchasing grocery brands and products.

The paper builds on existing literature and theories on CSR and marketing, as well as literature on consumers' perceptions of CSR related issues. The Swedish empirical study has two parts; the first explorative stage based on qualitative method and in‐store face‐to‐face interviews through which important consumer attitude‐based attributes of social responsibility are identified in a grocery context. The second quantitative part is based on questionnaires that describe the grocery brand positions and performances along these attributes.

Results point to three general attitude‐based dimensions for CSR positioning and that retail brands can indeed, in relation to leading national brands, build a CSR image. Further, this image is shown to have an impact on consumers' intention to buy. This is also the case for “me‐too” retail brands. The CSR dimension of greatest impact on overall CSR image is product responsibility, whereas human responsibility influences the customer purchase intentions the most. Environmental responsibility, perhaps the most commonly used CSR dimension, is in this study recognised to exert least impact on both overall CSR image and on purchase intentions.

This study is limited to a Swedish context and to one specific purchase situation. Future studies could involve validation of factor structure, relationship between CSR and preference, and ability to positioning in another market, perhaps in more mature markets in terms of well‐developed structures of CSR and health/organic organic products (e.g. the UK). A postal survey would allow the use of longer and evaluated measurement scales previously used in organic food research.

This study substantiates that retailer brands can indeed be distinctly positioned according to aspects other than price, e.g. as here exemplified, the concept of CSR. This relationship has hitherto not been identified outside the UK. The finding that CSR is less clearly connected to the expected dimension of environmental responsibility entails new added knowledge to this research field. The analysis has, moreover, resulted in more a simplified description of the basic dimensions of CSR containing three instead of, as often in the literature, six dimensions.

Over the past decade climate change has become an inescapable aspect of social responsibility for the major retail chains who have sought to incorporate the environmental considerations into their communication strategies. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at communications campaigns based on environmental theme through social networks.

In this respect, social media can be considered a direct communication tool conducive to the promotion of sustainable development. Therefore, the paper is based on a year-long study of one group’s official Facebook page.

The conclusions highlight the need for retail chains to strengthen the perceived consistency of their communication strategies on this subject, in order to retain their credibility.

Encouraging consumers’ contributions via Facebook may be considered as a relevant practice for greening retail, on the condition that internet users are convinced of the value and interest of this process, as examples of a company’s concrete actions, which provide hard evidence of its stated commitments. The authors also point out the implications of the results in the emerging context of omni-channel retailing.

This paper provides two kinds of added value. First its explore retailers’ practice on the subject of green marketing. Second, it provides significant learnings regarding the potential impact of communication in social media.