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This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity on forming self-reinforcing assets (enticing-the-self, enriching-the-self and enabling-the-self), which subsequently influence the brand-self connectedness and consumers’ behavioral intentions.

The authors surveyed 347 consumers in the USA and Brazil and used structural equation modeling to test the relationship among brand authenticity, self-reinforcing assets, brand-self connectedness and behavioral intentions.

Brand authenticity was found to influence the self-reinforcing assets. In turn, the self-reinforcing assets promoted closeness toward the brand, thereby increasing the behavioral intentions of consumers to buy a product, visit a store/website in the future and recommend the brand to other people.

Marketing practitioners can use these results to promote better brand positioning by considering brand authenticity as a key factor in how consumers cognitively assess brands.

This paper shows that brand authenticity is a key antecedent of consumer–brand self-reinforcing assets.

Brand transgressions, characterized by service failure, are a frequent theme for marketing scholars. Their impact on satisfaction, trust and brand loyalty is of high interest. However, in assessing the influence of those events on third-party consumers, the literature is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social distance explains the reactions of close and distant third-party consumers toward other consumers during a brand transgression event. Anger is analyzed as a driver of this process.

Two experiments were conducted. Both studies presented a 3 (social distance: victim vs close third party vs distant third party) by 2 (severity: low vs high) between-subjects design. Respondents were asked to read a transgression scenario in a mobile phone service (study 1) and in a restaurant (study 2) and then completed scales that measured their affective reactions and evaluations of the relationship – satisfaction, trust, and loyalty intention – with the transgressing brand.

The results showed that transgression severity intensifies the effect of the brand transgression on consumer’s anger. Victims and close third parties demonstrated higher levels of anger compared to distant third-party consumers. In the case of severe transgressions, an experience of anger contagion between victims and close third-party consumers was responsible for the negative effect on the relationship evaluation of the transgressing brand compared to distant third-party consumers.

This study extends previous research about how social distance influences consumer-brand relationships and demonstrates the mediating role played by affective anger contagion.

Due to increasing use of the Internet to purchase products, this article aimed to investigate how poor experiences during online purchases lead consumers to perform webrooming.

The authors performed three laboratory experiments and analyzed secondary data to investigate this issue.

The findings revealed that (a) poor online experiences increased consumers' intentions to perform webrooming (studies 1, 2 and 3); (b) frustration is a mechanism that explains why consumers choose to perform webrooming in the same or rival stores (Studies 1, 2 and 3); (c) Perceived channel integration increases consumer's intentions to perform webrooming in the same retailer (study 3).

This research contributes to webrooming literature by highlighting one more antecedent of this behavior and its psychological mechanism. To the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first one shedding light on the differentiation between webrooming in the same or rival stores. The findings also complement omnichannel literature by exploring how poor experiences and frustration change channel preferences. Finally, the article demonstrated how managers could retain consumers by improving channel integration.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a common strategy implemented by companies due to social, ethical and policy pressures to reduce its impact on society, economy and environment. However, whether CSR adds or decreases firms’ value remains little explored. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the impact of CSR adoption on companies’ economic value added (EVA). The authors also tested a mechanism of environmental innovation and the moderation role of a firm’s size.

The authors performed a regression analysis and a mediation process analysis using dataset from 4,287 largest companies worldwide to investigate this issue. The a dataset was collected from Eikon, a Thomson Reuters platform.

The results revealed four main findings. Companies with high CSR indexes decreased EVA; environmental innovation mediated the effect of CSR on EVA; the firm size positively moderated the effect of CSR on EVA and firm size positively moderated the effect of CSR on environmental innovation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this research is the first endeavor to analyze CSR’s effect on EVA and the mediation role of environmental innovation using the most prominent firms worldwide. Furthermore, the results highlight exciting implications for literature, managers and policymakers.

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on social responsibility in Latin America.

The hypotheses were tested using a sample of 371 companies based in eight Latin American countries, resulting in 4,823 observations.

The results show that more independent boards, with greater female representation and the presence of a sustainability committee lead companies to behave more ethically. The findings indicate that corporate governance mechanisms play an important role for companies to engage in social responsibility actions.

Governments can use these findings to draft regulations that encourage Latin American companies to disclose more non-financial information and to support a more diverse board composition. The evidence shows that the quality of national governance plays a key role in times of crisis by encouraging more responsible behavior by companies.

This study broadens the scope of application of agency theory and the resource-based view by demonstrating that the board of directors is a unique composition and that organizations must understand how to balance external and internal members on their boards in order to achieve higher social and environmental performance.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar el efecto de los mecanismos de gobierno corporativo en la responsabilidad social en América Latina.

Las hipótesis se probaron utilizando una muestra de 371 empresas con sede en 8 países de América Latina, lo que resultó en 4.823 observaciones.

Los resultados muestran que directorios más independientes, con mayor representación femenina y la presencia de un comité de sustentabilidad llevan a las empresas a comportarse de manera más ética. Los hallazgos indican que los mecanismos de gobierno corporativo juegan un papel importante para que las empresas realicen acciones de responsabilidad social.

Este estudio amplía el alcance de la aplicación de la teoría de la agencia y la visión basada en los recursos al demostrar que la junta directiva es una composición única y que las organizaciones deben entender cómo equilibrar los miembros externos e internos en sus juntas para lograr un mayor impacto social. y desempeño ambiental.

Los gobiernos pueden usar estos hallazgos para redactar regulaciones que alienten a las empresas latinoamericanas a divulgar más información no financiera y apoyar una composición de directorio más diversa. Nuestra evidencia muestra que la calidad de la gobernanza nacional juega un papel clave en tiempos de crisis al fomentar un comportamiento más responsable por parte de las empresas.

This paper aims to outline the role of brands as relationship builders and to offer a better understanding of the recent developments and key literature in the area of consumer–brand relationships.

This paper is an editorial based mainly on a literature review on consumer–brand relationships. It uses the sentiment range and passion intensity to position various brand relationship constructs. This work follows the same bibliometric-analysis approach used by Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) and looked for publications in the Web of Science on brand relationships, with reference to Fournier’s (1998) seminal work and data collected for the period between January 2010 and November 2018.

First, this work presents the key consumer–brand relationship terms and positions the work on brand love, brand like, brand hate, brand dislike and brand indifference. In addition, the bibliometric analysis offers a number of insights into the current state of the academic research in the area of consumer–brand relationships, including a clear indication that the research on consumer–brand relationships is increasing.

This work and the whole special issue together help in the understanding of brands as relationship builders, clearly explaining the continuum from strong positive or negative relationships with brands to no relationship with brands and the current state of research in the area.

This study aims to examine the internal brand knowledge dissemination process in the banking sector and its effects on employees. Specifically, it focuses on the key roles of employee identification with both the organization and with the customer as antecedents of behaviors supportive of the brand, i.e. employee citizenship behaviors and recommendation behaviors.

An empirical study was carried out in a major Spanish bank. Data gathered from a survey of 315 employees were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results showed that employees' perceptions of brand value congruence are key in explaining their identification with both the organization and with the customer. However, the employees' perceptions of the brand's authenticity explained only their recommendations of the bank as a good place to work.

These findings contribute to the advance in the current knowledge of the role of variables such as brand authenticity and employee–customer identification in internal brand management. From a managerial viewpoint, the results provide insights into the importance of employees' perceptions and attitudes when it comes to brand knowledge dissemination.

This study uses the antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) framework to identify how perceived risks and benefits relate to the omnichannel strategy and influence consumer behavior.

A systematic review was conducted on 111 articles (2014–2023) on Scopus using NVivo® software for content analysis.

The literature on omnichannel is fragmented between journals and lines of research, making it difficult to identify influential journals in the area and preventing effective convergence. When the perception of risk is greater than the perception of benefits, companies must understand how to mitigate the risk, so that the adoption of an omnichannel strategy is not canceled.

The review is limited to one database and does not consider specific products/services or consumer profiles.

This review broadens understanding of omnichannel from a perspective neglected by researchers, namely risks and benefits and their impacts on organizational results. The model will clarify how the literature on omnichannel has evolved and instigate new research.

This study evaluates the impact of environmental innovation (EI) on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) along with mediating role of green branding among the production oriented small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on the resource-based view (RBV) and ecological modernization theories.

The study compiled data through questionnaire-based survey and inspected via partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to find results.

The findings indicate that EI aligns positive significant association with SDGs among the production SMEs. The study also discovers that green branding mediates between EI and SDGs.

The results have interesting implications for policy and explicate the practitioners to apply the techniques of eco-organizational innovation, eco-product innovation and eco-process innovation to achieve SDGs.

Even, the topics of EI and SDGs have gained significant attention, but this is the first study in these domains.

This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity dimensions (i.e. aesthetic, symbolism, heritage, originality, quality commitment and virtue) on consumer engagement in the context of social media. This study answers to the need of scholars to understand consumer behaviour towards family and non-family firms’ brand authenticity constructs and for practitioners to find the correct levers to increase consumer engagement.

Top 10 European family firms with a retrievable Facebook (FB) page from the Global Family Business Index have been selected. Then, the study analysed family firms’ social media consumer engagement versus their non-family business direct competitors on a sample of 21.664 FB posts over a four-year period, leveraging multi-group analysis.

The results outline that three out of six brand authenticity dimensions posted on FB are statistically arousing more interactions respect to non-authenticity-related contents when posted by family firms. However, there are no statistically significant findings when brand authenticity content is posted by the non-family competitors.

This research is helpful for practitioners and entrepreneurs who might want to strengthen their social media brand strategies. With this regard, the study provides insights on which elements of brand authenticity are perceived by consumers as more engaging and which levers to use when communicating the familiness of the company.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies crosscutting the family business and brand authenticity literature streams to conduct an empirical analysis based on official FB data with a data set of over 20,000 observations. Moreover, this study assesses that not every dimension of the brand authenticity construct is relevant in the context of social media and that its effectiveness depends on the firms’ familiness.