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Employees, as internal stakeholders, not only play significant roles in a company’s operations but are also important users of a company’s financial information. However, prior accounting research to date has not explored whether employees incorporate a firm’s ability to meet earnings benchmarks in forming and revising their perceptions of firms. This study aims to focus on whether a firm’s ability to meet relevant earnings benchmarks impacts employees’ perceptions.

The authors use employees’ perception scores from the 100 Best Companies to Work for from 1998 to 2015. The authors conduct an empirical study to examine the impact of beating earnings benchmarks on the perceptions of employees by estimating regression analyses. The dependent variable is employee perceptions of the firm. The variables of interest are the earnings growth and the analyst forecast benchmarks. The authors control for earnings performance and other determinants of employees’ perceptions.

The authors find that beating the earnings benchmarks is relevant for employees but has different impacts on the employees’ perceptions of firms. Specifically, both level and change analyses suggest that a firm’s ability to beat the earnings growth benchmark affects employees’ perceptions. However, the authors find no associations between employees’ perceptions and the analyst forecast benchmarks.

The authors recognize the amount of variation among the two groups’ perceptions from the binary variable creates an inherent limitation that the authors examine the best firms in terms of employee perceptions compared to the second-best firms. Therefore, the authors create another measure, EMPLOYEE_PERCEPTION2, which equals one if the firm’s ranking is within the top quartile and zero if the firm’s ranking is within the bottom quartile. This new variable increases the variation of employees’ perceptions in the sample to address the inherent limitation by allowing us to compare the best firms to the worst firms in the sample.

The study highlights the importance of beating earnings benchmarks for employees as a broader group of stakeholders. The study contributes to accounting benchmarks literature by exploring a different group of earnings benchmarks users. The authors also contribute to psychology studies by providing empirical evidence on the previously untested, intuitive prediction that employees’ views depend on a firm’s ability to meet relevant earnings benchmarks.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate masculinity in Chinese social media marketing for global luxury fashion brands through two studies.

Study 1 compares physical characteristics of males in visually oriented US (Instagram) and Chinese (Weibo) social media posts promoting global luxury fashion magazine brands (e.g. Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Esquire). Study 2 examines the prevalence of and Chinese consumers’ responses (reposts, comments and likes) to different masculinities depicted in luxury fashion brand-sponsored Weibo posts.

Male portrayals for Chinese audiences feature more characteristics associated with emerging East Asian hybrid masculinities – “Little Fresh Meat” (LFM) and “Old Grilled Meat” (OGM) – than associated with global or regional hegemonic masculinity (i.e. the scholarly Wén and action-oriented Wu). Wén remains common in social media posts for luxury fashion goods, but LFM and OGM engender more consumer responses.

Chinese luxury fashion marketing depicts masculinity more similarly to other East Asian marketing than to Western marketing. Some luxury fashion brands are struggling for acceptance among Chinese youth. Luxury fashion marketers should incorporate hybrid rather than hegemonic masculinities to prompt more favorable responses among Chinese consumers, especially younger female target markets.

Growing female occupational and consumer power and shifting male employment from blue-collar to white-collar jobs have influenced media portrayals of masculinity. Social media marketing for luxury fashion brands demonstrates the prevalence and appeal of hybrid masculinities in China.