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Brand managers can choose among two fundamentally different brand positioning strategies. One is a broad brand strategy, focusing on many favorable brand associations. The other is a narrow brand strategy, focusing on just a few and thus more mentally accessible associations. Building on associative memory theory, this paper aims to examine which of these brand positioning strategies performs better under dynamic market conditions.

Three experiments test the effect of brand positioning strategy on memory accessibility and competitive brand performance. Study 1 tests how brand strategy (broad vs narrow) affects defensive brand performance. Study 2 tests how broad vs narrow brands perform differently in a brand extension scenario (offensive brand performance). Study 3 uses real brands and situation-based attributes as stimuli in a defensive scenario.

The results show that a narrow brand positioning strategy leads to a competitive advantage. Narrow brands with fewer and more accessible associations resist new competitors more easily and have higher brand extension acceptance than do broad brands.

The study shows how to use accessibility as evidence of associative strength and test how accessibility influences competitive brand performance in a controlled experimental context.

Brand managers would benefit from a narrow brand positioning strategy in accordance with the unique selling proposition (USP) school of thought used by many marketing practitioners.

The paper demonstrates that narrow brand positioning performs better than broad brand positioning in dynamic markets, and to the knowledge is the first to do so.

Brand managers must decide between extension and alliance strategies to grow their brands. This paper aims to describe testing of consumers' responses to two alternative brand growth strategies: an extension strategy whereby a brand moves into a new category alone, and an alliance strategy whereby the same brand moves into the new category as a branded ingredient in a brand already established in that category. How far to stretch a brand is yet another strategic choice facing the brand manager, and the current research tests, under short and long category‐stretch conditions, the attitudinal responses to extension and alliance strategies.

The paper builds on the categorisation and incongruence literature. An experiment was employed to test the main hypotheses in the study.

Extensions outperform alliances, especially when the brand undertakes a long stretch, and short‐stretch strategies outperform long‐stretch strategies.

An extension strategy may be preferred to an alliance strategy, especially in situations in which the new growth opportunity requires a long stretch.

The paper compares, in the same study, the attitudinal effects of two important growth strategies widely employed by companies. Previous studies have assessed the performance of these two strategic options only separately.

Companies often find that customers fail to complain directly to the company when they experience a negative service incident. One explanation for such behavior may be found in customers' emotions caused by the incident. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how emotions and customer complaint behaviors are related.

Two studies were performed. The first was a survey of customers who experienced negative service incidents in the Norwegian travel industry. In a second study, an experiment used another service context to validate the findings.

The results indicated that negative service incidents that are wholly attributed to the company increase the likelihood of customers complaining directly to the company. However, negative service incidents for which customers attribute responsibility wholly or partly to themselves, customers will be more likely to complain anonymously through social media and blogs, and hence to be a source of negative word‐of‐mouth about the company.

The paper establishes that increased levels of emotions, regardless of whether these emotions are internal or external in nature, increase customers complaints via negative word‐of‐mouth via social media and blogs.

Previous research demonstrates the importance of product category fit in evaluating brand alliances. However, many factors determine fit between alliance partners. For example, conclusions from brand extension research suggest that the evaluation is a question not only of product category fit, but also of brand concept consistency. Therefore, this study introduces brand concept consistency in research on brand alliances.

The paper builds on the categorization and incongruence literature. An experiment was employed to test the two hypotheses in the study.

The results indicate that both product category fit and brand concept consistency influence consumers' evaluations. However, the results also show that product category fit is important in only functional and mixed‐brand concept‐based alliances. For expressive brand alliances, product category fit is not important in evaluating the alliance.

Managers should take care in finding potential alliance partners who have brands that in some way, either on the product category level or in brand concept, fit well with their company's brands. However, managers of a functional brand should find a partner whose brand has high product category fit, since low‐fit partners presumably will hurt the potential alliance.

The paper demonstrates that brand concept consistency, not only product category fit, is an important variable in consumer evaluations of brand alliances.

This study focuses on how the creation of a new market identity, defined here by the social categories that specify what to expect of products and organizations, helps legitimize normatively illegitimate products and thereby facilitate the formation of markets for these products. A product is given a legitimate market identity by recombining existing product and status categories in a way that is both isomorphic with and differentiated from these preexisting categories. I argue that the creation of a new market identity helped create a market for feature films that combined legitimate comedy and illegitimate pornography following the legalization of pornography in Denmark in 1969. Topological analyses of the cultural content of all the film posters used to promote Danish films between 1970 and 1978, and regression analyses of the status of the actors appearing in these films document the importance of market identity in legitimizing illegitimacy.