Johan Anselmsson, Ulf Johansson and Niklas Persson
This paper seeks to develop a framework for understanding what drives customer‐based brand equity and price premium for grocery products.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to develop a framework for understanding what drives customer‐based brand equity and price premium for grocery products.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
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Johan Anselmsson, Niklas Bondesson and Frans Melin
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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on a survey of Swedish customers in two different retail categories: groceries and home decoration.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
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Johan Anselmsson, Niklas Lars Anders and
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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey of 77 managers of domestic and international brands.
Findings
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
A comparative and systematic method that suggests an alternative and analytical approach to strengthening domestic and weaker brands
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Rebecca Bednarek, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Jonathan Schad and Wendy Smith
Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through…
Abstract
Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.
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The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.
Findings
The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.
Social implications
In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.
Originality/value
To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.
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Johan Anselmsson, Niklas Vestman Bondesson and Ulf Johansson
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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
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Niklas Humble, Peter Mozelius and Lisa Sällvin
The purpose of this study is to analyse and discuss K-12 mathematics and technology teachers' perceptions on integrating programming in their teaching and learning activities, and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to analyse and discuss K-12 mathematics and technology teachers' perceptions on integrating programming in their teaching and learning activities, and perceptions on different programming tools.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach of a case study was used, with data collected from three instances of a professional development programming course for K-12 teachers in mathematics and technology.
Findings
The findings show that there are perceived challenges and opportunities with learning and integrating programming, and with different programming tools. Many teachers perceive programming as fun, but lack the time to learn and implement it, and view different programming tools as both complementary to each other and with individual opportunities and challenges.
Practical implications
The practical implication of the research is that it can provide guidance for teachers and other stakeholders that are in the process of integrating programming in K-12 education. Further, the research provides useful information on teachers' experiences on working with different programming tools.
Social implications
The social implication of the research is that the overall aim of the nation-wide integration process might not succeed if the challenges identified in this study are not addressed, which could have negative effects on the development of students' digital competence.
Originality/value
The value of the research is that it identifies important challenges and opportunities for the integration of programming. That is, that many teachers perceive the different programming tools available as complimentary to each other, but are hesitating about what is expected of the integration. Findings could also be valuable for future course design of the teacher professional development.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore, how organization theoretically diverse research on OCR is actually grounded, since insights into the organization theoretical foundations…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore, how organization theoretically diverse research on OCR is actually grounded, since insights into the organization theoretical foundations of OCR are completely lacking.
Design/methodology/approach
A selection of 85 articles on organizational change was made, published in top tier journals in 2010. The authors conducted a reference analysis based on 18 prominent organization theories and their main contributing authors.
Findings
The findings show firstly a very strong theoretical selectivity, focusing on cognitive, learning, and neo-institutional theories. Other theories are almost fully neglected. Secondly, this analysis suggests that current OCR struggles hard with transforming the cognitive frames of topical OT into fruitful accesses to the own object. The resulting theory application appears as a dissatisfying escape strategy, performed to cover theoretical antagonisms and to avoid a deeper confrontation with the underlying assumptions of OCR.
Research limitations/implications
The authors are fully aware that the depth of their analysis is worth broadening. A more comparable scope in the amount of the theories, journals, articles, and of the covered time span would help to substantiate their results.
Practical implications
Pragmatic change approaches rely strongly on organizational change research. If OCR itself is not topical in terms of using available theoretical knowledge, pragmatic approaches fail to stand on solid ground. The paper therefore provides a background for the link between failing empirical change projects and the usage of available scientific knowledge.
Originality/value
An analysis of the organization theoretical topicality of organizational change research is completely missing. The paper therefore not only contributes to the discovery of a blind spot in organizational studies, it possibly helps to explore the reasons for the high percentage of failing change projects.