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This study aims to show that brand success can be improved if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by each employee of a company. The paper terms such brand consistent employee behaviour behavioural branding and identifies managerial instruments for its implementation and management.

The model in the paper explains the brand's contribution to company success by brand consistent employee behaviour, functional employee performance and brand congruent mass media communication. Brand consistent employee behaviour and functional employee performance in turn are modelled as determined by formal and informal management techniques as well as employee empowerment. The model is tested on a sample of 167 senior managers using partial least squares and finds empirical support. Furthermore, practical implications are provided based on additional top management focus groups.

The paper finds that behavioural branding determines the brand's contribution to company success. Further, the results show that informal management and employee empowerment have a far stronger impact on the brand consistency of employee behaviour than formal management instruments.

Managers should spend more time explaining and discussing targets of behavioural branding, and they should create an organisational environment that enables employees to find their own individual ways of articulating a brand to customers.

The framework in the paper integrates personal and non‐personal facets of interaction for a holistic explanation of brand performance. It provides a broader understanding of factors affecting the accruement of a customer's brand experience and enables researchers and practitioners to develop more consistent and promising brand management activities.

Service robots are now an integral part of people's living and working environment, making service robots one of the hot topics for service researchers today. Against that background, the paper reviews the recent service robot literature following a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) approach to capture the state of art of the field. In addition, building on qualitative input from researchers who are active in this field, the authors highlight where opportunities for further development and growth lie.

The paper identifies and analyzes 88 manuscripts (featuring 173 individual studies) published in academic journals featured on the SERVSIG literature alert. In addition, qualitative input gathered from 79 researchers who are active in the service field and doing research on service robots is infused throughout the manuscript.

The key research foci of the service robot literature to date include comparing service robots with humans, the role of service robots' look and feel, consumer attitudes toward service robots and the role of service robot conversational skills and behaviors. From a TCCM view, the authors discern dominant theories (anthropomorphism theory), contexts (retail/healthcare, USA samples, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) settings and customer focused), study characteristics (robot types: chatbots, not embodied and text/voice-based; outcome focus: customer intentions) and methodologies (experimental, picture-based scenarios).

The current paper is the first to analyze the service robot literature from a TCCM perspective. Doing so, the study gives (1) a comprehensive picture of the field to date and (2) highlights key pathways to inspire future work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and how much open innovation is used across Europe. The goal of this study is therefore to provide comprehensive empirical evidence for the adoption of inbound and outbound open innovation activities in Europe.

Data from 180 European companies were used to test three hypotheses on open innovation adoption and the role of internal R&D. Data were collected in 2009 and the sample comprises companies from different industries and 24 European countries.

It is found that 30.3 per cent of European companies are very open to innovation and 38.7 per cent are semi‐open. The results show that inbound open innovation is more commonly used than outbound open innovation, which can be explained by insufficiencies of the market or the organization. Finally, it is found that the type of innovation strategy (vertically integrated, inbound, outbound, or mixed) is related to the R&D intensity.

This paper provides large‐scale empirical evidence for the extent of open innovation adoption in Europe. Moreover, it confirms the role of open innovation generally as a complement for internal R&D. However, results show that firms can reduce R&D intensity through inbound open innovation.

The study aims to explore how concept stores (theoretically) differ from other experience-based retail formats, and hence, how they (practically) contribute to a diversified retail store portfolio.

Case study based on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with seven IKEA retail managers, three industry experts and 26 customers of IKEA concept stores in London and Stockholm.

The concept store represents a conceptual departure from other experiential store formats. It is neither fully experiential in the sense that it is not only about marketing communications nor is it sales or profit-focused. Its aim is to be an accessible touchpoint that reduces friction on a diversified customer journey with its value to the retail portfolio being that it attracts new and latent customers, mitigates existing inhibiting factors and drives them to other touchpoints.

Ideas about the different characteristics of new store formats and their potential to shape the customer experience are extended. New formats reflect innovation in retailing and are part of a retail portfolio which generates different customer expectations and determinants from traditional store formats which provide the customers' existing reference point.

The contributions of new formats should be evaluated in light of other existing formats in the portfolio and not isolated. This is particularly true when considering format cannibalisation and the potentially extended customer journey that arises when customers use traditional format stores and new concept format stores simultaneously.

Previous research, using sales metrics and market-based results as performance determinants, suggests negative outcomes for format diversification. Our study suggests that the contributions of the concept store format should be viewed from an overall customer journey perspective and the “performance” of different format based touchpoints are not best captured through traditional sales evaluation methods.

The purpose of this paper is to examine translation in the context of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by taking the example of the English term “impairment” in IAS 36, and following it into 19 translations. The paper then examines the terms used for impairment in English translations of annual reports provided by firms. Consideration is given to the best approach for translating regulations and whether that is also suitable for the translation of annual reports.

The two empirical parts of the paper involve: first, identifying the terms for impairment used in 19 official translations of IAS 36, and second, examining English-language translations of reports provided by 393 listed firms from 11 major countries.

Nearly all the terms used for “impairment” in translations of IAS 36 do not convey the message of damage to assets. In annual reports translated into English, many terms are misleading in that they do not mention impairment, peaking at 39 per cent in German and Italian reports in one year.

Researchers should note that the information related to impairment in international databases is likely to contain errors, and the authors recommend that data should be hand-collected and then carefully checked by experts. The authors make suggestions for further research.

Translators of regulations should aim to convey the messages of the source documents, but translators of annual reports should not look only at the reports but also consult the terminology in the original regulations. The authors also suggest implications for regulators and analysts.

The paper innovates by separately considering regulations and annual reports. The authors examine a key accounting term systematically into a wide range of official translations. The core section of the paper is a new field of research: an empirical study of the translations of firms’ financial statements.

This study investigates the impact of the degree of process maturity on the degree of patient orientation in the context of radical process changes. The study is based on a sample of healthcare providers in Ukraine which experiences a fundamental transformation of its healthcare system.

The investigation was conducted among the full population of the chief physicians from 53 medical institutions (hospitals, general practitioners centers, dental clinics, and maternity clinics) in one of the largest cities in Ukraine. We investigated the maturity of the process of interaction with patients as perceived by these top managers. We applied variance-based structural equation modeling (SmartPLS3).

The study shows that each stage of process maturity predetermines the following one. With regard to the impact of each stage of process maturity on patient orientation, all stages show a positive and significant relationship toward patient orientation, i.e. even the lowest stage of maturity is critical for patient orientation. A further contradictory finding to extant literature is, that based on the set of indicators, the process appears to be in different stages at the same time. This speaks against the regular sequence-based approach toward process maturity.

Although it has been assumed that higher degrees of process maturity are associated with higher customer (patient) orientation, this work shows that the relationship holds also for each stage of process maturity separately. This research is based on a very unique sample – the almost complete set of chief physicians and their deputies of practically all medical institutions of a large city.