Purpose This study aims to investigate the most effective branding strategy for facilitating the acceptance of controversial products. Three strategies were compared: host brand alone, ingredient brand alone and ingredient co-branding. The study also examined which brand positioning - warm, competent or ideological - would best suit an ingredient brand wanting to partner with a host brand. Design/methodology/approach An experiment was conducted on 70 consumers using a survey and an eye tracker. The survey measured curiosity, purchase intention and brand fit, while the eye tracker recorded fixation duration (interest), revisits (semantic informativeness) and peak velocity of saccades (arousal). Findings The results indicated that host brand alone and ingredient co-branding elicited greater curiosity and intention to purchase than ingredient brand alone, with ingredient co-branding also exerting a significant impact on semantic informativeness and arousal. Furthermore, consumers perceived a warmly positioned ingredient brand as most compatible with the host brand. Originality/value This study extends the literature on ingredient co-branding by examining it in the context of controversial products. In doing so, it reveals the efficacy of an ingredient co-branding strategy and informs brand hosts to select partners with a warm brand positioning.

Livestreaming is transforming influencer marketing by enabling synchronous, improvised, and prolonged interactions that challenge the temporal and relational assumptions of traditional social media. Yet, little is known about how value emerges and is sustained in real-time. Adopting a netnographic research design, this study examines how prolonged synchrony reshapes value creation within influencer ecosystems.Extending Libai et al., 2025 equity-based framework, this work conceptualizes value creation as shaped by three core tensions (endurance vs. fragility, unpredictability vs. control, and specialization vs. diversification), each navigated through adaptive mechanisms: self-disclosing, improvising, and anchoring. This study introduces relational equity to capture the cumulative value that originates from the continuous alignment of a growing number or interdependent actors involved in adaptive mechanisms. Throughout this process, value creation unfolds in a spiral dynamic, as the result of tensions which are continuously rebalanced in real-time. This work advances a processual understanding of value creation under prolonged synchrony.

This research explicates the significance of mobile retail app continuous use to make the online shopping experience more trustful, comfortable, and enjoyable for consumers. The paper employed a quantitative method and collected empirical data from 289 Finnish mobile retail app users. Also, the study used covariance-based structural equation modelling to test the hypothesised relationships with AMOS 22.0. The paper broadens the theoretical and managerial insights into how trust, performance expectancy, and gratification play an active mediating role between effort expectancy, social influence, and continuous use of mobile retail apps. This paper recommends that retailing managers relate the mediation role of trust, performance expectancy, and gratification as a critical means of causing an effect on the mobile retail app's continuous use when reviewing their technology strategy. This paper will influence society by shortening retailing transaction time and promoting sustainable retailing.

The ethical and environmental rhetoric employed by institutions and companies to foster insect-based food consumption neglects individualistic motives that can prompt consumers to buy this novel food. To fill this gap, this paper reports a study in which consumers’ hedonic and utilitarian motives and the relative consumer profiles for insect-based food consumption were investigated. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the study collected data from 929 participants and applied a structural equation modeling analysis to evaluate the moderating effect produced by hedonic and utilitarian motives on the intention to consume insect-based food. Based on the same dataset, then performed was a cluster analysis to define the profile of consumers according to the level of acceptance of insect-based food. The results indicated that hedonic motives have a positive impact on consumers' intention to consume insect-based food, while utilitarian-ethical and utilitarian-health motives have no and a negative impact, respectively. These findings suggest that promoting the hedonic aspects of insect-based foods would be more effective in increasing consumer acceptance than emphasizing only ethical and health utilitarian values; and they also highlight the importance of creating an emotional and experiential connection with consumers in order to improve the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Drawing upon the thriving brand co-creation perspective, our study explores the co-creation of family business brand (FBB) meanings with external stakeholders. Through a mixed method analysis that combines structural topic modelling and interpretative grounded theorizing, we analyse 12,039 newspaper articles, covering a period of 30 years, to show how journalists co-created intended and unintended family business brand meanings. Our findings reveal seven unique FBB discourses, and a set of five discursive strategies (echoing, educating, narrativizing, unveiling and reframing) embedded in two discursive mechanisms (FBB meanings consolidation and FBB meanings unravelling) that journalists actuate in their press coverage of family businesses. Thus, our paper contributes to the family business and brand co-creation literatures theorizing and contextualizing the role of an overlooked actor in the FBB ecosystem, promotes a way to methodologically apply big-data-friendly analysis in the family business field, and offers managerial implications.

Brands are increasingly required to be ‘woke’ and communicate their stance on various divisive sociopolitical issues and to do so particularly on social media platforms. However, research shedding light on the outcome of woke brand communication is in short supply; it does not compare the suasory effects of the latter with those achieved by traditional persuasive appeals; and it provides scant guidance on which brands ought to adopt this strategy. Combining language expectancy theory, the brands-as-intentional-agents framework, and the literature on consumer engagement in social media, this paper aims to fill these gaps by means of a multi-industry, text-mining-based study which investigates both the volume and the semantic virality patterns of traditional vs. woke persuasive appeals adopted by brands on social media platforms. The findings suggest that woke communication generates higher levels of consumer engagement than do traditional persuasive appeals; in particular, woke communication is more effective for warm brands. Moreover, when competent brands undertake woke campaigns, they tend to trigger more polarized reactions in consumers’ comments than warm brands do.

The renewed interest in the market as a unit of analysis has increased adoption of a market system dynamics (MSD) perspective. Since studies drawing on MSD have significant overlaps with other research traditions equally focused on market changes, we trace the theoretical boundaries of the literature on MSD, and unpack its evolution, in order to appreciate conceptual achievements and research directions. Building on change-process theorizing and on a reiterative processual multi-stage research strategy, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on MSD. We organize the findings into three stages of MSD’s maturation– infancy, adolescence , and adulthood –and show that MSD has grown into a market approach that is ever more multi-actor, theoretically-plural, and based on longitudinal methodologies. The existing literature has gradually shifted towards a balance in agency and structure in market change, and towards a more cautious view on the consumer’s role. Under-researched areas are pinpointed, along with research avenues that can further reinforce MSD.

Gin is far more than just a juniper-flavored alcoholic beverage distilled or infused with botanicals. This spirit boasts an incredibly rich (albeit tumultuous) cultural and social history, and its identity has shifted considerably over the centuries. Born as a medical treatment in the eleventh century, rising in popularity, especially in the Low Countries and in Germany, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and held up as a material signifier of Englishness by the end of the seventeenth century, gin spawned a plague in England as the country transitioned to an era of modernization. It subsequently evolved from a symbol of English hegemony during colonialism to the spirit that is shaping the contemporary global drinking culture more than any other today. In this essay, we retrace the history of gin from the beginning to the present and recount how this spirit became a marketplace icon.

The multi-disciplinary literature on ethics asserts that the relationship between religiosity and ethical perceptions and judgements is an under-researched topic. Despite its importance, few studies have examined the relationship between religiosity and the learning of business ethics. This research investigates whether religiosity is conducive to the learning of business ethics in a digital learning environment: a serious 3D ethics game. A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 302 final-year students from two different academic institutions based in the UK. The results of a structural equation modelling analysis suggest that religiosity does not inform the ethical perceptions and decisions of religious individuals in digital learning environments. Religious individuals perceive the utilitarian aspects of a serious game such as ease of use to be more important for learning ethics than religion. In contrast, less religious individuals perceive the hedonic aspects of a serious game to be a key catalyst for enhancing the learning of ethics.

Increasing competition has induced brands to find ever more innovative ways to raise awareness. Among the latter, co-branding has recently become pervasive in the luxury fashion sector. Despite the growing interest in co-branding, no study to date has examined how luxury fashion brands can strategically combine different types of co-branding and the amount of media visibility that they can gain by means of these brand alliances. Drawing on both case study analysis and automated text analysis, this paper on the longitudinal case of the luxury fashion brand Off-White offers important managerial implication. It shows that, to create a successful co-branding portfolio, luxury brands should initially collaborate with renowned brands in the same target market, and only later with brands operating in other sectors. This study also reports empirical findings with which to understand what are the most suitable forms of co-branding to pursue to increase media visibility and consumers' engagement in social media.

Research on business model innovation (BMI) processes is blossoming and expanding in many directions. Hence, the time is ripe to summarize and systematize this body of knowledge for the benefit of current and future BMI scholars. In this article, we take stock of the current literature to clarify the concept of a BMI process, develop a categorization scheme (a “BMI process framework”), and discuss future research possibilities. Building on a systematic literature review of 114 papers, our categorization delineates different types of BMI processes and corresponding sub-processes. Moreover, we develop a framework that illustrates how BMI processes are interrelated and interconnected. Finally, we identify the main process-related research gaps in BMI research and provide directions for future research that emerge from our categorization and discussion.

This article conceptualizes chief executive officer (CEO) brand image as a multidimensional construct consisting of three main dimensions—personality, performance, and leadership—and develops a reliable and valid 9-item scale to capture these dimensions. The article adopts a grounded-theory approach to derive the dimensionality of the concept, then a rigorous scale-development procedure based on multiple empirical studies, with a total of 1,655 respondents. The article shows that CEO brand image is an independent construct that differs conceptually and empirically from CEO familiarity, corporate brand image, corporate brand reputation, and product brand awareness. It also reveals that in social-media advertising contexts, CEO brand image predicts the advertisement's credibility and also mediates the relationship between the advertisement's credibility and two antecedents: CEO brand familiarity and consumer attitude toward social-media advertisement.

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 & nbsp;C above preindustrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot be underestimated, there exists a technical perspective where digital and IS technology has a role to play in the monitoring of potential solutions, but also an integral element of climate change solutions. We explore these aspects in this editorial article, offering a comprehensive opinion based insight to a multitude of diverse viewpoints that look at the many challenges through a technology lens. It is widely recognized that technology in all its forms, is an important and integral element of the solution, but industry and wider society also view technology as being part of the problem. Increasingly, researchers are referencing the importance of responsible digitalization to eliminate the significant levels of e-waste. The reality is that technology is an integral component of the global efforts to get to net zero, however, its adoption requires pragmatic tradeoffs as we transition from current behaviors to a more climate friendly society.

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, academics and practitioners alike wondered how and to what extent brands should adapt their advertising and communication efforts to remain resonant and to engage their audiences. Gathering and processing a unique data set composed of about 12,000 tweets of 76 leading brands associated with seven Italian industries, this research examines how rhetorical appeals that brands adopted evolved on Twitter during the pandemic. Theoretically, the research is grounded on an institutional logic perspective and resorts to the Aristotelian categories of logos, ethos, and pathos to make sense of the rhetorical appeals brands adopted. Methodologically, we relied on the most recent text-mining protocols in marketing studies. Our analyses outline that during the lockdown brands resorted to emotive appeals characterized by intense ethical and social overtones. Regarding consumers' response in their social media engagement, we find they appreciated this strategy the brands followed.