The new media has now become the topic of the day. It has revealed new possibilities for the firms to market their brands. One of the most interesting ways of brand promotion is brand personification, which refers to a multi-dimensional firm effort to make their brands perceived by the consumers as human-being rather than business entity. Up till now, the concept of brand personification is contested. The goal of this paper is two-fold: what is brand personification, and what should the firms do. This study adopts grounded theory, which is ideal for determining new concepts. The researcher conducted 57 in-depth interviews, combined with a pre-study using data from online forums and official brand websites to form the conceptual framework of brand personification. The result of the study coincides with social presence theory. This paper also provides guideline for firms to conduct brand personification.

As online product reviews have become an important source of information for consumers to make purchase decisions, firms are tempted to monitor and manipulate online product reviews to influence consumer perceptions about their products, making online review manipulations a research topic in urgent need for theory development and empirical study. In this paper, we examine how consumers perceive different manipulation strategies in terms of perceived ethicality and deceptiveness, their effect on consumers’ purchase intention, and the moderating role of persuasion knowledge. This research contributes to the online marketing literature by extending Information Manipulation Theory and the Persuasion Knowledge model to the online context and provides valuable insight to industry associations and policy makers to ensure the healthy development of e-commerce.

Consumption emotions play an important role in consumer post-purchase behavior. Former Research mainly aimed at the relationships between consumption emotions, which are elicited by product attribute and retail environment, and post-purchase behavior. Based on the literature review, the paper sort the consumption experiences and put forward hypothesis to depict the relationships between consumption emotions, which are elicited by marketing communication behavior, and brand trust, brand affect and brand loyalty. The results of quantitative research (questionnaire) indicate that these consumption emotions have directly influence on brand trust and brand affect, and have indirectly influence on brand loyalty mediated by brand trust and brand affect, moreover, these influence changes with consumption experiences. Finally the authors discuss the managerial implications of these results and give a prospect on the further study in this field.

We provide the first theoretical effort to understand how consumers in the developed regions evaluate global brands from emerging countries. We propose that when consumers’ global (vs. local) identity is accessible, those from developed regions will show more favorable evaluations of global brands from emerging countries. And this effect is mediated by the positive association between global identity and globalization. Further, this effect emerged when consumers view global and local cultures as compatible with each other but disappeared when consumers view global and local cultures as oppositional to each other. Through four studies in U.S. and U.K. markets, we obtained convergent results for the global identity effect and also tested the reasons for this effect. The results add new knowledge to the literature of globalization, global branding and assimilation effect of global identity, and help to reconcile the heated debate on whether country of origin is still relevant to the globalized world. The findings have practical implications for global brand marketers from emerging economies to enter developed country markets, and to make their brands real global.

Marketing channels are crucial and strategic assets to a firm. A better channel performance will improve a firm’s performance and bring it with competitive advantage. The widely application of information technology (IT) offers firms a new path to enhance their marketing channel management. This study develops a conceptual framework illustrating the impact of IT capabilities on the marketing channel management and control based on RBV. It suggests that a firm’s IT capabilities will affect its uses of channel power mechanism, guanxi mechanism and contract mechanism, which in turn will influence its channel satisfaction, its partners’ opportunism, channel profit. The paper ends with a discussion on future research questions and agenda implied by the framework.

Can examples enhance the novelty of consumers’ ideas when consumers participate in firms’ creative activities? This article investigates how example uniqueness (unique or not) and designer source (expert or common consumer) affect the novelty of consumers’ creative ideas using two experimental studies. The results show that participants who exposed to a unique example exhibited a higher level of novelty of their new product ideas than those who exposed to a common example; The effects of example uniqueness on the novelty of consumers’ ideas varied with designer source of the examples; the number of far analogies generated by the consumers explained the effects of example uniqueness and designer source on the novelty of consumers’ ideas. The findings provide managerial implications for companies who intend to harness consumers’ creativity.

Nowadays，many weak brands have acquired strong international brands to accelerate their internationalization. However, “the weakers acquire the strongers” model of M&A leads to many consumers’ loss. Thus, this paper through two experiments to explore the relationships between the brand strategy after the M&A, brand authenticity and consumer purchase intention. The results show that the decline of consumer purchase intention was mainly caused by the falling consumer assesses on brand authenticity, the different post-merger brand strategies have significant difference on brand authenticity and consumer purchase intention, and self-brand connection played a moderate role between brand authenticity and consumer purchase intention.

According to the Language Association Mechanism, people will produce some associations (i.e., advertising language image, ALI) when they contact advertising language. By employing the method of the grounded theory, five dimensions were put forward to describe the ALI. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted with 534 questionnaires and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted with 1279 questionnaires. Finally, six dimensions were drawn on, which include the capability image of language origin, the affinity image of language origin, the image of language user, the cultural affinity image of language, the characteristic image of language, and the sound image of language. The inventory of ALI consisted of nineteen items. The inventory is of significant reliability and validity. Especially, the predictive validity of the dimensions was testified by an experiment. It was found that ALI has positive influence on product evaluation and purchase intention. The research findings can provide the support in measurement for advertising language in the future. With the help of ALI, enterprises can consider appropriate languages to enhance the advertising performance and improve the marketing proficiency when they engage in multinational marketing activities.

Given the importance of customer delight in winning customer loyalty, it has gained considerable attention of academic and practitioners. Based on the perspective of service esteem needs, this study examined the formation mechanism of customer delight. Research found that service esteem needs significantly and negatively affected arousal and pleasure emotion, which the latter mediated the effect of arousal emotion on customer delight. In addition to provide high-level service quality, therefore, service enterprises should not neglect the effect of service esteem needs on customer delight, and should also regard customer delight as one of decision standards of improving customer loyalty.