Co-creating stakeholder and brand identities: a cross-cultural consumer perspective

Co-creation of value and identity is an important topic in consumer research, lying at the heart of several important marketing concepts and offering a better understanding of a wide range of phenomena, such as consumer identity, satisfaction, or brand loyalty. The literature on co-creation of brand and stakeholder identities, however, draws from (and reflects) a focus on cultures with dominant independent selves. Managers are increasingly confronting globalized marketing environments and therefore must understand how cultural differences shape identity development and co-construction, from a brand, consumer, and multiple stakeholder standpoint. Drawing from a critical review of the literature, this study offers a novel conceptual framework, together with a set of propositions, which discusses how cultural differences might affect such reciprocal co-creation processes. The processes and outcomes involved in reciprocal identity co-creation are likely to differ as a function of cultural environments promoting different types of individual-level differences in self-perception. The study concludes by offering a research agenda to deepen understanding of cross-cultural reciprocal identity co-creation

Co-creating stakeholder and brand identities: introduction to the special section

This article introduces the special section on reciprocal co-creation of stakeholder and brand identities. Branding research and practice traditionally focus on the managerial creation and implementation of brand identity. Based on recent paradigmatic shifts from managerial to co-creative branding and from consumer to multi-stakeholder approaches in marketing, this special section develops a dynamic, process-oriented perspective on brand identity. Brand identity continuously emerges as a dynamic outcome of social processes of stakeholder interaction. Reciprocally, brand identity plays a potentially important role in ongoing interactive identity development processes of stakeholders. The special section contributes to deepening the understanding of this reciprocal co-creation of stakeholder and brand identities, through a series of conceptual and empirical articles. The Introduction reviews four articles as well as related commentaries and discusses their contributions towards establishing a new dynamic paradigm of co-created and reciprocal brand and stakeholder identities

Socio-cognitive determinants of consumers’ support for the fair trade movement

Despite the reasonable explanatory power of existing models of consumers’ ethical decision making, a large part of the process remains unexplained. This article draws on previous research and proposes an integrated model that includes measures of the theory of planned behavior, personal norms, self-identity, neutralization, past experience, and attitudinal ambivalence. We postulate and test a variety of direct and moderating effects in the context of a large survey with a representative sample of the U.K. population. Overall, the resulting model represents an empirically robust and holistic attempt to identify the most important determinants of consumers’ support for the fair-trade movement. Implications and avenues for further research are discussed

Explaining variation in luxury consumption

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Cultural effects on perception and cognition:integrating recent findings and reviewing implications for consumer research

Research increasingly suggests that cultural differences may account for variation in cross-cultural consumer reactions to several phenomena of interest to marketing scholars and practitioners, including consumer expectations, evaluations and reactions to service (Zhang, Beatty and Walsh 2008), or attitudes to consumerism in general (Tse, Belk and Zhou 1989). Despite the growing interest – focusing mainly on consumers’ behaviors – relatively little research has examined cross-cultural differences or similarities in pre-behavioral processes such as perception and cognition – with little attempt aiming at explaining, synthesizing and extending existing evidence, especially in the light of the latest developments. Given the central role played by perception and cognition in subjective human experience and eventual behavior (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1999), studying cross-cultural differences in pre-behavioral domains is important in order to ultimately understand differences in cross-cultural consumer behaviors