Brand and Product Management

The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also raises new challenges. These include the higher likelihood of costly product returns when customers' ability to "touch and feel" products is important in determining fit.

This guest editorial of JAR considers what the "new normal" of marketing will be and suggests that it will be the digitization of everything, the need for constant change and adaptation affected by the continuous flow of knowledge. Involving consumers in co-creation will be increasingly important, while raw data for market research has increased massively and so will require the tools and people to mine it.

Many companies do not know their marketing ROI because their organizations are not set up to evaluate marketing ROI.

Six studies show that subtle contextual cues that increase customers' self-awareness can be used to influence their satisfaction with service providers holding the objective service delivery constant. Self-awareness cues tend to increase customers' satisfaction when the outcome of a service interaction is unfavorable, but tend to decrease customers' satisfaction when the outcome of the interaction is favorable. This is because higher self-awareness increases customers' tendency to attribute outcomes to themselves as opposed to the provider.

We present a broad-based, consumer-centric view of innovation — referred to as "perceived firm innovativeness" (PFI). PFI is conceptualized as the consumer's perception of an enduring firm capability that results in novel, creative, and impactful ideas and solutions. We develop and validate a PFI scale and show that PFI impacts consumer loyalty via two processing routes: a functional-cognitive route and an affective-experiential route.

Much discussion has focused on the economic and financial issues related to the continued growth of China. Of equal importance are the marketing and branding issues. How Chinese managers develop and implement their marketing and branding strategies has enormous implications for the future growth of Chinese organizations.