Brand and Product Management

We examine the relationship between the organization of a multi-divisional firm and its ability to adapt production decisions to changes in the environment. We show that even if lower-level managers have superior information about local conditions, and incentive conflicts are negligible, a centralized organization can be better at adapting to local information than a decentralized one. As a result, and in contrast to what is commonly argued, an increase in product market competition that makes adaptation more important can favor centralization rather than decentralization.

The authors discuss the current state and future scenarios of brand experience — a new concept that they contributed to the brand management literature. Specifically, they present three research and practical trends, and marketing challenges: (i) the proliferation of settings and media that evoke brand experiences; (ii) the role of brands in consumption experiences; and (iii) the need of brand experiences to reach positive psychological outcomes.

This research examines how core consumers of selective brands react when core users obtain access to the brand. Contrary to the view that non-core users and downward brand extensions pose a threat to the brand, this work investigates the conditions under which these non-core users enhance rather than dilute the brand image.

Emotionally pleasant TV commercials are often preferred over merely factual ones. A large-scale study of Belgian TV ads confirms this notion and shows that such commercials also create more positive feelings toward the advertised brand. Interestingly, these effects depend on neither the level of involvement associated with the product category nor the type of product. Independent of the perceived creativity of the commercial or its informational value, emotionality had a significant impact on the evaluation of a brand.

This paper focuses on add-on sales to determine both their value per se and their value as a reflexive measure of brand equity. Specifically, this paper examines the "accessory premium" for automobiles, i.e., accessories installed by dealers at the time of sale. Using J.D. Power Data, the authors find that higher add-on accessory sales accrue to higher equity brands which make accessory sales a potentially useful measure of brand equity (J. Marketing 67: 1?17, 2003). In addition, the authors examine how the revenue premium metric varies by age cohort.

This study shows how experiential product attributes that are part of the design of new products can create compelling consumer experiences. Following processing-fluency theory, when consumers attend to experiential attributes (sensory or affective), they should process them fluently (i.e., spontaneously and with little effort); however, consumers should process functional attributes always deliberately, irrespective of whether or not they attend to them.