Economics Insights @ CBS

Traditionally the management of brands has been entrusted to middle management. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that brands are of such critical strategic importance, that they are more appropriately placed under the direct responsibility of senior management. Indeed, we believe that senior managers should act as brand custodians. For this new responsibility, senior managers need integrative overviews of brands and their management.

Despite the importance of decisions regarding international brand names, research on brand naming has focused primarily on English name creation. The authors conceptualize the local brand-name creation process in a multilingual international market. The authors present a framework that incorporates (1) a linguistic analysis of three translation methods—phonetic (i.e., by sound), semantic (i.e., by meaning), and phonosemantic (i.e., by sounds plus meaning)—and (2) a cognitive analysis focusing on the impact of primes and expectations on consumer name evaluations.

The authors urge that modern strategic theory is robust and provides a solid foundation for legal policy. The striking breakthrough of strategic theory was to establish that predatory pricing can be rational economic behavior.

The authors suggest that people strategically manage—specifically, lower—their expectations to increase future satisfaction. Consumers who are more disconfirmation sensitive, that is, those who are more satisfied (dissatisfied) when a product performs better (worse) than expected, are hypothesized to have lower expectations. In contrast, the authors expect that consumers who are perfectionists will have higher expectations than those who are not. Results from a laboratory experiment and a field study are consistent with the hypotheses.