In an age in which everything from technologies to whole countries seems to be branded, brands and branding have received relatively little attention in sociology.The aim of this thesis is to develop a sociological understanding of brands through an investigation of digital cameras. I take a constructivist approach which understands that what a technology is, what it will do, and what its effects are, are the consequences of specific interpretations of that technology. This thesis contributes to the literature on branding and consumer practices by undertaking three types of research. The first investigation is of advertising. The second investigation consists of a qualitative study of eleven Sony Centres conducted over a twelve month period. The third investigation consists of a thirteen month ethnography of an online community whose members own a range of digital cameras belonging to the 'DigiCam' brand (a pseudonym).

Marketing theory has long ignored the influence of the natural environment in marketing strategy and its consequent performance. However, recent pressures by consumers, government regulators, and other stakeholders have been responsible for companies examining the potential of adopting a more environmentally-friendly approach in their marketing activities. In order to address this phenomenon, a growing body of literature has emerged over the years with the aim of understanding the nature of the link between organisations, strategy, marketing and the natural environment. Even though valuable knowledge has been built up, very little research has examined the driving forces and performance outcomes of incorporating environmental issues into marketing strategies. As a result, marketing managers today lack a clear framework that could guide them in effectively transforming their good environmental intentions into profitable business opportunities. Against this backdrop, this thesis examined the concept of enviro-marketing strategy, which reflects the integration of environmental concerns into the firm's marketing strategy. Drawing on the Industrial Organisation theory and the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm, a comprehensive model of antecedents and consequences of an enviro-marketing strategy was developed. This model incorporated a number of hypotheses pertaining to: (a) the external and internal structural factors influencing the firm to adopt environmentally-friendly marketing strategies; (b) the ultimate impact of such strategies on marketing performance; and (c) the moderating role of environmental marketing strategy proactiveness on the achievement of superior marketing performance. By implementing a longitudinal study design and a large-scale mail survey, the model was empirically tested among a sample of 183 UK industrial producers. Using structural equation modelling, it was revealed that managers' perceptions of high market attractiveness and dynamism lead to higher adoption of environmental marketing strategies, while perceptions of high competitive intensity were not found to be significantly related. Similarly, the personal environmental sensitivity of managers, together with the existence of specialised environmental procedures and high cross-functional coordination, were found to be instrumental in the adoption of green marketing strategies. With regard to performance, the results indicate that past financial performance is essential for organisations to embark on environmental marketing strategies. However, their implementation produces higher performance results for organisations one year later. Importantly, it was demonstrated that this is particularly true when environmental marketing strategies are implemented on a pro active, rather than a reactive, basis. These results have important implications for practitioners, policy-makers, and marketing educators in dealing with environmental issues in an effective way. Finally, several limitations derived from the study are considered, along with directions for future research on the subject.

Under the current competitive market environment, buyers and sellers strive to develop and maintain close business relationships to achieve greater competitive advantages. However, this relationship arrangement often fails at a very high rate due to the existence of opportunism. Research scholars have empirically investigated this issue. Yet, to date, opportunism has not been studied explicitly. Empirical attentions have been devoted to define sets of governance mechanisms that deter opportunism rather than trying to understand what the root causes are. Moreover, the causes and effects of this phenomenon have not been systematically integrated. Previous empirical studies also produced inconsistent results. In addition, there is relatively limited empirical attention given to studying this issue from an international exchange context, especially in utilising information obtained from both sides of the exporter-importer relationships. In response to these literature gaps, the present study focuses on exploring the drivers and outcomes of opportunism in international buyer-seller relationships . Drawing on the transaction costs analysis theory and a key aspect of the international theory, a comprehensive conceptual model integrating antecedents and consequences of opportunism in export-import relationships is proposed. A set of research hypotheses that illustrates the link between drivers, opportunism and outcomes is formulated. The hypotheses are tested by using data from mail surveys of Thai exporting manufacturers and their UK importing distributors. The data are analysed through structural equation modelling. The results suggest that psychic distance and performance ambiguity have a positive effect on opportunism, whereas transaction-specific investments have a negative effect. Moreover, opportunism significantly increases transaction costs and therefore reduces the performance of the relationship. However, there is no significant link found between environmental uncertainty and opportunism. The research findings are discussed in accordance with the results from previous empirical studies. The theoretical, managerial and public policy implications are also presented, along with the limitations and possible fruitful avenues for future research.

The processes of branding and brand management have progressively transitioned from corporate offices to online social spaces in recent years as brands have become increasingly situated within social media. To date however there has been limited academic scrutiny directed towards understanding the impact of social media on brands and brand management. Taking the view that social media represent a new institutional environment for brands and brand management, this research draws from institutional theory in exploring brand management in social media environments. Specifically the study explores how social media impacts upon brand management, and how brand management responds to the institutional demands of social media. Following a case study approach, five cases were studied with data collected from semi-structured interviews, longitudinal observations of social media brand fan pages and consultation of secondary sources. The findings show that social media can serve as a medium capable of framing the brands situated therein as worthy of attention, and moreover as legitimate actors. However the transparency of social media renders brands highly visible, creating ambivalence for brand managers and serving to constrain the range of legitimate actions that can be employed by organisations ill the management of their brands. However, institutional demands are not entirely deterministic and the findings draw attention to the roles of internal organisational processes and individual actors in influencing brand management activities in social media. The findings demonstrated that organisations do not necessarily passively comply with the demands of social media, but rather develop subtle forms of maintaining control over their brands through attempts at influencing brand-related user-generated content and the behaviours of social media users.

Researchers are interested in understanding the individual processes that favour consumers’ self-regulation since they can contribute to the achievement of personal and collective long-term goals in many areas. Sustainable and ethical consumption represents one such context; self-regulation can be a key driver for the solution of environmental and social sustainability challenges. In a series of three studies, this thesis investigates how guilt and pride contribute to consumers’ decisions to purchase sustainable products. The research adopts a multiple methods approach. The first qualitative study explores the process that leads to emotional experiences and describes what characterises feelings of guilt and pride. Five key dimensions that lead to enhanced self-control and stronger experiences of guilt and pride are identified: 1) altruistic value preference, 2) moral relevance of the issue presented, 3) credibility of the ethical claim(s) presented, 4) perception of a trade-off between altruism and self-interest, 5) social visibility of the decision. The two quantitative investigations examine consumers’ emotional reactions and how they affect future intentions to purchase sustainable products. It is demonstrated that: 1) feelings of guilt and pride have a positive influence on the intentions to purchase ethical products in the future; 2) intentionality is not necessary to experience guilt or pride; 3) experiences of guilt and pride have a positive impact on consumers’ efficacy beliefs; 4) beliefs in self-efficacy and collective efficacy influence positively intentions to purchase ethical products in the future. This research contributes to the literature on sustainable consumption by exploring how guilt and pride influence the purchase of ethical alternatives. This thesis also contributes to other domains of consumer research by: 1) explaining how guilt and pride influence cognition in self-regulation contexts; 2)developing a context-bound theory of appraisal in the study of guilt and pride. Implications for practitioners are also critically discussed.

The purpose of this thesis was to develop a guideline to support the implementation of E-Commerce with E-Commerce benchmarking. Because of its importance as an interface with the customer, web-site benchmarking has been a widely researched topic. However, limited research has been conducted on benchmarking E-Commerce across other areas of the value chain. Consequently this thesis aims to extend benchmarking into E-Commerce related subjects. The literature review examined two main bodies of theory, E-Commerce and benchmarking. lt became clearly apparent that a gap in the literature existed for E-Commerce benchmarking. To address this gap, a single-case-study exploratory methodology has been applied. The case study method was considered most suitable for this research given the exploratory nature of the research aim and question as well as the potential for new insights to be gained from the samples. Three sub-studies have been applied within this single-case-study exploratory design. In study 1, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore possible themes related to E-Commerce, benchmarking and E-Commerce benchmarking. Those themes were included in study 2, the exploratory quantitative questionnaire survey. 146 responses were analyzed in this phase. In study 3, six expert interviews were executed to explore potential themes based on the research of the first two studies. The data analysis of this thesis included descriptive statistics and a mixture of grounded and content analysis. There were a number of important findings that emerged from this research. Firstly, E-Commerce benchmarking is mostly executed as web-site benchmarking, customer surveys and basic top line indicators like the E-Share. Secondly, exchange of best practices, target setting, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage emerged as benefits from E-Commerce benchmarking. Thirdly, there are two distinct differences between E-Commerce benchmarking and traditional bench marking: (1) higher frequency and (2) types of indicators. Fourthly, external benchmarking, process benchmarking and additional indicators were identified as appropriate avenues of benchmarking E-Commerce. The contribution of this thesis relates to extending current literature on E-Commerce benchmarking. Furthermore, a guideline for the implementation of E-Commerce benchmarking is provided. In summary it is proven that the implementation of E-Commerce can and needs to be benchmarked.

Building strong brand equity is imperative in the highly competitive arena of financial services. Despite tremendous interest in brand equity and relationship marketing,- little conceptual development or empirical research has addressed whether relationships exist between these important marketing issues. This study explores the associations between customer relationships and brand equity. A conceptual framework is proposed, in which the constructs of customer relationships including relationship closeness, relationship strength and relationship satisfaction are related to the dimensions of brand equity comprising of perceived quality, brand loyalty and brand associations combined with brand awareness. Two phases of qualitative and quantitative data gathering have been conducted. In the primary quantitative research, personal interviews were conducted with 998 respondents and the response rate was 85%. Empirical tests using factor analysis and structural equation model support the research hypotheses and an establishment of linkage between the two domains of branding and relationship marketing, which are traditionally apart, is established. The research findings provide bank managers with a comprehensive understanding of how customer relationships impact on the dimensions of brand equity, which will enable them in turn to design more effective marketing strategies to enhance the evaluation of brand equity. Key Words: Brand Equity, Branding, Relationship Marketing, Customer Relationships, Services Marketing, China

Brand equity is an extensively researched subject associated with marketing performance measurement. Although brand equity is a significant source of competitive advantage online, previous conceptualisations and measures thereof overlook the unique characteristics of computer mediated environments that render consumers co-creators of brand value as opposed to passive recipients. Experience with interactive media such as the internet 1 has shown that simply replicating offline marketing effort online is not capitalising on the interactive opportunities offered by the internet. The internet's unique capabilities have significant implications for the development and management of brands and, by extension, to the translation of brand value into consumer based brand equity. By choosing to focus on e-tail brands, a multi-phased research programme was initiated to identify the facets of etail brand equity, and then develop and validate a scale for its measurement. Following well established procedures for scale development and validation in the social sciences (e.g., Churchill 1979; Gerbing and Anderson 1988), an exploratory stage was first undertaken in conjunction with a literature review to identify the facets of e-tail brand equity. This involved sixteen depth interviews with brand experts and two focus groups with consumers. Based on the results of this exploratory qualitative stage, e-tail brand equity was assumed to be three-faceted, the dimensions being emotional connection, online experience, and responsive service nature. An initial item pool was then developed to tap the aforementioned facets. In this thesis a lowercase "i" is used for the word "internet" (cf. Schwartz 2002). Next, quantitative data were collected by means of a web based consumer survey, administered to a sample of UK online shoppers, all of whom were registered users of a leading European online reward programme. After a series of iterative statistical analyses, including coefficient alpha, item-to-total correlations, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the initial pool was reduced to a more tractable number of items. Items of fulfilment and trust failed to load on the hypothesised factors, responsive service nature and emotional connection respectively, but emerged as separate factors. Various tests of validity, reliability, and unidimensionality provided preliminary evidence of the stability of the resulting scale's psychometric properties, and suggested that e-tail brand equity is a second order construct with five independent but correlated dimensions: emotional connection, online experience, responsive service nature, trust, and fulfilment. The proposed e-tail brand equity scale is reflective of a paradigm shift precipitated by the internet and its related technologies. No longer is brand equity the outcome of "cultural engineering" branding, but is instead the result of a dialectical process between managers and consumers. The implications of this research are both theoretical and practical. The 12-item e-tail brand equity scale can potentially be used for a variety of applications in e-tailing, and can also serve as the basis for further empirical research in marketing.

This thesis theorizes how sonic branding functions within the contemporary mediascape through relations between mind/body, emotion/feeling and sound/music. Sonic branding is important to the extent to which it is able to capture consumer attention, through a sonic stimulus that articulates a brand feeling. The soundmark concept is the novel and distinctive contribution of the thesis, which refers to the stimulation of a mind/body mark, when the appropriate sonic form is heard. Taking the view of an advertising/branding analyst, the method is to apply the soundmark to the sonic brand to illustrate how sonic brands gain attention and guide consumers through the mediascape. The soundmark evolves from the principle of Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's somatic marker. The interdisciplinary approach interweaves numerous sonic brand/soundmark examples to illustrate key concepts. The primary example is the British Airways sonic brand and secondary examples include: Müller, Youngs, Lloyds TSB, Direct Line, Danone, Nokia, Intel, T-Mobile and Mazda. The argument is that sonic branding is a fundamental media object in the ubiquitous media environment, guiding consumers via the brand feeling. This thesis claims that sonic brand soundmarks become centres infused with feeling/emotion and experience, and represent the consumer-brand relationship. It is stated that multi-sensory brand experiences are becoming fundamental within consumer culture, with some branding existing as merely one component of a multi-faceted brand object/assemblage. The project extends the scope of the relatively limited research carried out on sonic branding. It also provides, through the soundmark, a significant concept that can be applied not only to sonic branding but to various sonic events/experiences. The thesis concludes that soundmarks for all sonic stimuli are essential mind/body formations that personalize the soundscape. Soundmarks providing vital sonic attachments are integral for sifting through the mediascape of today and the future sonic environment.

Following Bitner's well-known "servicescape" model, many studies have shown that physical environments affect customers' perceptions of the service experience, although mainly focused upon service encounters of relatively short duration. In the case of hotels, where customers stay in the facility for an extended period of time, the issues may well be different. However, few studies exist that examine the effect of the servicescape in hotels. In such situation, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the hotel servicescape on customers' emotional responses and behavioural response.