© 2018 Elsevier Inc. It is important to understand the relative importance of business ethics and social responsibility in determining brand attitudes. However, there has been a failure in prior research to differentiate between attitudes toward business ethics and CSR. This research reviews customer-brand research related to business ethics and social responsibility and conducts a study to evaluate customer attitudes. Four scenarios offer variations in company behaviors related to positive and negative conduct of customer social responsibility and business ethics. Study findings from a panel of 351 respondents provide new insights related to a customer's expectations and perceptions of company CSR and business ethics behavior. We conclude that although CSR attitudes remain important, customers value business ethics as a critical behavior in their perceptions of brand attitudes.

Background: Reshoring refers to the process of bringing back manufacturing activities from foreign countries to the home country. The phenomenon is receiving increasing attention from companies and academics for factors such as increasing labor costs in offshore locations, supply chain disruptions, and a growing preference for locally made products. Sweden is home to many world-renowned multinational companies and multinational brands, many of which have established production operations in developing countries. However, reshoring from a consumer-side perspective has not received much research attention, especially from a Swedish consumer perspective. Purpose: This study investigates factors influencing Swedish consumers’ purchase intention on reshored products. This study focuses on five factors: brand attitude, social acceptability, individual ethnocentrism, made-in effect, and perceived social responsibility.  Methodology: This study adopts a quantitative research design and conducts a questionnaire regarding reshored apparel among Swedish consumers to test hypotheses. The data was collected through a web-based survey that 151 respondents answered. Findings: The empirical results indicate that brand attitude, social acceptability, and perceived social responsibility positively affect Swedish consumers' purchase intention on reshored apparel, while individual ethnocentrism and made-in effect do not have any significant effect.  Contributions: This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the implications of reshoring from a demand-side perspective, complementing the reshoring literature that primarily focuses on the business perspective. As the study is limited to a Swedish context, it provides a deeper understanding of Swedish consumers and their influence on reshored products.

This thesis empirically investigates the impact of an individual’s dominant independent self-construal, interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation on the effect of the four self-congruity types (actual, ideal, social, ideal social) on brand attitude. A widely used practice among marketers focuses on communicating the notion that using their brands will bring consumers closer to how they would like to see themselves, their ideal self-concept (e.g. being a slim person like the models in the ads), instead of how they actually see themselves, their actual self-concept. However, recent research shows that there is no “universality” of a superior self-congruity effect. Specifically, individual-level characteristics (e.g. public self-consciousness) determine whether actual or ideal self-congruity impacts brand perceptions more strongly (Malär et al., 2011). This study extends that research by considering (a) all four self-congruity types and (b) additional individual-level characteristics (independent and interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation), which are valuable for segmenting consumer markets within and across countries. Survey data from a non-student sample were collected in two countries (the US and India). After performing data cleaning procedures, over 800 usable responses in each country were analysed with the use of PLS-SEM. The findings show that, as expected, these individual-level characteristics have an impact in regard to which of the four self-congruity types has the strongest effect on brand attitude. For instance, for individuals with a local orientation or interdependent self-construal, actual self-congruity has the strongest effect on brand attitude. These findings extend self-congruity theory by considering how an individual’s dominant independent and interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation impact the effect of the four self-congruity types on brand attitude. Moreover, the findings offer marketers insights into which self-concept type they should try to match with their brand communications when targeting these specific consumer groups. Details on the contributions as well as managerial implications are presented.

Nowadays, people around the world are connected through social networks. This hyperconnectivity implies that companies need to think about the perceptions and opinions of consumers who were not directly targeted by a campaign. As a result, brand activism, an emerging phenomenon that describes companies taking a stand on polarizing sociopolitical issues, must be explored more thoroughly in relation to non-targeted markets. Therefore, this thesis examined perceptions of brand activism in non-targeted markets and the role of perceived authenticity in shaping consumer perceptions and attitudes toward these campaigns. Furthermore, due to an ethnocentric view of previous research conducted mainly in Anglo-Saxon and European markets, this study focused on a non-Western market, specifically Singapore. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with Singaporean exchange students to examine their perceptions of two brand activist campaigns launched in the US and Australia. It was also examined whether their purchase intentions and brand perceptions changed as a result of the campaigns. The results showed that a missing cultural context, poor communication by the companies, the politically and socially safe options taken by the brands in launching their campaigns, and the general belief that for-profit companies use activism as a calculated move to generate more sales, led to a lack of perceived authenticity in Singapore. It was also found that authenticity and brand attitude are perceived differently depending on geographic location and age group. Brand activism was perceived as more acceptable in Western countries and younger generations than in more conservative countries such as Singapore, and older generations. In addition, Western research on authenticity must be re-evaluated for non-Western markets and cannot be assumed to be universally applicable. Finally, the perception of brand activism led to neutral or slightly positive brand attitudes, suggesting that in Singapore, authenticity does not need to be assumed for activist campaigns to be successful.

Yes / This paper aims to explore the important qualitative aspects of online user-generated-content that reflects customers’ brand-attitudes. Additionally, the qualitative aspects can help service-providers understand customers’ brand-attitudes by focusing on the important aspects rather than reading the entire review, which will save both their time and effort. We have utilised a total of 10,000 reviews from TripAdvisor (an online-travel-agency provider). This study has analysed the data using statistical-technique (logistic regression), predictive-model (artificial-neural-networks) and structural-modelling technique to understand the most important aspects (i.e. sentiment, emotion or parts-of-speech) that can help to predict customers’ brand-attitudes. Results show that sentiment is the most important aspect in predicting brand-attitudes. While total sentiment content and content polarity have significant positive association, negative high-arousal emotions and low-arousal emotions have significant negative association with customers’ brand attitudes. However, parts-of-speech aspects have no significant impact on brand attitude. The paper concludes with implications, limitations and future research directions.

This study’s purpose was to provide a deeper understanding regarding how millennials’ attitudes towards brands are influenced by online communication. With the aim of fulfilling the purpose of the study, two research questions of descriptive and explorative kind were stated; “How can the factors that influence millennials’ use of electronic word-of-mouth be described?” as well as “How does electronic word-of-mouth influence millennials’ brand attitude?”. In order to generate potential answers to the stated research questions, a conceptual framework was conducted by reviewing scholarly literature. The conceptual framework then provided the study with a theoretical foundation of which was utilized during both the data collection and the data analysis. Methodologically, this was a case study analyzing qualitative data that was collected through eleven semi-structured and in-depth interviews with both male and female millennials. The findings and conclusions of this study implied that electronic word-of-mouth has a meaningful impact on both the formation of and influence on attitudes towards brands amongst the millennials. Moreover, this was heavily dependent on the one disseminated it. However, with regard to the ever-evolving area of social network sites, other noteworthy factors such as millennials’ need for affiliation, aesthetically appealing firm-generated content and intense exposure to digital advertising were emphasized as components of which too formed their attitudes towards brands. Furthermore, the results suggested that adopting personalization- and social interaction strategies will encourage the spreading of positive electronic word-of-mouth. Lastly, positive electronic word-of-mouth was then for its part related to brand loyalty, which was reckoned to promote the persistency of positive brand attitudes.

根據過去國內外做過的研究調查結果顯示，對於台灣製的 買主和消費者 的認知有相當大的差距。往往買主對於 的產品評價較高，但消費者對台 灣製產品的印象卻普A甚至有些消費者認為台灣產品反而比不上中國大陸 所ㄚ~。造成買主和消費者間認知落差的主因，是因為台熔ㄚ~有很多是屬 於沒有國際市場行銷能力的企業主所A一些品質不錯擁有國外買主下單的 產品在國際市場上韭N掛上國外知名品牌，消費者根本就不知道這些產品a 的台灣製產品。慦漱尷R方法屬於多變量統計分析的應用。由地主國形i看 出日本國家形象在企業規模、團隊精神與研發能力顜痚篨蒛敿禤a形象； 同樣由中日兩國產品形象分析也貌熔ㄚ~形象除了定價一項比我國產品定 價高外，其餘H都比我國要來得好。其次由品牌態度及其變動分析可O者所 形成的品牌態度會因地主國國家形象或產品形象P品牌態度。另外由干擾 變數產品知識分析得知知識水A消費者所形成的品牌態度也有所不同。而 由品牌知名R中可知，品牌知名度愈高消費者對其品牌的信心愈強磥獐t商 應朝提高品牌知名度以及針對目標顧客群加以j與產品定位。

Many firms attempt to ensure the success of new product introductions by applying an existing, well-known brand name to the product. The strategy, known as brand extension, has become commomplace. In recent years, the strategy has been used in media industry. Especially, since the Internet started gaining in popularity in the mid-1990s, the newspaper industry has started applying brand extensions to online markets. For example, United Daily News, Chinatimes, and so on has developed websites of various types. However, we doubt whether it¡¦ll affect consumers¡¦ attitude toward the parent brand. For this reason, we attempt to figure out consumers¡¦attitude toward the newspaper brand when a newspaper office has introduced extensions with good or poor fit. Besides, in this study, we also propose that three factors including ownership status, product attributes, and dominance of the parent brand will influence consumers¡¦s evaluation of the parent brand. Previous research have provided mixed evidence about the reciprocal effects of a brand extension on its parent brand and rarely studied the impact of these four factors on parent brand evaluation, especially in media industy. As a result, we select United Daily News and Appledaily as two objects of the study and find out the extensions (websites) with good and poor fit of these two newspaper brands through group discussing. After T-test analysis, we have some findings as follows: 1.There¡¦s no significant effect of fit on parent brand attitude toward United Daily News, but there¡¦s significant difference for Appledaily. 2.The consumers who think of the newspaper brand as more dominant have higher evaluation of attitude toward the parent brand than those who think of the newspaper brand as less dominant, whether extensions with good or poor fit introduced. 3.The owners of newspaper brands have higher evaluation of attitude toward the parent brand than nonowners, whether extensions with good or poor fit introduced. 4.The product attributes of newspapers brands will affect consumers¡¦s attitude toward the newspaper brands.

With the increased volume of commercial content online, some news sites have adopted so-called native advertising on their websites to convey marketing messages more discreetly. As an increased share of advertising budgets is spent on this form of advertising this essay aims to examine its news consumer’s attitudes towards the phenomenon. The research was carried out through a qualitative study where news consumers discussed their attitudes in two separate focus groups. This was analyzed with the help of the previous studies Advertisement - an uninvited guest? and Banner Blindness as well as theories including theory of science hermeneutics, reception analysis, convergence culture, brand schema, advertising schema and ad- brand attitude.The results show that in most cases native advertising is met with indifferent attitudes but in some cases also confusion, which could lead to negative attitudes towards the ad and the news site. The respondents mostly had a scientism towards native ads but because they don´t intend to pay for their news their attitudes are more indifferent than negative. However most of the respondents experienced a so called third-person effect which means that they think they’re not affected by ads, but others are. They say that their generation is the hardest group to fool. Thus this thesis concludes that the most favorable ads were technology- and channel driven, which is a form of semi native ads. This is making it a little less native and more recognizable as a commercial message

In the present study, event sponsorship and event marketing are identified as two distinct event-related marketing communications tools. As a research field, sponsorship and event sponsorship has experienced continuous research interest for the last four decades. This in clear contrast to event marketing, which only within the last 10 years has attracted research interest from marketing scholars. However, little research has been carried out in the field of (event-) sponsorship from an organisational perspective. Thus, to the author s knowledge, the present study is the first of its kind investigating both event formats, event sponsorship and event marketing, from an organisational perspective in one study. A literature review that spans the domains of branding, signalling theory and hedonic consumption helped to differentiate between the two event formats, and to provide a theoretical grounding of the two event formats. The present study evaluates the impact of event sponsorship and event marketing on the brand and performance dimensions of brand awareness, brand attitude, brand performance and financial performance. Furthermore, brand orientation and organisational innovativeness moderate the relationship between independent and dependent variables. Moreover, this research study was undertaken from an organisational perspective. There is little evidence within the field of event sponsorship and event marketing as to how organisations evaluate the performance impact of event sponsorship and event marketing. Similarly, the more established sponsorship outcomes of brand awareness and brand attitude have yet to receive research attention within an organisational research setting. This research study follows a cross-sectional research design. A conceptual model is developed on the basis of the literature review, and is tested through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling. The data for this study was collected via an online survey which resulted in 226 responses. The findings indicate a negative relationship between event sponsorship and brand performance. Furthermore, organisational innovativeness was identified as moderating the event sponsorship brand performance relationship, whereas brand orientation is found to moderate the event marketing financial performance relationship.