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In an era where brands try to generate strong and positive consumer responses in an uncertain, complex, unpredictable, and fast-changing environment, understanding the mechanism that brand signals turn to external audiences' responses has become ever more important. Using as a context service brands, given their complexity, this work aims to update and inform existing knowledge on brand building practices, audience-processing and the brand-related action link. The proposed conceptual brand building and audience response framework is based on an extensive review of existing brand management and services marketing academic knowledge collected and examined aiming to: (a) synthesise the somewhat dispersed literature on firms' brand building and audience-processing and brand-related action link reported in both literature streams and (b) identify relevant trends on brand building and audience-processing/responding. The introduced framework comprises three components (the chain, the influencing factors and the feedback loops), provides a good, contemporary overview of the full brand identity co-creation process and potential audience behavioural responses and unfolds avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet, in its 2D form, offered answers to some of the internationalization barriers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and has questioned the available internationalization models. Virtual worlds (VWs) have recently emerged as a promising platform for conducting various business and marketing activities. The current article is the first to examine their value in the internationalization process of SMEs. On the basis of literature from both the international marketing and the information systems fields, as well as incorporating current business practices, a model for internationalization using VWs is proposed. VWs' potential as a market knowledge generator, a strategic tool for internationalization (marketing program testing and brand building) and as a business platform for real and in-world product is evaluated. Further, a strategy for SMEs on how to build successful businesses in such metaverses to help them achieve their objective/s is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A traditional industry confronting market change is examined here, for the wine industry is important to the economy of Cyprus. Cyprus had to reinvent itself as a wine producer after receiving a double blow: losing its main product, sherry, as a result of nomenclature protection by the European Union and the loss of its largest market after the fall of communism. The objective here is to examine the product (wine) and how it may be improved and upgraded for a more sophisticated market. Product quality and branding then immediately rise to the fore but to ensure that all the issues are being properly addressed, soundings were taken from local, Greek and international wine professionals as well as local consumers. There are 52 wineries in Cyprus but the industry is controlled by four main companies and tied mainly to a local grape variety, Mavro. The grapes are grown by people independent of the wineries and this has been a long-standing issue—affecting wine quality—as has the distance between where the grapes are grown and the wineries themselves. The methodology involved focus groups, depth interviews and an e-mail survey. Respondents were local consumers and wine experts who fell into three groups: local Cypriot, Greek and International. The findings reveal an industry that is still growing, but fragmented and dominated by the big four Cyprus wineries—KEO, ETKO, SODAP and LOEL, formulating the Cyprus Wine Producers’ Association (ΣOK—Συ´νδɛσμος Oινοπαραγωγω´ν Kυπρου), that possess 75.5 per cent of the market. Way below is the market share of imported wines (16 per cent) and small local wineries (8.5 per cent) that fall under the umbrella of the Bacchus Association (Bacchus is equated with Dionysus, the god of wine in Greek mythology). There is also great secrecy and unwillingness on behalf of local wineries to work together, which serves to perpetuate existing weaknesses and work against attempts to develop branding associations. The inescapable conclusion is that necessary change will require the adoption of branding that in turn will require greater investment in the product and then its promotion and labelling.Journal of Brand Management (2008) 16, 145–159. doi:10.1057/bm.2008.1; published online 29 February 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]