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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 crisis in the UK financial services industry has led to retail banking customers treating transactions with growing scepticism. Retail banks are having to work very hard to regain customer trust. Despite recent research in marketing that acknowledges the importance of service loyalty to service firms, studies that have examined the relative effects of trust and the different types of switching costs on attitudinal and behavioural loyalty are scant. Therefore this article aims to build a model to examine the strength of the relationships between these constructs. Using survey data collected from a convenience sample of 290 retail banking customers in the United Kingdom, the article reveals that the main drivers of attitudinal loyalty are trust and relational switching costs. In contrast, the main drivers of behavioural loyalty are trust, relational switching costs and attitudinal loyalty. Interestingly, financial and procedural switching costs exert no significant effect on either attitudinal or behavioural loyalty. Trust and relational switching costs exert a stronger effect on attitudinal than behavioural loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the wide spread of counterfeiting, very few studies have examined consumer behaviour and attitudes regarding counterfeit products. This paper aims to profile the consumers who admit to purchasing nondeceptive counterfeit brands in the UK and China. Furthermore, it attempts to investigate consumers' views on counterfeit brands and to contrast them with the genuine brands and the non-logo products. The demographic profile seems to be somewhat influential in the intention to purchase counterfeit brands for British consumers, but not for Chinese. The findings suggest that not all respondents have a very high opinion regarding counterfeit brands, while Chinese value them even less. Consumers find it difficult to distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit brands, and when they are compared with the genuine, the British believe that counterfeits are even less trustworthy.Journal of Brand Management (2007) 14, 211–222. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550046 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the primary concerns of companies is to develop loyal customers,and banks are no exception. Past research attempted to examine the role of satisfaction, perceived quality and image,as drivers of bank brand loyalty. However the characteristics of specific bank brands were not taken into consideration. Using data collected from a sample of 216 retail bank customers, banking with five different banks in Athens Greece, this paper investigates whether similar antecedents could be used to predict brand loyalty in various institutions. The results imply that, depending on the bank, different drivers could influence in a dissimilar manner the formation of loyalty and therefore further research is needed to generalise the suggested models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the previous research on banking examined only the banking needs of core customers. The views of people experiencing financial exclusion are unknown, but some of the excluded customer segments may have been habitually overlooked by Financial service providers. This study investigated the financial needs and the views on ATM usage of a sample of 359 people living in remote Greek islands, who have never experienced financial inclusion. Furthermore, the views of inhabitants who have always lived in the area and are used to this situation are contrasted with the views of those who have lived for a part of their lives in other regions. The results show that they all express some dissatisfaction about the financial services provided. Moreover, those who have lived elsewhere express more dissatisfation with the provided services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes brand manager's expected and perceived roles in the automobile industry in Greece. Degree of the adoption of the brand management structure in the industry; Importance of vertical communication in the delegation of duties; Brand managers' specific tasks.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss various reports published within the issue including one by Cristoph Burmann on brand management, one by Chris Chapleo on university branding and one by Johan Gromark on the impact of brand orientation on financial performance.

The article discusses branding and the various issues of constant developing concept. The author compares the complexity in branding in the past and the emerging designs and concepts of today. The perceptions, characteristics, personality and clear differentiations of the companies and owners of brands are discussed.