Purpose – This paper aims at establishing a new stream of academic study for virtual brands. It explains the concepts of protobrands and reverse product placement and explores some of the managerial and academic implications. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from the most recent...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how international banking groups manage their branding in the context of successive mergers and acquisitions. It seeks to review of a number of case histories in order to show that banking companies tend to evolve a multi‐tiered system for absorbing and...

Purpose – Companies changing their brand names are frequently reported in the business press but this phenomenon has as yet received little academic attention. This paper sets out to understand the drivers of the corporate rebranding phenomenon and to analyse the impact of such strategies on...

Purpose – The paper aims to analyse the effect of abandoning a venerable brand name (Guinness) and all of the reputation value that it embodied in favour of a new, untested name (Diageo). The paper seeks to examine the extent to which this affects consumers' perceptions of the product and the...