This special issue contains fifteen articles developed from presentations at the sixth annual Thought Leaders’ International Conference on Brand Management, held at Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland in April 2010. The conference received 154 submissions and following a...

Brand identity definitions predominately take a unilateral and aspirational perspective—what managers want the brand to be—while emphasizing the need for stability over time. The increasingly dynamic environment and the rising role of consumers as co-contributors to brand construction and...

This introduction briefly summarizes each of the fifteen articles included in this special issue on fashion marketing of luxury brands and provides a rationale for the inclusion of each article. The articles are grouped by topic—luxury status/values, luxury consumer behavior, luxury brand...

Today's global firms face increasing pressure to protect their brand identity from encroachments of copycat brands that seek to benefit from associations firms have established in the minds of consumers. This essay is a commentary to the article “Marking your trade: cultural factors in the...

Although brands are acknowledged as significant assets in a firm's value creation and differentiation process, branding literature often describes opposing perspectives and contradictory demands. This article develops a framework of three strategic brand management archetypes that provide new...

The traditional branding paradigm involved heavy upfront investment and tightly managing the image via controlled communications in hopes of creating dominant brands that could be leveraged to cultivate loyalty and a long-term, steady stream of profits. However, social media can drastically...

The aim of this paper is to explore the links between brand equity, consumer learning and consumer choice processes in general, and considering two recent trends in the market place: store brands and the Internet. We first review the advances that have occurred in brand equity research in...

Influential forecasts occur when the forecast itself determines whether the forecast is tested. New product sales forecasts are often influential because a low forecast may cause a firm not to launch a new product so that actual sales are never observed. This paper considers a dilemma we face as...

Product-harm crises are among a firm's worst nightmares. A firm may experience (i) a loss in baseline sales, (ii) a reduced own effectiveness for its marketing instruments, (iii) an increased cross sensitivity to rival firms' marketing-mix activities, and (iv) a decreased cross impact of its...

Consumers often have to evaluate products comprising a combination of attributes that is not expected by them, given their beliefs about how attributes normally co-vary in the product category. Such an attribute combination implies that the claimed level of a product attribute is then different...