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 purpose of this paper is to develop an approach at defining a retail channel strategy applied to young consumers. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a qualitative study that adopts the consumer perspective and employed an investiga-tive channel-scan approach based on...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the preferences of children under the age of 12 regarding sales channels: how young consumers perceive online vs offline shopping in terms of advantages and disadvantages. Within a cross channel perspective, it also analyses the connections...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the nature of a branded mobile application experience for children, and analyse how these experiences affect the children’s and parents’ brand perceptions. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a qualitative approach focussing on the...

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...