We hope this special issue spurs continued new research to imagine future complex dynamics of consumers and brands. Brands need to actively consider the sometimes polarized, contesting and agentic voices of consumers and other actors, finding ways to positively influence firm and societal outcomes. The final theme is that brand owners must balance continuity and change, recognizing that brand contestation and cultural change are both inevitable. Consumers manage their relationships with brands selectively draw on media to create their own brand narratives and can even upend the “rules” of brand management. The second theme contributes to a growing conversation highlighting consumer agency in relation to brands. While marketers consider the power of a particular brand as a valued consumer resource, this theme speaks to the power of “brands” as a category. The first theme is that because of brands’ pervasiveness, consumers have developed a meta concept of “brands” that shapes how consumers think about the market, themselves, and others.
We identify three themes that emerge in this special issue that offer intriguing directions for future exploration and managerial action. The purpose of our conceptual introduction is to theorize how brands will continue to be relevant in the future marketplace. Building on this lacuna, the authors adopt an underexplored object that focuses on digital platform innovation through brand extension, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Little remains acknowledged regarding the theoretical interface of innovation through brand extension in the digital platform sphere and its consequences on customer behaviour. The findings provide a deeper understanding of innovation and brand management in digital platforms and forge a promising path forward for marketing researchers investigating the platform economy. Finally, perceived category similarity (fit) augments customer satisfaction while impacting loyalty negatively. Customer innovativeness enhances customer satisfaction. Parent brand reputation intensifies service innovation through the impact of brand extension on customer satisfaction and loyalty, while perceived risk deters its effects. Customer satisfaction mediates the relation between innovation through brand extension and brand loyalty. The results reveal that service innovation through brand extension impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty favourably. The partial least-squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is applied to analyse the questionnaires and explore the relationships between the proposed research model’s constructs. However, can the winner take it all? Or is the spandex rule-“just because you can, does not mean you should”-valid for platforms, as well? The present study is aimed at narrowing this research gap by focusing on the innovation through brand extension impact on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in an ever-greater area of the service sector. Resources and experiences may give platform owners an advantage to expand their business to new areas of possible growth. We conclude with an appeal that marketing takes the lead in developing overarching, indigenous theories of digital (dis)intermediation to make sense of the rapid changes in the marketplace. We present issues in need of future research for each type of digital (dis)intermediation. A final development is digital marketing disintermediation, which is closely tied to the rise of C2C models. Digital marketing intermediation and the rise of D2C brand-building models is powered by crowdsourcing. The next two types of digital (dis) intermediation are of the bottom-up kind - the consumer is in the driver's seat. These first two types of digital (dis) intermediation are primarily top-down processes, where firms are developing new ways to sell their brands to consumers.
A second type is digital transaction disintermediation associated with the rise of ecommerce D2C models. First, we discuss digital transaction intermediation, a development that is closely tied to the rise of ecommerce retailers. In this article, we discuss four types of digital (dis)intermediation, and how they affect branding activities of incumbents and new firms. Marketing academics are keenly aware of the seismic shifts in today's marketing environment caused by digital (dis)intermediation.
0 kommentar(er)
