Retailers are amongst the world's strongest brands, but little is known about retailer brand equity. In spite of their extensive use, we argue that current operational models are too abstract for understanding the uniqueness of the retail industry and too simplistic to understand the interrelationships among the dimensions in the retailer brand equity building process. This study contributes to the existing and largely generic retailer equity frameworks in three ways: first, by incorporating retail specific dimensions from the retailer image literature; second, by re-examining and developing the structures and relationships between the dimensions of retailer equity by testing alternative structures commonly used in the more general brand equity literature; and finally by creating a short and parsimonious scale for assessing retailer brand equity in different contexts. Three alternative models are compared and tested on six brands in both convenience and shopping goods categories, ranging from discount to middle range price levels. The outcome is an operational framework supporting the main building blocks of the conceptual brand resonance model presented in Keller (2001) with seven dimensions structured in a four-step sequence as awareness → pricing policy, customer service, product quality, physical store → retailer trust → retailer loyalty, thereby describing retailer brand equity as a four-step process. The extended, although parsimonious, 17-item retailer equity scale can be used by academics as well as practitioners to examine the underlying values of retailer brands and has the potential to incorporate additional dimensions and attributes to investigate specific retail contexts without creating lengthy questionnaires.

Media investments are continuously shifting from traditional media like newspapers to digital alternatives like websites and social media. This study investigated if and how media choice between the two rival channels can influence consumers' perceptions of a novel brand. 504 Swedish retail fashion customers participated in an experiment to evaluate the identical advertisement placed either in a national newspaper or on Facebook. The results revealed that advertising in a newspaper can have a positive effect on brand equity facets and purchase intention through brand personality perceptions of being competent, while advertising on Facebook have similar effects but through perceptions of being exciting. Besides some evidence that choice between traditional and new media affects brand personality this study is one of the first attempts to incorporate media channel choice into the broader customer-based brand equity framework. The results from this particular study suggest that media channel choice should be considered from a brand equity building perspective at least in the fashion category. This study shows that different media channels could complement each other strategically, as traditional media channels still can have valuable and unique contributions to brand building through brand personality perceptions, especially for brands striving to be perceived as competent.

We present two preregistered replications of the paper by Wang and Griskevicius (2014), which reported that women flaunt luxury products to signal their partners' devotion, thereby guarding their relationships from rivals. In Study 1, which was a conceptual replication with real luxury brands, we did not observe an effect of luxury products on partner devotion but found that women assumed male partners contribute financial resources to women's luxury possessions. In Study 2, which was a direct replication with designer products, we observed a small-sized effect in the opposite direction, such that perceived partner devotion increased when women used nondesigner products. Similar to Study 1, perceived partner contribution to possessions was higher for designer products.

Dubois, Rucker, and Galinsky (2012, Experiment 1) found that consumers view larger-size options as a signal of higher status. We conducted a close replication of this finding (N = 415), and observed a nonsignificant effect in the opposite direction (small vs. large product size: doriginal = 1.49, 95%CI [1.09, 1.89], dreplication = 0.09 95%CI [-0.15, 0.33]; medium vs. large: doriginal = 0.89 95%CI [0.52, 1.26], dreplication = 0.11 95%CI [-0.13, 0.34]; small vs. medium: doriginal = 0.62 95%CI [0.26, 0.98], dreplication = -0.01 95%CI [-0.25, 0.23]). We discuss potential reasons for this unsuccessful replication as well as implications for the status-signaling literature in consumer psychology.

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