PurposeIn recent years, brand personality as a branding construct has received considerable interest, which has led to a significant effort to develop tools to measure the personality of brands. Although the majority of these studies have focused on the brand personality of conventional product brands, the new boundaries of marketing obviously necessitate the application of branding constructs to non‐traditional products such as places. This study aims to focus on brand personalities of places, and to examine the applicability of this concept for city brands.Design/methodology/approachThe research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 898 college students.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal that differentiating places with regard to their brand personalities is achievable. The paper introduces two new dimensions of brand personality for cities.Originality/valueThe extraction of two new factors that contribute to place brand personalities is considered a major contribution of this research to the marketing literature.
Despite the widely acknowledged importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications, our knowledge is limited with regard to various factors affecting consumer responses to such communication efforts. This paper aims to identify the extent to which prior brand familiarity influences consumer responses to CSR communications through a controlled experiment, exploring whether the use of different communication functions for environmental domain of CSR (i.e., publicity and advertising) generates any different effect on these responses. Findings reveal that familiar and unfamiliar brands do not differ from each other with regard to consumer attitude toward message, but elicit dissimilar responses in terms of attitude toward brand and purchase intentions. The study leads to managerial implications regarding the effective formulation and dissemination of CSR-related messages in order to achieve stakeholder engagement.
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