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Technological advances have resulted in a hyperconnected world, requiring a reassessment of branding research from the perspectives of firms, consumers, and society. Brands are shifting away from single ownership to shared ownership, as heightened access to information and people is allowing more stakeholders to cocreate brand meanings and experiences alongside traditional brand owners and managers. Moreover, hyperconnectivity has allowed existing brands to expand their geographic reach and societal roles, while new types of branded entities (ideas, people, places, and organizational brands) are further stretching the branding space. To help establish a new branding paradigm that accounts for these changes, the authors address the following questions: (1) What are the roles and functions of brands?, (2) How is brand value (co)created?, and (3) How should brands be managed? Throughout the article, the authors also identify future research issues that require scholarly attention, with the aim of aligning branding theory and practice with the realities of a hyperconnected world.

Algorithms, increasingly used by brands, sometimes fail to perform as expected or, even worse, cause harm, leading to brand harm crises. Algorithm failures are unfortunately increasing in frequency, yet little is known about consumers' responses to brands following such crises. Extending developments in the theory of mind perception, the authors hypothesize that, following a brand harm crisis, consumers respond less negatively if the error was caused by an algorithm (vs. a human). The authors further hypothesize that consumers' lower mind perception of agency of the algorithm (vs. a human), which lowers their perceptions of the algorithm's responsibility for the harm, mediates this relationship. Four moderators of this relationship are hypothesized: two algorithm characteristics (whether the algorithm is anthropomorphized and whether it involves machine learning) and two characteristics of the task for which the algorithm is deployed (whether the task is subjective [vs. objective] and whether it is interactive [vs. noninteractive]). The authors find support for the hypotheses in eight experimental studies. The effects of two managerial interventions to manage brand harmcrises caused by algorithm errors are examined. This research advances the literature on brand harm crises, algorithm usage, and algorithmic marketing and generates managerial guidelines to address such crises.

Influencer marketing is prevalent in firm strategies, yet little is known about the factors that drive success of online brand engagement at different stages of the consumer purchase funnel. The findings suggest that sponsored blogging affects online engagement (e.g., posting comments, liking a brand) differently depending on blogger characteristics and blog post content, which are further moderated by social media platform type and campaign advertising intent. When a sponsored post occurs on a blog, high blogger expertise is more effective when the advertising intent is to raise awareness versus increase trial. However, source expertise fails to drive engagement when the sponsored post occurs on Facebook. When a sponsored post occurs on Facebook, posts high in hedonic content are more effective when the advertising intent is to increase trial versus raise awareness. The effectiveness of campaign incentives depends on the platform type, such that they can increase (decrease) engagement on blogs (Facebook). The empirical evidence for these findings comes from real in-market customer response data and is supplemented with data from an experiment. Taken together, the findings highlight the critical interplay of platform type, campaign intent, source, campaign incentives, and content factors in driving engagement.

Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates different drivers of negative eWOM and the response approaches that firms use to engage in and disengage from online conversations with complaining customers. A text-mining study of negative eWOM demonstrates distinct impacts of high- and low-arousal emotions, structural tie strength, and linguistic style match (between sender and brand community) on firestorm potential. The firm’s response must be tailored to the intensity of arousal in the negative eWOM to limit the virality of potential online firestorms. The impact of initiated firestorms can be mitigated by distinct firm responses over time, and the effectiveness of different disengagement approaches also varies with their timing. For managers, these insights provide guidance on how to detect and reduce the virality of online firestorms.

How can we know what stakeholders think and feel about brands in real time and over time? Most brand reputation measures are at the aggregate level (e.g., the Interbrand \"Best Global Brands\" list) or rely on customer brand perception surveys on a periodical basis (e.g., the Y&R Brand Asset Valuator). To answer this question, brand reputation measures must capture the voice of the stakeholders (not just ratings on brand attributes), reflect important brand events in real time, and connect to a brand's financial value to the firm. This article develops a new social media–based brand reputation tracker by mining Twitter comments for the world's top 100 brands using Rust–Zeithaml–Lemon's value–brand–relationship framework, on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. The article demonstrates that brand reputation can be monitored in real time and longitudinally, managed by leveraging the reciprocal and virtuous relationships between the drivers, and connected to firm financial performance. The resulting measures are housed in an online longitudinal database and may be accessed by brand reputation researchers.

A brand name's linguistic characteristics convey brand qualities independent of the name's denotative meaning. For instance, name length, sounds, and stress can signal masculine or feminine associations. This research examines the effects of such gender associations on three important brand outcomes: attitudes, choice, and performance. Across six studies, using both observational analyses of real brands and experimental manipulations of invented brands, the authors show that linguistically feminine names increase perceived warmth, which improves brand outcomes. Feminine brand names enhance attitudes and choice share—both hypothetically and consequentially—and are associated with better brand performance. The authors establish boundary conditions, showing that the feminine brand name advantage is attenuated when the typical user is male and when products are utilitarian.

Many products have similar or common attributes and are thus correlated. We show that, when these attributes are uncertain for consumers, a complementarity effect can arise among competing products in the sense that the lower price of one product may increase the demands for the others. This effect occurs when consumers sequentially search for information about both common and idiosyncratic product attributes before purchase. We characterize the optimal search strategy for the correlated search problem, provide the conditions for the existence of the complementarity effect, and show that the effect is robust under a wide range of alternative assumptions. We further explore the implications of the effect for pricing. When firms compete in price, although product correlation may weaken differentiation between the firms, the complementarity effect owing to correlated search may raise equilibrium price and profit.

Research studies on brand transgression (BT), service failure and recovery (SFR), and product-harm crisis (PHC) appear to have a common focus, yet the three streams developed surprisingly independently and with limited reference to one another. This situation is unfortunate because all three fields study a similar phenomenon by using complementary conceptualizations, theories, and methods; we argue that this development in silos represents an unnecessary obstacle to the development of a common discipline. In response, this review synthesizes the growing BT, SFR, and PHC literatures by systematically reviewing 236 articles across 21 years using an integrative conceptual framework. In doing so, we showcase how the mature field of SFR in concert with the younger but prolific BT and PHC fields can enrich one another while jointly advancing a broad and unified discipline of negative events in marketing. Through this process, we provide and explicate seven overarching insights across three major themes (theory, dynamic aspects, and method) to encourage researchers to contribute to the interface between these three important fields. The review concludes with academic contributions and practical implications.

Extensive research has investigated branding practices, processes, and consumers' reactions to brands in a globalized world. In this review, the authors aim to organize and synthesize the growing literature on branding, culture, and globalization from a behavioral perspective by reviewing 129 articles published over 25 years. Specifically, they explicate two perspectives found in the literature: (1) global-local branding and (2) the influence of culture on consumer and brand interactions. The authors identify conceptual gaps in the literature and discuss how new realities in the macro environment (e.g., political issues, digital transformation, environmental concerns) may affect the interaction between culture, brands, and consumers in a globalized world. This review facilitates a more impactful future research agenda in both theory and practice at the interface of branding and globalization from the perspective of behavioral outcomes.