Recent marketing literature suggests that brand orientation is an alternative concept for the public health because it is believed to address the shortcomings of market orientation. Brand orientation is specifically of interest to the sector of healthcare, due to the complex nature of the sector. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to find out what the possibilities are of brand orientation for local healthcare providers. The study shows that brand orientation is relevant for physical therapy primary healthcare organizations (PTPHOs), but is not always adopted effectively. PTPHOs are strongly focused on the patient as the only stakeholder. A more powerful option would be to choose a brand positioning strategy for all relevant stakeholders. PTPHOs have to design integrated marketing activities to encourage consumers directly to use our products/services, and to encourage suppliers, distributors, and other key stakeholders to promote our products/services to consumers. In order to safeguard their role and position in the context of community care for the future, the PTPHO is challenged to become more active and more visible, and must collaborate more with other (healthcare) professionals in the community, broaden their services, and focus more on the (future) needs of the citizen.
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In the psychological field, a lot of progress has been made in values theory. In marketing theory, however, the use of values has been undervalued. Despite the widespread managerial use of brand values, attention has remained focused on the brand personality concept. This book intends to provide a new perspective to marketing science, by proposing a system of brand values that takes into account the developments in values theory. Values were tested in a number of rounds among a total of more than 3,000 respondents in the Netherlands and several other countries including Germany, Italy, and China.In this study, values that motivate consumer behavior were demonstrated to relate to each other as a consistent value system, labelled here as the Value Compass. We showed that the values with which brands profile themselves can be organized according to a similar structure as the human value system, which opens additional insights into the use of values to position brands, or to predict brand choice. The cross-cultural validation included in this book showed a high degree of equivalence of the Value Compass. This validation provided insight in the cross-cultural similarities in the structure of the value system, but it also emphasized the cross-cultural differences in priorities that individuals attach to certain values.
This study investigated the influence of personality traits and the differential effect of product categories on brand love. Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) claim that it is relatively easier for hedonic and self-enhancing products to obtain brand love. Nevertheless, in relation to the field of consumer-brand relationships, contradictory findings exist regarding the effects of product category on relationship quality. Christy et al. (1996), Veloutsou (2007), and Wilson (2011) point to a positive effect for the influence of high product category involvement on the brand relationship quality, whereas Valta (2013) finds no support at all. Current empirical studies on brand love, however, focus on a single product category from rather high-involvement categories like consumer electronics or apparel (Batra et al., 2012; Rauschnabel et al., 2013). This raises the question whether brand love can only be obtained in those product categories. An application of the Rossiter–Percy grid is thus carried out to measure the direct influence of product category on brand love. Furthermore, we explore whether product category offers an additional explanation for the varying results of personality traits on relationships. We propose that product category acts as a moderator between personality and brand love. Therefore, the research questions this study will seek to answer are the following: RQ1: To what extent does personality influence brand love? RQ2: To what extent does the product category influence brand love? RQ3: To what extent does the product category moderate the relationship between personality and brand love?
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