Private Labels have transformed from value purchases into powerful brands. This paper develops a framework based on the four strategic dimensions of brand breadth, positioning, segmentation, and relationship with the store brand that retailers can uniquely draw upon to organise their brand portfolios. It examines the case of German retailer Rewe that successfully organises its private label portfolio along these dimensions. This paper argues that maintaining multi-tiered and multi-segmented private label portfolios can be important tools for retailers enabling them to cover broader markets, fulfil current consumer needs, build brand equity, and strengthen customer loyalty.
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This article describes a method for promoting sustainable business practices in the hospitality sector and focusses on energy usage in hotels. It raises questions about the actual impact of eco-labels on actual environmental performance.
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This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understand cities as places of transformation and change, with people and other living beings at its core. The aim of the article is to explore how the lens of vitalism can help us understand and connect ongoing interdisciplinary academic debates about urban development and vice versa, and how these ongoing debates inform our understanding of urban vitalism.
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Many global challenges cannot be addressed by one single actor alone. Achieving sustainability requires governance by state and non-state market actors to jointly realise public values and corporate goals. As a form of public-private governance, voluntary standards involving governments, non-governmental organisations and companies have gained much traction in recent years and have been in the limelight of public authorities and policymakers. From a firm perspective, sustainability standards can be a way to demonstrate that they engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a credible way. To capitalise on their CSR activities, firms need to ensure their stakeholders are able to recognise and assess their CSR quality. However, because the relative observability of CSR is low and since CSR is a contested concept, information asymmetries in firm-stakeholder relationships arise. Adopting CSR standards and using these as signalling devices is a strategy for firms to reduce these information asymmetries, by revealing their true CSR quality. Against this background, this article investigates the voluntary ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility as a form of public-private governance and contends that, despite its objectives, this standard suffers from severe signalling problems. Applying signalling theory to the ISO 26000 standard, this article takes a critical stance towards this standard and argues that firms adhering to this standard may actually emit signals that compromise rather than enhance stakeholders' ability to identify and interpret firms' underlying CSR quality. Consequently, the article discusses the findings in the context of public-private governance, suggests a specification of signalling theory and identifies avenues for future research.
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Brand portfolio strategies are an essential prerequisite for securing long-term success for multi-brand companies. Only by focusing on the entire portfolio can it be ensured that all brands “act in concert” to achieve superordinate objectives. Thereby, an increasing vertical competition caused by private labels calls for a new approach, by which brand manufacturers integrate private labels into their portfolio management. This paper presents a planning model that is embedded in the company’s strategic management and demonstrates how brand-related objectives/strategies can be linked with superordinated objectives/strategies. By including vertical marketing goals into portfolio strategy, brand manufacturers may gain from extending the planning scope to private label brands.
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The changing climate has an effect on the quality of life in our cities: heavier rainfall (resulting infloodings), longer periods of drought, reduced air and water quality and increasing temperatures incities (heat stress). Awareness about these changes among various stakeholders is of greatimportance. Every Dutch region is required to perform a stresstest indicating the effects of climatechange (o.a. flooding and heatstress) before 2020. The level of execution, area size and level ofparticipation of stakeholders, has intentionally been made flexible.To provide more insight into the approaches and best management practices to climate resilience,this article provides 3 examples of stresstests performed on several levels: single object real estatelevel, city level and national district level. The method ‘stresstestíng’, involves flood and heatstressmodeling, defines the current status of climate adaptation characteristics of an object, city or district.The stresstest form the base line and starting point for the national 3 step approach adaptationstrategy ‘analyse, ambition and action’.The 3 pilots have been evaluated as ‘successful’ by stakeholders and yielded a significant amount ofvaluable information, further improvement is recommended as increasing the participation of theprivate sector, in a ‘quadruple helix approach’. The learning points from these 3 examples ofstresstests will subsequently be implemented in the form of improved stresstesting in the nearfuture in (inter)national cities around the world.
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The aim of this paper is to investigate which portfolio extension option: either a cheaper subbrand or a private label endorsed by the national brand is better from the consumer perspective. Two hypothetical product concepts from a leading beer brand were tested among Dutch consumers. The findings show that consumers are equally likely to try the options and form a positive or negative opinion about the manufacturer after the extension. However, when looking at the ability for a brand to cover a price conscious segment and thereforeincrease penetration, the cheaper national sub-brand performs better. Given that the manufacturer will be not restricted in distribution of such a brand, our findings are in favour of a cheaper sub-brand rather than an endorsed private label.
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This paper reveals how the automatising of protocols ignited a public conflict between Dutch banks and their Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) clients in the years after the Global Financial Crisis. The bank’s “infirmary departments” for Financial Restructuring and Recovery (FR&R) were accused of (mal)treating SMEs. The conflict resulted in no formal regulatory or legal change despite public support. Instead, the banks created self-regulation to improve communication with SMEs, leading to shifts in governing FR&R for SMEs. This way, the banks mitigated significant negative symptoms of automation and solved the conflict with the SMEs while keeping FR&R and ongoing automation intact. The research uses an interdisciplinary analytical framework to understand national financial conflicts in a digitalised (business) world. It contributes to the theory of institutionalising values in discursive contests between action fields. The paper highlights the material and causes of normative conflicts of interest among critical actors in established public-private networks through discourse analysis and process tracing.
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Little progress has been made in recent years toward achieving a fully circular economy by 2050. Implementing circular urban supply chains is a major economic transformation that can only work if significant coordination problems between the actors involved are solved. On the one hand, this requires the implementation of efficient urban collection technologies, where process industries collaborate hand-in-hand with manufacturers, urban waste treatment, and city logistics specialists and are supported by digital solutions for visibility and planning. But on the other hand, it also requires implementing regional and urban ecosystems connected by innovative CO2-neutral circular city logistics systems smoothly and sustainably managing the regional flow of resources and data, often at large and with interfaces between industrial processes and private and private and public actors. What are relevant research questions from a city logistics perspective?
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