Kavita Miadaira Hamza

The meaning of a brand? An archetypal approach

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze customers’ perceptions about brand personality in different cultural environments, checking if the archetypal framework of Mark and Pearson (2001) applies to different brands across countries. Design/methodology/approach The authors measured consumers’ perceptions in different cultural contexts through a survey, and received 537 valid questionnaires from Portugal, Brazil, Colombia and Peru, countries that have some similar indicators of cultural proximity. The authors wanted to verify if the words and sentences that respondents related to each brand were coherent with the archetype/brand, and the homogeneity of the results in different cultural contexts. Findings Empirical evidence shows that there is proximity between the literature review and the associations – words and sentences – that consumers from different countries make with those brands. This consistency of results is significantly higher for word associations. Originality/value Regardless of the results, the perceptions of consumers expressed through the selected words were often diverse and heterogeneous among countries. This could possibly indicate insufficient efforts from global brands toward a coherent brand personality/global-archetypal approach. Therefore, managing brand personality deserves more attention and marketers must understand consumer behavior patterns in different markets.

Sustainable consumption profile differences among Brazilian regions

Brazil is a vast country and there are several scientific studies reporting sustainable behavior in its different regions. Since methodologies used in these studies differ from one another, it is hard to compare them. This paper aims to identify whether differences in sustainable behavior occur in different Brazilian regions and what differences can be identified. Through a web survey, we analyzed data from 1,489 participants, from four different regions. We identified two factors (behavior and search for information), and analyzed the differences through multivariate analysis of variance. The Northeast region had a higher score for “search for information”, while Southern regions performed better on “behavior.” The Midwest region had the worst performance for both factors. The reasons for such differences may be greatly influenced by the social/cultural context of each region. The results also show that consumers still do not use their power of choice to pressure companies to become more sustainable.