Pierre Berthon's research while affiliated with Bentley University and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (216)
Secrets are a double-edged sword. They are crucial for protecting valuable knowledge and appropriating value from innovation; they also invite consumer curiosity and in doing so may generate demand. On the other side, secrecy may invite suspicions, distrust, and miscommunication. In this paper, we review the growing body of research on secrets and...
With the increasing use of AI in marketing, ethical
repercussions are beginning to emerge. From privacy
issues, through discrimination of marginalized
groups, to emergent systemic social distortions, AI is
changing the marketing ethical landscape. In this
paper we conduct a structured literature review of
the emerging ethical issues posed by AI in...
Any number of industries and their offerings have fallen victim to managerial shortsightedness. Firms often believe themselves to be invincible and see themselves as immune to threats from seemingly unrelated technologies. There seemed to be no apparent link between bound paper books and the emerging internet, no discernible ties between the video...
Remedies to fake news have generally emphasized identification of false content (information fact-checking) and censorship (curtailing information dissemination). In this article, however, we focus on the systems within which fake news travels, rather than the information per se. Specifically, we look at the marketer-consumer ecosystem and argue th...
A primary goal of health marketing is to help people make healthy choices. The problem is that health decision-making is complex, and individuals often make unhealthy decisions even when healthy options are promoted. In this paper, we address this problem by integrating literature in marketing, psychology, economics, medicine, and health to develop...
Signaling how virtuous a brand is has become an ever more common strategy. Brands have recently outcompeted one another to align themselves with various causes. We explore the rise in virtue signaling and review prominent examples of brands who have linked themselves to social movements: some successfully, some unsuccessfully. We draw on evolutiona...
A key function of marketing is the management of information between the firm and the market; and what is not communicated is as important as what is communicated. Thus, secrecy – the active withholding of information – is intrinsic and critical to the success of the firm. Yet secrecy has received little attention in the marketing literature. In th...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the effect of employees’ state mindfulness, a short period of mindful presence, on the quality of the service they provide in a service encounter.
Design/methodology/approach
Three studies are conducted. A pilot study explores the relationship between state mindfulness and service encounter quality. Experiment 1...
Mindfulness, an ancient and exclusive monastic tradition, has in recent years become a modern and secular practice. It has shown to have positive effects in various fields such as medicine, schooling, prison programs, negotiations, and business. However, research on mindfulness in the marketing domain has just started. The extant literature on the...
The theory of the post-emotional-self and post-emotional society proposes that the industrialized world has become a post-emotional society in which emotion has become separated from action and feeling. If this were the case, then the language used over time should reflect a change from actual emotions, inner feelings, and sensitivities, to outer d...
Amidst the forceful public demand for organisational transparency, there is an ambition to explore the limits of openness. What kind of information could and should firms keep secret and under which conditions? In this paper, we explore the limits of transparency in the marketing domain and develop a conceptual model of secrecy in marketing. We des...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop an instrument to measure employer branding in the information age. Firms increasingly migrate from matter-intensive business models to information-intensive models, where value lies in information rather than the physical objects. This shift has, in turn, led to a change in employee work skills. This...
We spend our days looking at them, talking to them, and touching them. We sleep with them, work with them, and play with them. They increasingly consume our time, attention, and money: we are addicted to our digital devices—or, more precisely, the digital experiences they enable. This addiction is both akratic (we are aware of the negative conseque...
Purpose
Berthon and Pitt (2018) recently highlighted the symbiotic relationship between fake news and brands. This paper aims to draw on semiotics to refine the fake/real news dichotomy to a fourfold typology.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the authors turn to semiotics and review Greimas’ (1966) semiotic square. Second, they use this framew...
This paper looks at brand engagement in the context of employees and B2B firms, two areas that are largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement in social media, two key drivers of employee brand engagement are identified using the content analysis tool, DICTION...
The transition of ResMed, the world’s leading manufacturer of therapies and devices for Obstructive Sleep Apnea, from a goods producer to an information-intensive firm presents a compelling opportunity for marketing scholars to revisit fundamental issues in strategic marketing’s theoretical past. These issues are still vitally relevant today and sp...
In an age of digital distractions, mindfulness has become a billion-dollar industry that extends well beyond training to include products, services, and experiences. Attitudes on mindfulness vary from the cautious to the starry-eyed. However, one thing is certain: mindfulness is here and it is here to stay, as the conditions that gave rise to its p...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the mechanisms that organizations use to keep their innovations secret. This paper examines how, when and why secrecy appropriation mechanisms (SAMs) can enable innovators to appropriate value from their innovations.
Design/methodology/approach
Building from an extensive literature review...
Developed economies have seen a shift in economic value away from the production of material goods and toward the production of information-intensive offerings. The process of innovation has evolved in parallel, from staged and gated approaches to agile and iterative processes. Agile innovation models developed in software and technology industries...
Brands can interact both directly and indirectly with fake news. In some instances, brands are the victims of fake news and, other times, the purveyors. Brands can either finance fake news or be the targets of it. Indirectly, they can be linked via image transfer, where either fake news contaminates brands, or brands validate fake news.
To control...
Around the world, parents observe their children using multiple channels to consume media content. Video games, movies, animation and mobile apps increasingly substitute books and toys. It has been shown that media representations impact children's implicit attitudes and behavior, though parents still can mediate this by talking to their children a...
In the past US election cycle, and mirrored by similar events in Europe, two trends have come to dominate social discourse: truthiness (the validity of something based on how it feels) and post-fact (taking a position that ignores facts). Human discourse has always contained elements of these, but the nature of the Internet and social media has pus...
This paper explores how value is co-created in crowdsourcing business models. We envision crowd contributors as a special kind of non-consumer multi-role stakeholder. Our model suggests that the value they derive from monetary rewards and other expected benefits of participation is mediated by experiential value and identity value. The latter is dr...
It is estimated that financial services comprise around 15% of the global economy. From the supply side, one key to meeting this demand is being able to educate and certify the people who provide these services. With the advent of the internet and related technologies, the ability to deliver financial services education synchronously to both online...
In this study, we employ the Harrison-Wicks four-factor model of stakeholder value to explore the factors of stakeholder value linked to stakeholder-company affiliation. Using the modified model of customer-company identification, we propose that the company may provide value for its stakeholders by satisfying their psychological needs for self-ver...
Crowdsourcing is becoming an ever more important creator of value for firms across the globe. Initially attracting individuals to participate in such crowdsourcing ventures was easy – consumer interest and demand easily outpaced the supply of such initiatives. However, as the number of such ventures increases, managers need to consider what differe...
Despite significant global prestige and a strong brand presence, UNESCO World Heritage Sites remain underfunded with many unable to self-sustain. Increasing government budget constraints have further restricted funds and UNESCO's "World Heritage Fund"-UNESCO's sole source of financial assistance available to sites-has fallen to approximately $3M US...
In this article, we consider crowdsourcing from the consumer perspective. Specifically, we examine the identity value (i.e., sense of self) that consumers accrue by participating in creative crowds. How can managers structure crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation and expression? We strive to answer t...
From the seclusion of monastic life to the noise of Silicon Valley, the ancient practice of mindfulness has ‘come out of the cloister.’ As an antidote to mindless cognition and behavior, the practice of mindfulness—with its principle of grounding attention in the present moment—has been shown to have powerful and positive effects at both the indivi...
In management literature, a psychological contract generally refers to an employee's beliefs about the reciprocal obligations that exist between him or her and an organization. Legal contracts, on the other hand, are agreements that create obligations between the parties that are enforceable by law. Psychological contracts are different from legal...
Traditionally, firms have tried to listen to primary stakeholders (e.g., customers, suppliers, creditors, employees) but have paid little attention to the concerns of secondary stakeholders (e.g., the general public, communities, activist groups). This is because primary stakeholders were perceived to have power, legitimacy, and urgency behind thei...
A review of the literature reveals a paucity of research in two important areas: first, in the area of inter-functional relations, and especially dyadic relations involving marketing and other departments; second, in the area of behavioural research behind marketing decision-making. This article seeks to explore the first in terms of the second: th...
The past few years has seen a proliferation of literature in the area of effective management of service organizations. A major theme has been the focus on service quality and its link to business performance, with the finding that superior service quality translates into higher profits. Consequently the measurement of service quality has become cr...
While dilemma of number of scale points and the presence of a neutral point on an item in a questionnaire have long concerned marketing and social researchers, the issue of whether an example to respondents in a questionnaire can bias them has received less attention. This brief research note concerns itself with whether the presence of a neutral p...
Drawing on Clark and Marshall’s (1981) theory of mutual knowledge, this article presents a framework for understanding and managing brand meaning. Whilst traditional brand management theory has focused primarily on brand-related marketing communications, the role that the knowledge base of the recipient plays in interpreting these communications ha...
Consider the following question: In which U.S. business environment are the marketing, operations management, and finance functions typically not very integrated? The answer: most U.S. business schools! The irony is inescapable. The very environment for which we are supposed to be preparing our students, does not exist in the academic world. The wa...
Measuring response to consumer generated advertising is, for a variety of reasons, difficult to do using traditional advertising measures. In this paper we present an approach to better understanding response to consumer generated advertising. Using the comments posted about four consumer generated advertisements hosted on YouTube, we demonstrate h...
This article examines the salience of the McDonald’s brand on children in elementary school. Students were asked to create an advertisement for McDonald’s in one of three conditions: for themselves, a friend, or a parent. Differences were found in how students expressed themselves based on age and their perceived audience.
Very few organizations actually refer to their customers as customers, yet this important and somewhat unusual phenomenon has received scant attention in the marketing literature. This might either be because it is not considered important (it is), or because marketing scholars have lacked a theory to adequately explain the impact of names on custo...
What a consumer knows about a product or service is crucial to how it is marketed, and this is particularly true in the case of information-intensive products. However, there are two important sides to consumer knowledge: first, there is what consumers really know, or objective knowledge; second, there is what consumers think they know, or subjecti...
Two related trends characterize the recent past: value propositions are migrating from the physical to the informational, and value creation is shifting from firms to consumers. These two trends meet in the phenomenon of " consumer-generated intellectual property " (CGIP). This article addresses the question: " How should firms manage the intellect...
Stealth, or undercover, marketing involves the disguising of marketing communications that marketers undertake to purposefully influence their audiences without the audiences being aware of these activities. Inasmuch as stealth marketing involves secrecy (the withholding of information) and miscommunication (the communication of partial or misleadi...
This installment of Marketing & Technology introduces managers to improvisation—colloquially known as ‘improv’—or acting sans pre-planning, as a device for delivering warm, unmechanical service without breaking the training budget. We begin by describing improv, reviewing its history, and covering the rules and guidelines that improv uses. Then we...
Until recently, most manufacturing processes have been ‘subtractive’ in that matter is removed (e.g., scraped, dissolved, turned, machined) from a substance in order to produce the desired product. 3-D printing turns traditional manufacturing on its head in that it uses an ‘additive’ process. Similar to laser and inkjet printers, 3-D (three-dimensi...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to focus on the impact that country connectedness and cultural values have on the equity afforded to a country’s workforce in today’s global economy.
Design/methodology/approach
– Drawing upon a number of large international surveys of national-level metrics, e-readiness is identified as a proxy measure for...
Marketeers have argued that organisations are concerned with vertical control along the marketing channel to avoid competition and to improve perfOrmance by rationalising costs arising from both production and market search. The general proposal offered by this study is that within the transaction cost framework, the existence of relational norms b...
Most marketing academics today are concerned with making their curricula more relevant, just as employers operating internationally seek marketing graduates with at least an exposure to global issues, if not actual experience. In the light of increasing globalization of business, this relevance would undoubtedly be concerned with the internationali...
Most innovation research tends to focus on manufacturing situations, yet in the 1990s more innovations occur in retail and service businesses. Numerous factors may lead to innovation in the service context. This paper focuses on the relationship between one such variable, namely corporate entrepreneurship, and innovation in service firms. In partic...
In the marketing and IT literature technology is studied in terms of how they change consumers: making their lives easier, more productive, more enjoyable – or otherwise. Rarely do these studies look at the other side of the human-technology interaction: how users change technologies. Moreover if consumers changed technologies in the past it was in...
Information boundaries in organizations are designed to keep information inside an area defined by that boundary, usually by providing access to the information for those authorized to be inside the boundary and denying that access to those outside of it. In spite of their importance to organizational functioning, the management literature lacks a...
Marketing thrives on secrets, yet surprisingly little formal attention has been given to how the marketing of secrecy and the secrecy of marketing can play a significant role in contemporary organizations. We draw upon the fields of organizational studies, psychology, and marketing to develop a typology of secrets that reflects both their marketing...
Organizations use a variety of labels to refer to their customers — the individuals who use their products and services. These labels (e.g., guests, students, clients, members, patients, users, etc.) suggest different meanings and connotations than being a simple customer. In this paper, we explore traditional labeling theory, and its roots in cate...
The concept of goal orientations and their effects on workplace behavior has been traditionally examined in a domestic context and often within the same organization. This article addresses the shortage of empirical research in this area by exploring whether goal and achievement motivation theory holds in an international Middle Eastern context. Ba...
There is iron in irony (Ewart, G. 1980. Selected Poems 1933–1988 . New Directions Books: New York, NY).
Acentral concern of public affairs is the notion of social justice and the scrutinizing of truth claims in public discourse where the power of social actors is asymmetrical. The mechanisms of rejection of truth claims tend to fall into two camps...
One of the most fundamental decisions made in firms is about what functions or activities the firm should perform within its own hierarchy, and which of these it should rely on the market to perform. Outsourcing is ‘an agreement in which one company contracts out a part of their existing internal activity to another company’. However, this article...
Marketing thrives on secrets, yet surprisingly little formal attention has been paid to how the marketing of secrecy and the secrecy of marketing can play a significant role in contemporary organizations. We draw upon the fields of organizational studies, psychology, and marketing to develop a typology of secrets that reflects their marketing value...
Drawing on four research papers and case studies, this paper explores the interaction between creative consumers and technology. While prior research has taken either a technology 'push' stance (technology shapes consumers) or a 'pull' posture (technology results from identifying consumer needs), the view adopted here is that the interplay between...
Parody, or spoof advertising, is as old as advertising itself. However, the rise of consumer generated content and its rapid diffusion have created a veritable epidemic of spoof ads aimed at companies and their brands. Brands are increasingly becoming the targets of burlesque. Marketers, faced with a loss of control over their message, are left won...
The purpose of this paper is to employ an extended notion of gift giving by showing that much of the gifts exchanged in social media are driven by social emotions. We argue that consumers have migrated from the production of services to the production of experiences and that, in social media, the primary experience of value is emotion. Web 2.0 is m...
The 21st century has brought both opportunities and challenges in our global, boundaryless world. Importantly, managers face a dynamic and interconnected international environment. As such, 21st century managers need to consider the many opportunities and threats that Web 2.0, social media, and creative consumers present and the resulting respectiv...
Contests are a ubiquitous form of promotion widely adopted by financial services advertisers, yet, paradoxically, academic research on them is conspicuous in its absence. This work addresses this gap by developing a model of contest engagement and performance. Using motivation theory, factors that drive participant engagement are modeled, and engag...
Creative consumers – consumers who adapt, modify or transform a proprietary offering – represent an intriguing paradox for business. On the one hand they can be a black hole for future revenue, with breach of copyright and intellectual property, while on the other hand they represent a gold mine of ideas and business opportunities. This problem is...
Irony is employed to add edge or bite to advertising to make it stand out. Yet the irony of ironic advertising is that it is used but not thoroughly understood; practiced but not well researched. In this study, the authors set out to remedy this failing by laying the foundations of research into ironic advertising. Specifically, they define a const...
Purpose
– This paper aims to report on the construction of a scale to measure a firm's stance towards creative consumers; that is, customers who adapt, modify or transform a proprietary offering.
Design/methodology/approach
– A measurement instrument, called the 3As, is developed to assess the extent to which an organization is aware of its creati...
Social media provide consumers with a platform for interactivity, and interactivity leads to consumer empowerment by providing the consumer with a platform to make their voice heard. This paper contributes to the marketing literature exploring the voice of the consumer in consumer-generated advertisements (CGAs). The objective of this research is t...
Marketers have long been concerned with the issue of brand equity. This paper argues that most common notions of brand equity are at worst flawed and at best limited by a failure to view the concept in its widest context. The paper introduces the separate but related ideas of organizational and customer brand equity, with their sub-components. It i...
Companies spend millions of dollars researching consumers, consumer attitudes to brands, and consumer uses of products. Yet the irony is that consumers are now doing this research themselves and posting their material to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. In this paper we argue that the BASIC IDS framework (Cohen, 1999) for dimensional qualitativ...
Interfunctional relations and their implications for organizational effectiveness is increasingly becoming a major strategic issue. Marketing and human resources (HR) are concerned with building relationships; marketing is the function charged with managing relationships with external customer, whilst HR is the function obligated to the task of man...
Like many disruptive technologies, tablet computers such as the Apple iPad are already changing the face of corporate computing and will likely have an even greater impact in the future. The purpose of this article is to provide a set of frameworks that can be used to identify when and where a tablet computer device, and tablet applications that le...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the issues of luxury gift giving and the giving of luxury wines as gifts from a conceptual perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
The article considers the OA (aesthetic and ontology) model as proposed by Berthon et al. that permits the integration of various conceptualisations of different authors...
YouTube has become a popular platform for political debate. Issues discussed via the medium of video and hosted on sites such as YouTube increasingly employ rhetorical devices such as humor, satire, and irony. In this paper, we focus on a campaign for fiscal conservatism aimed at reducing US's sizable or ‘huge’ debt. The campaign features a caricat...
With the rise of new media, it is easy to overlook, not only old media but also mummery—the arcane medium of the flesh—street performances, stage shows, plays, and carnivals. In this paper, we look at the case of Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping. We begin by re‐introducing the term ‘mummer’ as a traditional medium of expression...
This study examines the impact of a new communication tool, the social media release (SMR), on bloggers. Specifically, we seek to determine what factors will influence bloggers' intent to use SMRs or their components. Our global survey of 332 bloggers finds that bloggers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the SMR and the use of SMRs by companies...
User-generated online content poses a problem when it takes the form of advertising. Consumer-generated advertising challenges researchers and practitioners to understand consumers' articulated responses to ads and to the responses of other consumers, as well as the implications these may have for the brand. Traditional research methods such as vie...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the visibility of luxury wine brands, in particular the Bordeaux first growth brands in social media.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses data from howsociable.com to portray similar luxury wine brands in multi‐dimensional space. To identify the associations between the brands and the social m...
Green IT (information technology) has recently emerged into an active research area in the information systems (IS) discipline. A major gap that exists in the Green IT research literature today is the absence of a theoretical framework that can be used ...
The advent of inexpensive hardware (video cameras) and free video-production and -editing software has enabled almost anyone to produce a reasonably competent video. When this is coupled to free video-hosting sites such as You Tube, individual consumers can produce content and many do so in the form of ads about the brands they love, hate, or simpl...
In this paper, the authors reflect upon the last half-century of branding research, offering both integration and insight. They chart how the understanding of brands has evolved from mark-through mimesis, expression, and symptom to self-organizing phenomenon. Using Popper's Three Worlds hypothesis, they show how the various fragmented streams of br...
The portable computer or notebook has become an integral and even essential aspect of modern life. Year-in-year its price to the consumer falls while its performance grows, yet recent analysis suggests that pound-for-pound its environmental costs are amongst the highest of any product on the planet. In this paper we explore the market price of “sus...
The customization of a service often depends on the “performance” delivered by front-stage service employees. Drawing on theories
of dramaturgy and service marketing, we present a typology of four distinct and viable configurations for achieving different
types of service customization. We explain how variations in the time pressure to customize a...
This article highlights the paradoxes of information technology (IT) and IS and the promise of these as one of the solutions to our ecological dilemma. Some of these paradoxes include the promise of efficiency gains, of cleanliness, of education, and of community. It explores Green IT by focusing on a neglected level of information systems analysis...
Interactive digital media are revolutionizing the marketing landscape. The virtual world is a dominant player in this new panorama, with exchanges in the virtual marketplace approaching $2 billion annually. While virtual, like real world, exchanges require buyers and sellers, there is little or no understanding of this disembodied sales process. Th...
Sponsorship of large sporting and cultural events has become a major marketing communication tool, particularly when firms obtain exclusive rights and garner the hype associated with this honor. Concomitantly, ambush marketing--defined as attempts by competitors to exploit the event--has also increased in prominence. This article outlines what is k...
The Social Media Release (SMR) is emerging as a potentially powerful public relations tool in a world of social network media, particularly when targeted at influential bloggers. The research described here studies the factors that influence bloggers to use SMRs, using the Technology Acceptance Model as a theoretical framework, concentrating specif...
This study examines the impact of a new communication tool, the social media release (SMR), on bloggers. Specifically, we seek to determine what factors will influence bloggers' intent to use SMRs or their components. Our global survey of 332 bloggers finds that bloggers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the SMR and the use of SMRs by companies...
Technologies often have uses outside of or beyond what their designer intended. This paper presents both a theory describing how technology disperses as well as a description of the various routes a technology can take to maturity. Widening the scope of IS, we argue that IT, rather than merely being passively consumed, simultaneously creates new ne...
Purpose
– The aim of this paper is to consider business schools and to elicit whether, in seeking differentiation, rankings are more desirable than brand personality and whether silver medal winner effects exist in the perceptions of brand personalities.
Design/methodology/approach
– Literature on reputation, identity, differentiation, brand perso...
A theory of caricature is used to analyse and explain the nature of—and reactions to—a controversial political cartoon depicting Jacob Zuma, the highly publicized president of South Africa, and how the cartoon both played on and affected his political image and brand. Jacob Zuma has crafted his image as a person who has overcome insurmountable inju...
