Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
Media refer that customers buy brands because of ethical or moral concerns and that the majority of
the population confirms this by saying that they take moral and ethical concerns in account while
making a purchasing decision. Devinney (2012) proves this statement wrong with his research. He
sustains that customers indeed care about ethical concerns of products, brands and companies but
that these are not the most important ones in customers’ purchasing decisions. On the contrary of
what the media call “ethical consumers”, the majority of the consumers chose price, taste, positioning,
the context in which they buy, and convenience over a company’s ethical concerns. To summarise,
there is an attitude gap, which means that consumers say they make their purchasing decisions based
on ethical reasons, while in reality, the company’s social and ethical responsibility isn’t the most vital
criterion.
On the other hand, marketing strategies should be aware of online social networking tends in the
digital domain, where consumers are able to communicate more proactively (Tiago & Veríssimo, 2014).
Knowledge and relationship are boosted by the digital dimension, allowing individuals to share
different cultures (Budden, Anthony, Budden, & Jones, 2011; Kumar, Novak, & Tomkins, 2010).
The brand is one of the most fundamental intangible resources (Kayo, 2002). Fakhrutdinova,
Kolesnikova and Yurieva (2014) state that this should be the cornerstone of a sustained and
differentiated international strategy that can ensure the organization’s competitive advantage and
clearly communicate its positioning to its audiences (Morgan and Pritchard, 2004). Holt, Quelch and
Taylor (2004) argue that brand value is even more relevant in an international context, where
competitiveness levels are also higher. Thus, it should convey a unified and coherent idea, but it must
also be adapted to local specificities, ie, it should be oriented to the markets in which it operates (Kirca
Jayachandran and Bearden et al., 2005), ensuring an effective response to consumers’ needs and
demands (Kohli & Jaworsk, 1990).
Market orientation is the concern of an organization to understand and respond to the characteristics
of the market in which it operates (Kohli et al., 1990), shifting its focus from an internal perspective to
an external perspective (Kirca, Jayachandran & Bearden, 2005). Popoli (2015) argues that the
organization’s direct link to the needs of its markets is central to the effective and full realization of a
strategy through differentiation, so the present study aimed to test the following hypothesis:
There is a progression where internationalization is defined by the “specific priorities of a country,
institution or a specific group of stakeholders” (Knight, 2015, p. 2), and where the success of its
implementation depends not only on the costs of but of the ability of organizations to understand
differences in the home and international markets, as well as to develop competitive advantage and
respond to the difficulties that arise from this heterogeneity (Brouthers, Brouthers & Werner, 2008;
Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson, 2007; He, 2012), through a recognized and differentiated brand (Popoli,
2015). We intend to conduct an online survey to marketing managers from Portuguese footwear firms
analysing their (1) Facebook, (2) Twitter, (3) Orkut and (4) blogs. Based on the preceding discussion
the following hypotheses were developed for this study:
H1: Brand has a positive effect on market orientation on digital consumers.
H2: Brand has a positive effect on competitive advantage through differentiation on digital consumers.
H3: Market orientation has a positive effect on competitive advantage through differentiation on
digital consumers.
H4: Market orientation mediates the relationship between brand and competitive advantage through
differentiation on digital consumers.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Brand Ethics Market orientation Competitive advantage Digital consumers
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Rua, O. & Oliveira, A. (2020). Brand, Ethics and Competitive Advantage. in Mario Arias-Oliva, Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo, Kiyoshi Murata & Ana Lara Palma (Eds.) Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2020: 18th International Conference on the Ethical and Social issues Universidad de La Rioja Publicaciones, Logroño, Spain.151-153. ISBN: 978-84-09-20272-0.