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Manufacturing and using counterfeit products has seriously damaged industries worldwide. Consciously complicity of consumers in buying these products is an interesting issue which on the light of its impression on economies and operation continuity of businesses, necessitates more investigation. Thus, thus study aims for investigating factors affecting consumer complicity in buying and consuming counterfeits. To this end, a questionnaire survey of students in management universities was conducted using random simple sampling. 385 questionnaires received and analyzed through descriptive statistics and structural

The marketing and strategic management literature is well-documented regarding the drivers of competitive intelligence (CI) and how they are gathered, its organization, and dissemination through the organization. However, the impact of CI upon the development of other organizational capabilities including marketing capabilities and the performance of organizations has been neglected and very scarce through the literature. Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate the impact of CI categories including market intelligence, competitor intelligence and technological intelligence on marketing capabilities (i.e. market-sensing capability and customer-linking capability), as well as the organizational performance. To this end, structured questionnaire was applied and a survey of 225 persons involved in sales and marketing affairs of insurance companies in Iran was administrated. Results showed that CI categories have direct and significant effect on marketing capabilities and the organization’s performance.

Brands and their positive consequences as an economic constructs, have been well studied. But, in addition to economic, brands are also regarded as a social construct, which has remained fairly unrecognized due to lack of academic investigations. So, the purpose of this paper is to focus on and address negative functions and effects of brands and brandings. With utilizing critical point of view and Merton’s functional analysis, this research presents a literature-based conceptual analysis of the negative functions of brands and brandings. The paper identifies that brands have their own demerits (latent functions) in addition to their merits (manifest functions). With referencing to existing literature, this paper identifies some negative effects of brands for societies such as class differences, self-alienation, cultural imperialism, emotional relationships.