Purpose -The paper seeks to discuss and analyse the nature of place umbrella brands and the role such brands play in promotion of a country, a region, or a city. The purpose is also to identify some salient success criteria of provenance associations as core values of place umbrella brands. Design/methodology/approach -The study delineates a conceptual framework, which illustrates important components in place umbrella branding. It also highlights a set of criteria to aid prioritisations among prospective provenance associations that have a potential to be used as brand values of place umbrella brands. Practical implications -The paper identifies some characteristics of provenance associations, which make them more transferable across a bundle of umbrella brand partners. The generation of better marketing theory in the field of place branding will make it easier for practitioners to reach the right decisions in choice of provenance associations. Findings -It is claimed that transcendence is related to the transferability of provenance associations across a bundle of brands. Because transferability strongly depends on perceptions of similarity, the starting point is to identify matches between the partner brands based on their shared provenance. Originality/value -The article ends with a recommendation that researchers in place branding should carefully analyze provenance associations according to the suggested criteria.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the relative importance of four main attributes of food products for consumer’s choice. These are price, taste, environmental friendliness and healthfulness, tested across hedonic and utilitarian food products (milk and ice-cream). The weighting of attributes involved in food choices is a complex phenomenon, as consumers must consider contradictory requirements when making their choices. Consumers’ decision-making processes might also be influenced by food category. Some food products are mostly consumed for pleasure, whereas others are consumed because of their nutritional value. Design/methodology/approach – The study employs a choice-based conjoint technique, which addresses how consumers make trade-offs across a set of product attributes. Findings – The results indicate that price and taste attributes are rated as the most important for both hedonic and utilitarian food products. However, when the authors group consumers according to their product preferences, the relative importance of product attributes changes. Specifically, the importance of environmental friendliness and healthfulness is much higher among the health-conscious and environmentally conscious segments than for other segments. Originality/value – To the knowledge, this is the first study comparing the importance of this combination of product attributes (price, taste, calorie content and eco-label) across hedonic and utilitarian foods in a choice-based conjoint setting. Moreover, a new way of grouping consumers according to their ethical-value profiles enables the authors to create a psychographic description of these segments, and to relate it to their food attribute preferences.

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PurposeThe aim of this paper is to examine the impact of perceived fit, brand type and country's culture on the consumers' attitude towards brand extensions and on the parent brand equity.Design/methodology/approachData were collected in three European countries: Spain, UK, and Norway. A series of analyses of variance (ANOVA) were conducted to test the hypotheses.FindingsBrand extensions with high fit receive more favourable consumer evaluations and decrease the negative feedback effects of extensions on parent brand equity. Results also reveal that parent brand equity dilution is higher when the brand used to launch the extension has high equity. Finally, findings indicate different consumers' responses to extensions and effects on parent brand equity across countries.Research limitations/implicationsImportant directions for future research would be to include other countries and carry out a more in‐depth analysis to understand the effect of culture.Practical implicationsManagers should launch extensions with high perceived fit. In addition, greater effort is needed to extend high equity brands, due to their greater dilution. Finally, managers need to understand that consumer evaluations and feedback effects of the same brand extensions can vary due to cultural differences between consumers. Therefore, standardised brand extension strategies should be carefully considered.Originality/valueThe study focuses, not only on consumer evaluations of extensions, but also on the effects of extensions on the parent brand equity. Furthermore, this paper is one of the first to empirically examine and show that consumer evaluations of extensions and feedback effects on parent brand equity differ across countries.