https://tidsskrift.dk/her/issue/feed HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business 2024-02-18T11:31:19+01:00 Jan Engberg & Margrethe Petersen hermes@cc.au.dk Open Journal Systems https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/135381 Good vs. Bad: An Empirical Analysis of the Brand Names of Coronavirus Vaccines 2023-09-01T16:15:27+02:00 László Kovács klaszlo1@gmail.com <p>Brand names are assets in marketing: a good name can help to sell products. Although research has made several recommendations on how “good” brand names should be created, the complex process is not easily adapted to every product category. Little research is done on a particular product category: the brand names of vaccines. This paper contributes to vaccine brand names in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The theoretical part of the paper first describes the characteristics of “good” and “bad” brand names, and then the focus is narrowed down to the characteristics of drug brand names and to the processes that influenced the naming of coronavirus vaccines. In the empirical part of the paper, Hungarian students perform brand recognition, recall, and association tasks connected to vaccine brand names. It will be shown that the vaccines are known by their public brand names (e.g., <em>Pfizer</em>) and not by their actual brand names (e.g., <em>Comirnaty</em>). The rating of the brand names shows that public brand names are considered to be better than the actual brand names, while brand associations collected for the actual brand names show mixed results. In the last part of the paper, theoretical implications are discussed, and recommendations for pharmaceutical companies are formulated to show what steps these companies could take to overcome the impasse between public and actual brand names.</p> 2024-02-18T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 László Kovács https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/137856 Word-of-Mouth Escalation Levels 2024-02-13T14:20:39+01:00 Janek Mücksch Janek.muecksch@tu-dresden.de Markus Ziemann markusziemann.mail@web.de Florian U. Siems florian.siems@tu-dresden.de <p class="Hermesabstracttekst"><span lang="EN-US">A huge amount of marketing literature focuses on communication among customers about products, services, or providers, which is referred to as Word-of-mouth (WoM). However, only a small part of the literature discusses in which situations and between which individuals WoM occurs. This article derives theoretically that the tie strength and the contextual reference between individuals can be regarded as important predictors for the occurrence of WoM: More precisely, we suggest that a higher tie strength and a contextual reference has an association with the likelihood that WoM occurs. We apply several scenarios with different levels of disconfirmation of expectations – which are regarded as escalations levels. Afterwards, a quantitative empirical study proves that individuals are more likely to tell others about certain events if these people have a higher tie strength. Also, we provide evidence that the contextual reference has an impact. The article underlines the importance of WoM for businesses and contributes to the existing literature.</span></p> 2024-03-13T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright (c) 2024 Janek Mücksch, Markus Ziemann, Florian U. Siems