HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business https://tidsskrift.dk/her en-US <p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:</p> <p>a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><span style="color: #4f372e;">Creative Commons Attribution License</span></a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.</p> <p>b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</p> <p>c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new"><span style="color: #4f372e;">The Effect of Open Access</span></a>).</p> hermes@cc.au.dk (Jan Engberg & Margrethe Petersen) hermes@cc.au.dk (-) Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:31:19 +0100 OJS 3.3.0.13 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Good vs. Bad: An Empirical Analysis of the Brand Names of Coronavirus Vaccines https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/135381 <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> László Kovács Copyright (c) 2024 László Kovács https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/135381 Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 Word-of-Mouth Escalation Levels https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/137856 <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> Janek Mücksch, Markus Ziemann, Florian U. Siems Copyright (c) 2024 Janek Mücksch, Markus Ziemann, Florian U. Siems https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/137856 Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100