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Launched in 2018 on the initiative of the Equal Opportunity Committee of HEC Lausanne, the Female Career Award honours twice a year an outstanding female academic career outside HEC. Winner of the 1st edition 2018, Franziska Völckner, Prof of Marketing, School of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at University of Cologne (Germany), will give a lecture on "Brand Positioning based on Brand Image-Country Image Fit" as part of the 7th June award ceremony.
PROGRAM
18:30-18:35
Introduction, Prof. Alain Schatt, Vice-Dean, HEC Lausanne
18:35-18:45
Female Career Award and HEC Equality action plan, Prof. Marianne Schmid Mast, President of Equal Opportunity Committee of HEC Lausanne
18:45-18:50
Award & Prof. Franziska Völckner academic cursus, Prof. Markus Christen, Marketing Department HEC Lausanne
18:50-19:25
Conference "Brand Positioning Based on Brand Image-Country Image Fit", Prof. Franziska Völckner, University of Cologne, winner of the first edition of 2018 award
19:30
End of the event and cocktail reception
REGISTRATION: to participate, please register on www.unil.ch/hec/fca. (free of charge)
More about Prof. Franziska Völckner's research and conference
Although markets continue to globalize, local consumer culture (LCC), or the culture of one’s home country, remains a powerful influence. This article proposes that managers may exploit consumers’ home country associations in their brand-building activities by adapting the brand’s positioning to the country image the brand targets, thus capitalizing on LCC. It develops, empirically illustrates, and validates a multi-attribute methodology for estimating the effect of brand image–country image (BICI) fit on consumers’ brand evaluations. BICI fit measures the extent to which consumers in a specific country perceive a brand image as being congruent with their home country’s image. We identify those image attributes that are most important for consumers’ fit perceptions and show that BICI fit significantly affects their brand evaluations. Furthermore, we examine consumer and product-category factors that may enhance or diminish this effect, which provides managers an effective way to target customers or identify categories in which BICI fit is particularly important. We demonstrate the validity and robustness of the methodology in several ways, including predictive validity, cross-national generalizability, and robustness for different operationalizations of BICI fit. Overall, the BICI fit metric provides key strategic insights into how managers can capitalize on LCC in their brand-positioning strategies.