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The purpose of this paper is to understand the importance of private labels (PLs) offered by each retailer on store loyalty, combining different loyalty-driven factors and assessing the importance of PLs on different loyalty stages – attitudinal and behavioural store loyalty.

Data were collected through a questionnaire (online survey) run in Portugal (n=469). Multi-level regressions were run to estimate the different loyalty models (base and full models) on each loyalty stage.

Results stress the positive contribution of PLs on consumers’ loyalty across different loyalty stages. However, findings suggest that this relationship may not be as strong as suggested in earlier studies. Findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between attitudinal and behavioural loyalty, emphasizing the complexity of the consumer loyalty construct and that multiple store-related factors can positively contribute to it.

Data were collected in one single country. It would be interesting to collect similar data in other countries in order to assess the extent to which results prevail across different competitive and cultural contexts.

Findings indicate that the loyalty factors that contribute to store loyalty are not homogeneous across the different loyalty stages, strengthening the idea that retailers should adopt different loyalty strategies depending on the loyalty stage its target customers are in.

This study is the first of its kind combining in a single framework the loyalty towards the retailers’ brand, store-related variables (in-store and economic factors), and specific consumer and retailer characteristics across different loyalty stages.

This research aims to identify the optimal configuration of investment which leads firms to their best competitive positions, considering the degree of concentration in the market.

The methodology was quantitative and based on secondary data with samples of 124, 106 and 90 firms from competitive environment classified as perfect competition, monopolistic competition and oligopoly, respectively. Proposed models' parameters were estimated by means of genetic algorithms.

Adjustments on firm's investment are contingent on the degree of competition they face. Results are in line with existing academic research affirmation that the purpose of investments is to create and exploit opportunities for positive economic rents and that investments allow firms to protect from rivals' competitive actions and reinforce the need for investment decision makers to consider the environment in which the firm is competing, when defining the amount of investment that must be done to achieve and maintain a favorable competitive advantage position.

This research brings two main original contributions. The first one is the identification of the optimal amount of capital and R&D investments which leads firms to their best competitive positions, contingent to the degree of concentration of the competitive environment in which they operate, and the size of the firm. The second one is related to the use of genetic algorithms to estimate optimization models that considers the three competitive environments studied (perfect competition, monopolistic competition and oligopoly) and the investment variables in the linear and quadratic forms.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of copycat packaging strategies on consumers’ product choices, assessing to what extent the adoption of this type of packaging increases the likelihood of purchase of private labels (PLs).

Data were collected in a preliminary field study (1,032 observations), followed by two experimental studies. Study 1 analyzed to what extent PLs’ packaging similarity influences consumers perceptions regarding product quality and production origin across six product categories. Study 2 analyzed, in a simulated real retail setting, to what extent copycat packaging strategies influence consumers’ choice across 22 product categories.

Results indicate that the higher the level of package similarity between PLs and national brands (NBs) (copycat strategy), the higher the likelihood that PLs’ products are perceived as being produced by one of the NBs’ manufacturers, leading to enhanced perceptions of quality of the PL products, and that the higher the level of package similarity, the higher the likelihood of consumption of PLs, especially when consumers are choosing products of utilitarian versus hedonic nature.

Data were collected in a south-western European country, which will aid the development of further studies in different retail settings.

This paper analyzes the impact of copycat packaging adoption by retailers on consumers’ perceptions and preferences about PLs. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to assess, across multiple product categories and use market copycats, the potential effects of PLs packaging strategies on consumers’ purchase behavior.

This paper aims to identify the determining factors for the financial performance (FP) of social enterprises in an emerging country, in this case Brazil.

This paper identifies the determinants of the FP of social enterprises in Brazil using the resource-based view as a theoretical lenses and the quantitative method (n = 601) of logistic regression, analyzing the importance of nine variables related to SEs.

The findings refer to practical contributions (which show how SEs should focus and allocate their resources to maximize FP) and theoretical contributions linked to entrepreneurship literature (by differentiating the results of this work from the literature on commercial entrepreneurship in terms of resources), social entrepreneurship literature (by presenting the resources that determine their FP), business literature, entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurship in emerging economies.

This work represents a novelty from a methodological point of view, filling the gap regarding the lack of studies that apply a quantitative methodology to a large sample and analyze several different variables when most studies analyze only one factor related to the performance of an organization. It also fills the gap in entrepreneurship studies that use some theoretical lenses. This work is also a pioneer in analyzing the variables involved, such as market orientation, technologies and impact measurement in social entrepreneurship. As this work uses data from a secondary sample, there is the limitation of not choosing the analyzed variables. Even though there were many variables in the sample, it was impossible to consider some variables, referring to various aspects of resources and performance. For this same reason, the social performance of SEs, which is of fundamental importance within the objectives of any organization of this type, was not analyzed and may be a suggestion for future work.