How Do Consumers See Firms’ Family Nature? A Review of the Literature

Abstract

This literature review analyzes studies that deal with the meanings that consumers form about firms’ family nature. Through the analysis of 83 papers, we highlight the importance of firms’ family nature from consumers’ perceptual, social, and cultural perspectives, at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Beside the common meanings that consumers attach to firms’ family nature, our review showed that in some cases, firms’ family nature acquired meanings that were deemed to be so important that they eventually provided consumers with self-identification, communitarian identification, and novel market configurations, and even made the family firm the industry’s prototypical organizational form.

Keywords

firms’ family nature consumers meanings micro level meso level macro level

Introduction

We review studies on the meanings that consumers form about firms’ family nature. Consumers’ active role in contemporary marketplaces is widely acknowledged in current research (Cova & Dalli, 2009; Martin & Schouten, 2013). Consumers are more powerful than ever owing to the spectacular rise in digital technologies, the proliferation of virtual environments, and—more generally—a shift in power from firms to consumers (Labrecque, vor dem Esche, Mathwick, Novak, & Hofacker, 2013; Muñiz & Schau, 2007). The establishment of contemporary paradigms like consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; 2015) and service dominant logic (Lusch & Vargo, 2006; Vargo & Lusch, 2008) and their ways of framing market exchanges beyond their transactional value, have pushed scholars to regard the marketplace as a fabric of meanings. Thus, scholars have gradually shifted their focus from firms to customers and have noted that consumers make extensive use of marketplace meanings to negotiate their identity via individual consumption practices, to establish social relationships through the creation of social aggregates that form around consumption, and to use the marketplace to create and circulate social and cultural ideologies that go beyond mere consumption (Giesler & Fischer, 2017; Macinnis, Torelli, & Park, 2019; Peñaloza & Venkatesh, 2006).

In family business studies, scholars are especially concerned with whether and how the meanings implied in a firm’s family nature (i.e., being a family firm) influence consumers, and with whether and how family firms can exploit these meanings to gain differentiation and to outcompete their nonfamily counterparts (e.g., Binz Astrachan & Botero, 2018; Deephouse & Jaskiewicz, 2013). This is clearly visible in a growing number of scholarly contributions on family firm brands that are depicted in the four available comprehensive literature reviews (Beck, 2016; Binz Astrachan, Botero, Astrachan, & Prügl, 2018; Bravo, Cambra, Centeno, & Melero, 2017; Sageder, Mitter, & Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2018). A close look at research contributions summarized by these literature reviews reveals a tendency by scholars to consider firms’ family nature as an idiosyncratic resource (see Binz Astrachan et al., 2018), which distracts from the significance implied in being a family firm as (also) a by-product of a negotiation of meanings not only at the individual level but also at the level of the multiple social spheres. Recent developments in marketing and consumer research, on the contrary, have widely shown that consumption meanings are only partly explained by consumers’ positive mental associations with a market offering (for the most recent criticisms, see Macinnis et al., 2019) but are largely created through mechanisms of congruence (or fit) between a market offering and consumers’ selves (i.e., at the individual level; see Escalas & Bettman, 2005), through the association and appropriation of these meanings by some groups (i.e., at the group level; e.g., Muñiz & O’Guinn 2001; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995), and through the underlying dynamics that regulate the functioning of markets (i.e., at the market level; e.g., Giesler & Fischer, 2017). This is not to say that these individual-, group-, and market-level mechanisms have never been studied before—rather, that being previous literature reviews based on the implicit assumption that the firms’ family nature is an idiosyncratic resource of family firms, they tended to overlook the inclusion of other works where such family nature is framed as an outcome of negotiated and market-mediated consumption practices.

Having identified this gap, we review the literature so as to answer the following research question: What do we know about how consumers form meanings about firms’ family nature? To answer this question, we conduct a mixed-methods literature review and create a mapping framework that includes different yet nested levels where meanings are created: micro, meso, and macro (see Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Giesler & Thompson, 2016). The micro-meso-macro framework unifies distinct yet interconnected and embedded spheres of social reality (Dopfer, Foster, & Potts, 2004) that range from dyadic firm–consumer interactions (the micro level), through structured patterns of action and interaction in collectives (the meso level), and broader social categories in which both the micro and meso levels are embedded (the macro level; see Andreini, Pedeliento, Zarantonello, & Solerio, 2018). Used to organize the literature, this framework provides a fine-grained ontological lens able to reframe what we already know about how consumers form meanings about firms’ family nature and how the multiple social contexts in which consumers are embedded make such family nature meaningful (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011). Thus, the micro-meso-macro framework portrays as many nested contexts in which specific social structures, interactions, and meanings emerge and develop. Our review findings enable us to propose a different—namely, more consumer-sensitive—perspective through which firms’ family nature can be approached, and to propose a research agenda to advance and further enlarge the family business literature’s scope and boundaries.

Previous Literature Reviews

As noted, a growing stream has investigated consumers’ perceptions of firms’ family nature. It has focused on family-based marketing and family-based brands, and is well summarized in four recent literature reviews (Beck, 2016; Binz Astrachan et al., 2018; Bravo et al., 2017; Sageder et al., 2018). In short, Beck (2016) depicted the effects of being a family firm on firms and their stakeholders, highlighting the relevance of conducting brand management research in family firms. Bravo et al. (2017) provided an overview of the brand concept, along with a framework to better understand branding in the specific context of family firms. Binz Astrachan et al. (2018) offered a compelling literature review to answer the questions: what a family business brand is, what its constituents are, and how branding takes place in family firms, by considering consumers’ perceptions and reactions. Finally, Sageder et al. (2018) proposed a detailed and comprehensive picture of the literature on family firms’ images and reputations from the perspectives of both consumers and firms. Even more important, the most relevant research streams considered by these reviews included studies that (1) considered what family firms communicate as part of their brands (e.g., Krappe, Goutas, & Von Schlippe, 2011), (2) analyzed when family firms communicate their family firm brands (e.g., Micelotta & Raynard, 2011), or (3) focused on how family firm brands are perceived (e.g., Botero, Binz Astrachan, & Calabrò, 2018). Research into the third component tended to combine how stakeholders viewed family firms.

However, notably, none of these reviews used the words consumer(s), customer(s), or client(s) in the search strings through which articles were identified in electronic databases. Thus, these reviews’ contributions are skewed toward branding and communication strategies at the firm level, with limited consideration of consumers’ roles. A close look at the list of reviewed papers (e.g., see the list included in the supplementary data by Binz Astrachan et al., 2018¹) corroborates this statement. In contrast to these reviews, we focus on consumers and review studies that help us to understand how consumers form meanings related to firms’ family nature, also shedding light on the dynamics that lie beyond such meaning formation.

Method

To get a deeper understanding of what we know about how consumers form meanings about firms’ family nature, we integrated the systematic review approach with an inductive ontological analysis of papers. A systematic literature review is “an overview of primary studies which contains an explicit statement of objectives, materials, and methods and has been conducted according to explicit and reproducible methodology” (Greenhalgh, 1997, p. 672). To perform it, we followed the protocol suggested by Thorpe, Holt, Macpherson, and Pittaway (2005) as well as Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart (2003). Following Jones, Coviello, and Tang (2011), we then enhanced the review with a thematic ontological analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), inductively reading and rereading the papers in iterative cycles to identify themes in a process of theme accordance and categorization that ensured consistency within and across theme categories (Jones et al., 2011, Noy & McGuinness, 2001).

We limited the review to articles in established peer-reviewed journals, because they are a source of validated knowledge and have a strong impact on the field (Ordanini, Rubera, & DeFillippi, 2008; Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Bachrach, & Podsakoff, 2005). To identify articles, we applied three search strategies, each aimed at increasing the number of papers. The final database consisted of 83 papers. Online appendixes A and B provide extensive details of the procedures we followed to search, select, and analyze the papers. The adoption of these protocols enabled us to identify a set of papers that was not included in previous literature reviews. Of the 83 papers we identified, only 11 had been previously considered.

A closer look at the 83 articles revealed a clear preference for qualitative studies (50 papers). This can be explained by the fact that this research stream is still fairly young, and that measurement scales have not yet been developed (Binz Astrachan et al., 2018). Twenty-one used a quantitative approach, five a mixed-methods methodology, four were literature reviews, and three were conceptual papers. Empirical studies had been developed in very different geographical contexts, with most focusing on single European countries (35 articles), the United States (19), and single Asian countries (7). A wide array of industries was represented, although there is a clear overrepresentation of studies on food and beverages (26), retail (10), and tourism (8). Few studies (4) focused simultaneously on different industries.

On the basis of the systematic literature review and the ontological analysis of the 83 selected papers, we clustered papers in different groups by using two criteria.

First, we distinguished the papers based on the whether the family firm (1) was the main focus of investigation (n = 33),² or (2) was a research context (n = 20), or (3) emerged as an incidental finding (n = 30). Second, we categorized the papers based on their level of analysis, distinguished into micro, meso, and macro levels. As mentioned in the introduction, this coding is consistent with the perspective shared in consumer culture studies (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Giesler & Thompson, 2016) and with this branch of scholarship’s attempt to inscribe individual consumers’ lived experiences into larger social contexts (see Askegaard & Linnet, 2011). At the micro level, consumers are framed and analyzed at the individual-subjective level, that is, on cognitive perceptions and their behavioral effects (Escalas & Bettman, 2005; Fournier, 1998). At the meso level, consumers are investigated as members of social aggregates such as communities, social movements, and subcultural and ethnic groups (Cova & Pace, 2006; Hietanen & Rokka, 2015; Muñiz & O’Guinn 2001; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995) whose formation may imply or may revolve around consumption practices. Finally, at the macro level, consumers are seen as marketplace actors that may prompt and affect the functioning of markets and the structure of the underpinning product categories (Akaka, Vargo, & Lusch, 2013; Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Giesler & Fischer, 2017).

Results

We present the literature based on the different levels of analysis adopted and based on the role of firms’ family nature in the papers selected for the literature review (see Table 1 and Online Appendix C).

Table 1.

Overview of the Systematic Literature Review’s Key Findings.

Level	Firms’ family nature as the focus of investigation	Firms’ family nature as the research context	Firms’ family nature as incidental finding
Micro level	Perceived associations	Situational meanings	Meanings related to product categories
	Positive: small, local, trustworthy, socially responsible, authentic, and human	Family nature meanings related to direct relationships with owners	The meaning of firms’ family nature are salient in specific product categories
	Negative: limited selection of product and price offerings	Family nature meanings related to shopping experiences (e.g., IKEA store)	Identitarian meanings
	Relational meanings		Family nature of firms as a signal of a trait of consumer individual identity (e.g. anti-consumption and brand antagonism)
	Positive: good relational skills, strong bonds with consumers, integrity, long-term strategy
	Negative: inflexible and hierarchic
Meso level	Communitarian glue	Adherence to social groups	Ethnocentric meanings
	The meanings of family nature as communitarian, lifestyle, hobby glue	Family firms’ nature as adherence to ideologies of specific social and subcultural groups or movements	Firms’ family nature as a herald of ethnocentricity
		Family nature meanings in brand community	Subcultural meanings
		Divergent meanings compared to family firms’ intended ones (e.g. Vespa)	Firms’ family nature represents the perpetuation of subcultural values (often linked to a territory), embodied in specific subcultural communities
			Antagonistic meanings
			Firms’ family nature has anti-institutional and anti-government meanings to antagonistic groups
Macro level	Prototypical feature	Territorial and local features in product categories	Sociocultural meanings
	Firms’ family nature means authenticity, high quality and heritage for an entire product category	Market actors recognize firms’ family nature as expressions of territorial and local features into product categories	Firms’ family nature creates and supports a collective identity in specific markets
	Economic developing force	Product category status	Sociopolitical meaning
	Firms’ family nature means economic development	Firms’ family nature legitimized with a higher product category status by market actors	Firms’ family nature represents an oppositional category code

The Micro Level

Firms’ Family Nature as the Focus of Analysis

At the micro level, 12 of 20 papers that analyzed firms’ family nature as the main focus of analysis relied on a positivist epistemology and adopted a quantitative strategy that focused on how firms’ family nature can affect consumers’ cognitions and behaviors (e.g., Beck & Kenning, 2015; Binz Astrachan, Hair, Pieper, & Baldauf, 2013; Lude & Prügl, 2018; Orth & Green, 2009; Sageder, Duller, & Mitter, 2015). Six papers relied on qualitative methodologies and employed various research methods, such as case studies, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. Two papers adopted a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative papers generally adopted a psychological and cognitive perspective to identifying the attributes consumers attached to family-owned firms compared to non–family-owned ones (e.g., Beck & Kenning, 2015; Beck & Prügl, 2018; Binz Astrachan et al., 2013; Botero et al., 2018; Orth & Green, 2009; Sageder et al., 2015; Schellong, Kraiczy, Malär, & Hack, 2019). The qualitative papers were mainly interested in unveiling consumers’ perceptions and the meanings relating to the relationships and face-to-face interactions between consumers and members of family businesses (see Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Krappe et al., 2011; Lyman, 1991; Presas, Guia, & Muñoz, 2014; Wilson, Bengtsson, & Curran, 2014).

Regarding the meanings at the micro level, our review confirmed consumers’ well-known mental associations with firms’ family nature (Beck & Kenning, 2015; Binz Astrachan et al., 2013; Sageder et al., 2015) and the attributes consumers attach to family-owned brands (Botero et al., 2018; Lude & Prügl, 2018; 2019; Schellong et al., 2019). Common meanings that consumers perceive as peculiar to family firms and their brands relate to their smaller sizes (Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Panwar, Paul, Nybakk, Hansen, & Thompson, 2014) and to their being perceived as more authentic (Lude & Prügl, 2018), human (Beck & Prügl, 2018), trustworthy (Beck & Kenning, 2015; Binz Astrachan et al., 2013; Duncan & Hasso, 2018; Lude & Prügl, 2019), sensitive to social responsibility (Kang, Chiang, Huangthanapan, & Downing, 2015; Panwar et al., 2014; Schellong et al., 2019), and closer to the local context they act in (Baschieri, Carosi, & Mengoli, 2017; Duncan & Hasso, 2018). The evidence from quantitative studies was also supported by qualitative enquiries, which empirically confirmed the above-mentioned consumer perceptions. Furthermore, the articles also showed that what consumers perceive and appreciate most about family firms relates to their ability to establish and maintain relational bonds with their customers (Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Presas et al., 2014). The same meanings were also revealed in empirical studies that focused on family-based brands, where brand values such as consistency, enduring commitment, integrity, and attention to creating strong bonds with stakeholders were underlined (Krappe et al., 2011; Peters & Frehse, 2011; Wilson et al., 2014). Thus, most of the meanings attached to family firms have positive valence, and only a few studies disclosed negative consumer perceptions, such as the limited product selection and price/value in retail (Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Orth & Green, 2009). Consumers considered family firms to be inflexible and hierarchical, and questioned these companies’ future continuity and succession (Krappe et al., 2011).

While the micro-level papers focused on family firms confirmed what previous literature reviews found, our investigation shed light on the ways in which consumers formed these perceptions and the related outcomes. In particular, most of the selected papers categorized at the micro level used a theoretical approach based on signaling theory (see Connelly, Certo, Ireland, & Reutzel, 2011) to explain what consumers perceived about firms’ family nature. The direct and personal relationships between consumers and members of family firms is another way in which consumers develop positive perceptions, enabling family-owned businesses to gain advantages vis-à-vis nonfamily firms (e.g., Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Dessì et al., 2014; Lyman, 1991; Orth & Green, 2009; Peters & Frehse, 2011; Presas et al., 2014; Sageder et al., 2015). Studies in this set also provided evidence that the above meanings also relate to positive consumers’ outcomes, such as purchases and loyalty (Carrigan & Buckley, 2008; Presas et al., 2014; Sageder et al., 2015). Others noted that consumers have better evaluations, better preferences, and higher intentions to purchase when comparing family firms’ offerings to those of nonfamily firms (Binz Astrachan et al., 2013; Lude & Prügl, 2018; Orth & Green, 2009). Other studies focused on less frequently studied outcomes, such as emotional value (Peters & Frehse, 2011), feelings of happiness (Schellong et al., 2019), and indulgence (Wirtz & McColl-Kennedy, 2010).

At the micro level, our review showed how papers focused on how family firms have tended to overemphasize the latter’s ability to persuade consumers and to prompt the formation of positive perceptions via communication strategies, communication tactics, and brand stimuli. Indeed, to date, only two studies have tested whether family firms’ planned identities communicated via their branding strategies were in fact perceived differently by consumers, that is, whether a projected identity generated a misalignment with image (Dessì et al., 2014; Wilson et al., 2014). In the retail context, Wilson et al. (2014) found that meanings attributed to family-operated retailers can differ significantly depending on whether these meanings belong to managers or to consumers. In the same context, Dessì et al. (2014) found a significant perceptual discordance between retail managers and their customers when they sought to understand how small family-owned retailers were able to compete against large superstores that sell the same products.

Firms’ Family Nature as the Context of Analysis

Only four papers took a micro perspective with family firms as the context of analysis (De Roeck, Maon, & Lejeune, 2013; Dessì & Floris, 2010; Wirtz & McColl-Kennedy, 2010; Yi & La, 2004) and focused on how consumers develop meanings about family firms. They found that these meanings can form through direct relationships with family owners (Dessì & Floris, 2010; Yi & La, 2004) or through positive shopping experiences (De Roeck et al., 2013) resulting in the establishment of interpersonal (Dessì & Floris, 2010; Yi & La, 2004), company–consumer (Wirtz & McColl-Kennedy, 2010), and brand–consumer (De Roeck et al., 2013) bonds.

In the context of a family-owned restaurant, Yi and La (2004) found that a human touch, that is, the direct relationship consumers establish with a firm’s family members, is a direct driver of loyalty to the service organization. This human touch image has been demonstrated to be effective when communicated during service recovery, lowering opportunistic behaviors by consumers, who indulged companies presented as family firms more than other company types (Wirtz & McColl-Kennedy, 2010).

Differently, De Roeck et al. (2013) focused on IKEA, finding that despite the fact that the firm’s family nature is not communicated or promoted, such family nature is made salient via sales promotions and other marketing tactics especially addressed to families, such as family membership programs, family-inclusive shops, and special offers to families. Although IKEA’s family nature was not a primary focus of this article, the results underlined how this characteristic prompted positive consumer experiences. As De Roeck et al. (2013) vividly state in reference to IKEA, “The democratic design encourages customers to be part of IKEA’s family” (p. 145). In addition, Dessì and Floris (2010) demonstrated that firms’ performance is directly linked to the accordance between management and customers’ perceptions of family firms’ strengths, and mostly relate to human relationships and professionalism.

Firms’ Family Nature as an Incidental Finding

Ten papers included incidental findings on firms’ family nature at the micro level of analysis. Beside the common meanings that consumers attach to firms’ family nature, such as small, truthful, socially responsible, and committed to quality (e.g., see Karstens & Belz, 2006; Meas, Hu, Batte, Woods, & Ernst, 2014), these papers’ incidental findings revealed how firms’ family nature is salient not only in specific product categories such as organic food (Grashuis & Magnier, 2018; Karstens & Belz, 2006; Meas et al., 2014) and luxury products (Seo & Buchanan-Oliver, 2015) but also for services such as restaurants (Danes, Hess, Story, & York, 2010) and retailing (Paul, Sankaranarayanan, & Mekoth, 2016).

Other incidental findings also indicate that firms’ family nature is utilized by consumers to articulate their identity as individuals (Charters, Fountain, & Fish, 2009; Lee, Motion, & Conroy, 2009). Lee et al. (2009) focused on anticonsumption and brand antagonism, and unveiled a consumers’ preference for shopping at family-based stores as an example of their empathy with local businesses. Charters et al. (2009) revealed that consumers tend to prefer buying wines from family-owned wineries as a way to express their antagonism to bigger, non–family-owned organizations. Thus, these findings align with previous studies that suggest that consumers use the symbolic meaning of consumption to emphasize the ideological impacts of mundane consumption choices (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982) and use consumption for self-representation purposes (Aron & Aron, 1997; Aron, Paris, & Aron, 1995; Sirgy, 1982). In the context of family firms, this reasoning implies that consumption choices are made on the basis of a perceived fit between individual selves and the meanings that are supposed to be related to firms’ family nature. This identitarian congruence shapes consumption preferences for family firms (Lundqvist, Liljander, Gummerus, & Van Riel, 2013) and higher identification with family members (Charters et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2009).

The Meso Level

Firms’ Family Nature as the Focus of Analysis

Two papers at the meso level showed that members who joined social groups that revolve around consumption practices use the meanings implied in firms’ family nature to bind members together and to keep the group alive. Lapio and Morris (2000), for instance, investigated the group of fans of NASCAR, a family-owned company that organizes popular stock car racing, and found that these amateurs consider themselves to be valued and intimate members of the NASCAR family. Bednarz and Nikodemska-Wołowik (2017), for instance, showed that in Poland, familiness is associated with negative meanings of nepotism and amorality owing to the negative cultural legacy of adverse past political and economic conditions.

This set of papers underlines that firms’ family nature was linked not only to consumers’ mental processing driving their choices but also to group-based dynamics in social settings in which consumption assumes the form of a communitarian practice. This is visible not only in consumers’ aggregates such as communities of consumption or brand communities, but also in broader social contexts in which consumers are nested, where the meanings of being a family firm can either be used to maintain the group or contrasted.

Firms’ Family Nature as the Context of Analysis

Of the reviewed papers in which firms’ family nature was the context of analysis, seven adopted a meso level perspective when studying family-based contexts. For example, McGrath, Sherry, and Heisley (1993) demonstrated how farmers’ family nature embodied root cultural metaphors that induce consumers to compare their lifestyle to the values that underpin the ways in which family farmers relate to the market. In this context, firms’ family nature relates more to ideologies, according to which consumption choices are self-representation vehicles to signal an individual’s adherence to specific groups or social movements (Elliott, 1997; Holt, 1997). Similarly, Sherry (1990) demonstrated that the family nature of flea markets in the Midwest was fundamental to the institutionalization of the sociocultural practices that this market type proposes, since these businesses embody values and ideologies that contrast strongly to those aligned with the capitalist ethos. Encounters, events, and markets are the ways in which these meanings and ideologies are perpetuated and shared in communitarian settings, into which economic and festive impulses can be fused. The outcomes related to the family nature meanings enacted in ideological social settings can be summarized by Holt’s (2004) affirmation that consumption is first a cultural practice imbued with ideological meanings. Thus, the creation of alternative social formats and consumption types can be considered to be the outcomes of the ways in which firms’ family nature can be shared and experienced by consumers with communal ideological mind-sets (Balmer & Chen, 2016).

Four other papers focused on three family-based brand communities: Nutella (Cova & D’Antone, 2016; Cova & Pace, 2006), LEGO (Gyrd-Jones & Kornum, 2013), and Vespa (Rindell, Santos, & de Lima, 2015). Although these brand communities are linked to specific family firms, none of these studies investigated the social structures and social interactions developed according to the family firm brands’ values but focused only on the consumer and marketing practices enacted in these communities. The reasons are different for each case. At the start of the Internet era, Nutella suppressed the very first brand fans’ attempts to create consumer-based brand communities. This created conflicting relationships between the brand evangelists and the company. For this reason, when Nutella opened its company-owned brand community, “My Nutella the Community,” the managers decided that this online space was for member self-expression instead of using it to promote Nutella’s heritage and brand values. Differently, LEGO’s brand revitalization process passed through multiple consumer-owned communities not directly controlled by the company. Near bankruptcy in 2003, LEGO started a recovery program that included the recouping of brand values. Putting consumers first, the company began to orchestrate its social and network capital, which included multiple user-generated brand communities.

Rindell et al. (2015) focused on the Vespa brand community in Portugal. Interestingly, they identified the difference between the family-owned brand heritage as aimed by the corporate governance and the heritage as understood by the members of Vespa brand community. For the former, this brand heritage was largely represented by the brand’s ability to constantly update models with cutting-edge engine technologies while keeping them faithful to the original Vespa design. For the latter, this brand heritage was instead represented only by its past, regardless of whether new models were faithful to their original design. As the article reports, this misalignment caused a lack of fans’ communitarian representation with current Vespa brand values and therefore the refusal of the new versions of products, the creation of independent user-generated communities that support the brand’s glorious past, and the refusal of any contagion with Vespa’s new brand values. Such findings offer new opportunities for deeper investigations on the reasons and logics behind consumer practices relating to family-owned brands in different community settings, as well as for the identification of possible solutions to more tightly unfold the meanings implied in firms’ family nature in the lives of brand communities.

Firms’ Family Nature as an Incidental Finding

Three of the seven studies that incidentally found evidence about firms’ family nature at the meso level focused on consumers’ ethnocentrism (Alonso, 2012; Fernández-Ferrín, Calvo-Turrientes, Bande, Artaraz-Miñón, & Galán-Ladero, 2018; Pitta & Franzak, 2008), ethnic consumption (Amine & Lazzaoui, 2011; Jamal, 2005), subcultural social groups (Peñaloza, 2001), and anticonsumption social movements (Gopaldas, 2014). Papers that focused on consumers’ ethnocentrism showed how consumers make purposeful use of firms’ family nature to make sense, perpetuate, and instantiate their ethnocentrism in their purchasing choices (Alonso, 2012; Fernández-Ferrín et al., 2018; Pitta & Franzak, 2008). For instance, Alonso (2012) and Fernández-Ferrín et al. (2018) demonstrated that local consumers use firms’ family nature as a herald of their ethnocentric ideology, sustained by their local consumption choices and thus their membership to a local and ethnocentric social group.

Two papers considered selected ethnic groups and found that firms’ family nature signals tradition and reassures consumers in transactional contexts endangered by “invasion” by nonlocal firms, such as retail chains setting up operations in developing countries (Amine & Lazzaoui, 2011). Jamal (2005) showed that family firms are good at working with coethnic consumers, because family-owned retailers are used to working with ambivalence, providing both ethnic and mainstream brands and products at competitive prices. Peñaloza (2001) investigated how consumers’ cultural production at a cattle trade show and rodeo recreated and maintained ancestral cultural values, finding that consumers see family-owned ranches and booth exhibitors as the most meaningful firm types engaged in the perpetuation of the American West subculture. Finally, not all the family meanings were used constructively. For instance, Gopaldas (2014), focusing on the wine industry, showed that consumers and family firm brands proactively spread a marketplace sentiment of anger at corporations, governments, and mainstream consumers, contrasting their family values against more global ones.

The Macro Level

Firms’ Family Nature as the Focus of Analysis

Among the researchers who studied family firms as their main objective at the macro level, seven papers considered consumers as actors who, through their actions, can modify the marketplace they act in. These papers mainly relied on a sociological approach to markets (Fligstein & Dauter, 2007), where the market is considered to be a socially constructed arena in which different actor types (consumers, firms, intermediaries, and institutions) can make sense of things. In this instance, firms’ family nature resulted in an effective cultural signal, which has meanings that consumers can develop and exploit, contributing to the development of market dynamics, including the emergence and development of new product categories, such as Australian wines (Strickland, Smith Maguire, & Frost, 2013); the perpetuation of traditional markets, such as fine wine and restaurants (Heine, Phan, & Atwal, 2016; Kovács, Carroll, & Lehman, 2013); the development of local economies (Del Baldo 2014; File, 1995; Walton, 2014); and even the incidence of some possibly negative influences of family firms on society (Carney & Nason, 2018).

The results showed that firms’ family nature acquired meanings that were deemed to be so important for consumers that they eventually provided novel market configurations and made the family firm the industry’s prototypical organizational form. For example, Strickland et al. (2013) demonstrated that advertising a family heritage was a way for wineries to acquire legitimacy in Australia’s nascent wine market, since consumers weighted winemakers’ reliability in relation to the owning family’s stated heritage. Similarly, Heine et al. (2016) showed that in France’s fine wine industry, firms’ family nature is a prototypical cue of authenticity that family-based companies must manage with caution in order to fit the “ideal” prototype in consumers’ minds. The ways in which family firm meanings become sources of authenticity are perpetuated in market practices developed with consumers. For instance, consumers reward family firms’ efforts to keep their commitment to quality while downplaying their commercial motives. On the other hand, family firms do their best to appear ever-committed to quality and to find the promotional mix in order to appear uninterested in and distant from commercial motives (Beverland, 2006; Heine et al., 2016; Kovács et al., 2013).

At the macro level, two papers underlined another salient meaning that deserves attention: firms’ family nature as a development force. Del Baldo (2014) and File (1995) demonstrated that consumers and other stakeholders see family firms as local economic developers that can even stimulate such industries’ internationalization (Walton, 2014).

Family Firms’ Nature as the Context of Analysis

The nine studies of family firms as contexts of analysis at the macro level confirmed that firms’ family nature is a prototypical feature that relates to consumer perceptions of authenticity in specific markets, such as wine and business-to-business industries (Massa, Helms, Voronov, & Wang, 2017; Tsui-Auch, 2005) or even a prototypical feature of innovation in industries such as tourism (Wang & Juan, 2016). The same prototypical feature was found to be relevant for a family-based brand (Santos, Burghausen, & Balmer, 2016), where the corporate family-based brand heritage fostered a sense of authenticity for the product brands of the same company.

At this level, we found that in some industries, firms’ family nature represented the expression of local cultures and was also interpreted as a territorial developing force by local communities (Liu & Gao, 2014; Tessari & Godley, 2014). In this vein, Melewar and Skinner (2018) demonstrated that for consumers, firms’ family nature is a prototypical feature of local industrial organizations. Specifically, they found that for consumers, family ownership was a signal of quality and authenticity as well as a structuring force that helped to make brewing an area-salient industrial activity. Delmestri and Greenwood (2016) investigated a specific case of a family firm in the spirit industry, demonstrating that for local communities, firms’ family nature constituted such a value to legitimize a brand undergoing a vertical rise in status, which also affected the entire product category’s structure.

Finally, Press, Arnould, Murray, and Strand (2014) demonstrated that firms’ family nature can become an oppositional category code when consumers utilize its meanings to animate ideological conflicts (Luedicke, Thompson, & Giesler, 2010; Mikkonen, Vicdan, & Markkula, 2014) with the emergence of new markets (Giesler, 2007), such as the organic food industry. These aspects will be more evident in papers in which firms’ family nature was an incidental finding, as we will explain.

Firms’ Family Nature as an Incidental Finding

Among the papers that found some incidental findings with implications for understanding how consumers see firms’ family nature, 13 adopted a macro-level perspective. Eight presented results in line with previously discussed macro-level findings, in which firms’ family nature was found to be a prototypical feature of product categories (Catry, 2003; Ger & Csaba, 2000; Kovács et al., 2013; Smith Maguire, 2013; Ulver-Sneistrup & Johansson, 2011; Voronov, De Clercq, & Hinings, 2013; Vrontis & Paliwoda, 2008), while two unveiled firms’ family nature as a driver of the development of new product categories, such as the single malt whisky category (McKendrick & Hannan, 2013) and private banking in the United Kingdom (Laurence, 2008).

Different from previous analyses, three articles unveiled a sociocultural valence of firms’ family nature, and not only an economic one. In particular, family firm meanings have been found to be key to creating and supporting collective identities in specific markets, such as winemaking (Markowska & Lopez-Vega, 2018). Stories of pioneering winemaking families have become a sort of communitarian identity glue among local companies and an objective element that consumers use to evaluate wineries’ expertise at making high-quality products (Markowska & Lopez-Vega, 2018). Smith Maguire (2010), for instance, revealed that wine promoters, who are cultural intermediaries that operate at the interfaces between winemakers and customers, make extensive use of narratives that underline the symbolism implied in being a family firm winery so as to foster a higher feeling of consumer authenticity toward the market offering.

Furthermore, the assumed sociopolitical meanings of firms’ family nature affected some markets’ social and economic regulations, such as extended retail hours in Canada (McGregor, 2005). A similar political meaning has been used by consumers to negatively influence the outcomes of mergers and acquisitions enacted by global companies in specific markets (Van Rensburg, 2015). Thus, firms’ family nature can assume the meaning of not only economic developer or reshaper of product categories but also sociopolitical promoter of individual and communitarian identities (Markowska & Lopez-Vega, 2018; McGregor, 2005).

Firms’ Family Nature and a Future Research Agenda

We have reviewed studies that relate to the meanings that consumers form about firms’ family nature (i.e., being a family firm). Our findings have unveiled that consumers use such meanings to negotiate their identities, to establish social relationships, and to promote social and cultural ideologies that go beyond the pure act of consumption. The previous literature reviews focused more on whether and how the meanings implied in a firm’s family nature influence consumers (with a tendency to consider firms’ family nature as an idiosyncratic resource). Instead, our review has represented papers that shed light on the meanings implied in being a family firm as a result of a negotiation of meanings that takes place not only at the individual level (micro) but also at the level of the multiple social spheres (meso and macro) in which consumers are embedded and in which consumption occurs. Thus, we were also able to shed more light on the mechanisms of congruence (or fit) between market offerings and consumers’ selves, on the association and appropriation of these meanings by some groups, and on some of the underlying dynamics that animate markets.

Furthermore, our literature review has advanced knowledge about how consumers form meanings about firms’ family nature in two major and emerging ways. First, categorizing the papers according to family firms’ roles in the analysis not only allowed us to identify studies in which family firms were the main actors in the meaning formation (firms’ family nature as the focus of analysis) but also enabled us to broaden our perspectives to cases in which meaning formation occurred among different actors. Thus, when family firms were the context of the analysis, we could detect a more active role of consumers, engaged in meaning formation with other market actors. With papers in which firms’ family nature was an incidental finding, we could enrich consumers’ multifaceted meanings, such as identity-based, ideological, cultural, sociopolitical, and prototypical meanings.

Second, the micro, meso, and macro codification analysis adopted for grouping the literature into separate levels corresponding to as many social contexts in which meanings were formed. Despite being distinguished, the micro, the meso and macro levels cannot be considered as silos; they are connected via metalayers (Chandler & Vargo, 2011) in which practices, routines, activities, and processes allow for the exchange, negotiation, legitimation, and delegitimation of meanings, values, and symbols across individual, social, and market contexts (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). This framework led us to propose a research agenda to stimulate the development of further knowledge and a deeper understanding of firms’ family nature.

The Micro Level

In our literature review, we identified three gap types at the micro level: the emotional significance of firms’ family nature, the self-identity significance of firms’ family nature, and the family firm personality. Each of these gaps are discussed next.

The Emotional Significance of Firms’ Family Nature

As our review suggested, studies have shown that consumers have positive attitudes to firms’ family nature and that these attitudes can even be more positive than what they may be toward nonfamily companies (see Beck & Kenning, 2015; Binz Astrachan et al., 2013; Botero et al., 2018; Dessì et al., 2014; Orth & Green, 2009; Sageder et al., 2015). However, we still know little about whether a firm’s family nature prompts specific emotional feelings, such as attachment (e.g., Park, MacInnis, Priester, Eisingerich, & Iacobucci, 2010), love (Batra, Ahuvia, & Bagozzi, 2012), or—if negative—hate (e.g., Zarantonello, Romani, Grappi, & Bagozzi, 2016). Attachment theory (see Bowlby, 1969), which is widely established in marketing and branding studies (see Jiménez & Voss, 2014; Park et al., 2010; Thomson, MacInnis, & Park, 2005), is a promising investigation stream upon which family firms’ emotional significance can be grounded. Possible research questions include but are not limited to the following:

Which emotional bond types are more likely to determine consumers’ feelings of emotional attachment to family firms compared to nonfamily ones?

Which negative feelings (e.g., hate) do consumers relate to firms’ family nature? Which factors are more likely to prompt such negative consumer feelings?

How do the consumer affective responses toward family firm brands and/or products change according to the meanings the firm’s family nature assumes for that consumer?

The Self-Identity Significance of Firms’ Family Nature

Consumers use self-identity meanings as identity signals or self-representation vehicles (Aron & Aron, 1997; Aron et al., 1995; Escalas & Bettman, 2005; McGrath et al., 1993; Sirgy, 1982). Scholars have often shown that family firms are engaged in a sort of David versus Goliath competitive dynamic, because they often compete against large multinational corporations that, although they have more financial and economic resources, may lack sufficient social and cultural capital and are therefore perceived as less genuine (Ger & Csaba, 2000; Voronov et al., 2013).

Consumers see the act of consumption as well as their purchasing choices as active and purposeful ways to support family firms against large multinational and transnational corporations (Charters et al., 2009). Yet, to date, the roles of firms’ family nature in consumers’ self-identity projects have emerged only incidentally in studies’ empirical findings. Future research questions that can be addressed include the following:

How can consumers utilize the meanings related to firms’ family nature to shape their own identities and identity projects?

Which elements make family firms more identity-salient than their nonfamily counterparts from a consumer perspective?

Which consumers’ selves tend to be more significantly related to the purchasing and consumption of family firm brands and products?

The Family Firm Brand Personality

Consumers’ anthropomorphizing tendency (which implies the attachment of human characteristics to objects) is well studied in the brand–consumer relationship literature (for a pioneering study on brand personality, see Fournier, 1998) and has also been recently investigated in family firm literature (Beck & Prügl, 2018). Anthropomorphizing can result in specific feelings toward a firm or brand, such as a sense of firm/brand self-connection (Escalas & Bettman, 2005), that pay out in the creation and maintenance of enduring firm/brand–consumer relationships (Veloutsou, 2007; Veloutsou & Moutinho, 2009). Because family firms’ values are often associated with those held by the owning family’s members (Sorenson, 2014), the attribution of personality traits to inanimate brands (Manning, 2010) is more easily achieved in the context of family firms.

While Krappe et al.’s (2011) study is a pioneering investigation of family firm brand personalities, more studies are needed to test the reliability and validity of established brand personality scales (e.g., Aaker, 1997; Geuens, Weijters, & De Wulf, 2009) in the family business context, or to create and test specific family firm brand personality measurement scales. Research questions that can be addressed include the following:

Which personality traits are consumers more likely to associate with family firms?

How are consumers’ personalities and family firms’ personalities connected?

How does a family-based brand personality intended by a firm differ from that attached by the consumer to a brand?

The Meso Level

Our literature review, revealed that the firms’ family nature takes on specific meanings in communities, social movements, and subcultural and ethnic groups. However, future research should focus on two underdeveloped research areas: family firms as custodians of subcultural values and firms’ family nature in brand communities.

Family Firms as Custodians of Subcultural Values

Firm and brand meanings are involved in the ritual consolidation of sociocultural systems, such as consumption subcultures (see Holt, 2004; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). Our literature review highlighted the incidental findings of Peñaloza (2001), who demonstrated that subcultural groups of consumers, along with family-owned ranchers and booth exhibitors, perpetuated the subculture of the American West. Similar incidental results have been obtained by authors investigating ethnocentric consumer groups (e.g., Balmer & Chen, 2016; Jamal, 2005). Theoretically and empirically, the analysis of how family firms’ nature can assume subcultural significance requires the adoption of social theories and research approaches that primarily concern these meso-level social structures and their relationships to other broader social environments, for instance, strategic action field theory (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995), or Giddens’s (1984) and Bourdieu’s (1984) theories of practice. Since, according to our review, these insights were incidental findings, future research should seek to answer these questions:

How do the establishment and diffusion of specific consumption subcultures relate to the presence and relevance of family firms in specific contexts and industries?

Which specific subcultural consumer groups are more related to firms’ family nature and their characteristics?

How do selected consumption subcultures perceive the contributions by family firms compared to those by non–family-based ones?

Firms’ Family Nature in Brand Communities

When firms decide to communicate and exploit their family nature as an idiosyncratic resource (Beck & Kenning, 2015; Binz Astrachan & Botero, 2018; Binz Astrachan et al., 2018; Micelotta & Raynard, 2011), consumers can use family-based brands to signal their adherence to specific social and political ideologies (Holt, 2004; Kravets & Örge, 2010) and to create social aggregation types around firms and brands. In particular, brand communities (Cova & Pace, 2006; McAlexander, Schouten, & Koenig, 2002; Muñiz & O’Guinn, 2001) are expressions of this phenomenon. Our literature review identified specific brand advocates and brand communities created around well-known family firm brands such as Nutella, LEGO, and Vespa (Cova & D’Antone, 2016; Cova & Pace, 2006; Gyrd-Jones & Kornum, 2013; Rindell et al., 2015).

Theoretically and empirically, the analysis of these brand communities can rely on the broad branch of theories known as consumer culture theory. Consumer culture theory addresses the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). Historically, it has been largely studied how brand communities are formed and maintained in the intricate network of dynamics involving consumers and marketers. Considering the specific community management styles and the related members’ values and practices that our literature review showed, future studies should compare communities formed around family-based brands to those formed around non–family-owned ones, so as to identify differences across these two different community types. These research questions offer promising lines of enquiry:

What are the traits of successful brand communities stemming from family firms? How does their success relate to these firms’ family nature?

From a consumer perspective, how do family-based brand communities differ from non–family-based brand ones?

How do consumers that join family firm brand communities endorse family-related values to engage with, participate in, and commit to a brand community?

The Macro Level

The macro level comprises marketplaces, product categories, and wider market environments in which values and meanings affect market dynamics (Arnould & Thompson, 2005, 2015; Askegaard & Linnet, 2011). Thus, at this level of analysis, firms’ family nature is seen by consumers as a cultural force that may affect the functioning of markets and market categories (Akaka et al., 2013; Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Delmestri & Greenwood, 2016). In our review, we identified three research areas for future investigation of firms’ family nature in macro contexts:

The Relevance of the Family Nature of Firms and Markets

An emerging family business research stream is investigating in which markets firms’ family nature is a source of value and competitive advantage vis-à-vis nonfamily firms (Binz Astrachan & Botero, 2018; Botero, Spitzley, Lude, & Prügl, 2019). These authors suggest that buying behavior processes affect the salience of firms’ family nature in specific markets such as business-to-business and business-to-consumer. What we found at the macro level is that firms’ family nature resulted in a categorical prototype in the wine industry (e.g., Markowska & Lopez-Vega, 2018; Smith Maguire, 2013; Voronov et al., 2013), and for handcrafted items (e.g., Ger & Csaba, 2000; Seo & Buchanan-Oliver, 2015) and that this characteristic was salient both for consumers and for other stakeholders. Being prototypical means to be a typical and more representative model of a category than others (Durand & Paolella, 2013). Framed in this way, firms’ family nature could become salient not only for branding purposes but also for more strategic and managerial decisions relating to market entrance and exit strategies, niche concentration, and/or alliance selection (Miller, Amore, Le Breton-Miller, Minichilli, & Quarato, 2018). However, we still lack empirical and comparative analyses that relate firms’ family nature to the characteristics of markets and their actors. Thus, research questions that can be addressed include the following:

In which industries is firms’ family nature a categorical prototype? What are these relative markets’ tenets?

What are the characteristics of the industries in which firms’ family nature is salient to consumers?

What makes firms’ family nature salient to consumers in one market and not in another? How can we identify and measure these differences?

Firms’ Family Nature as a Prototypical Feature of Authenticity in Specific Markets

The consumer quest for authenticity is a cornerstone of contemporary markets (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995). Family firms seem to have most of the attributes—generally labeled cues, adopting Grayson and Martinec’s (2004) term—that consumers value when evaluating the authenticity of family firms’ brands and products. The literature suggested three main typesof empirical evidence to corroborate this statement. First, consumers are more likely to consider small and family-owned businesses as more authentic than large-scale and chain-affiliated ones (Kovács et al., 2013). Second, a product’s link to a place of origin where it is grown, prepared, or manufactured, which is the main attribute along which consumers evaluate market offerings’ authenticity (Beverland, 2006; Grayson & Martinec, 2004), has been found to be amplified when connected to a family firm (Lude & Prügl, 2018; Melewar & Skinner, 2018). Third, scholars have also found that a firm’s fidelity to its history and the continuity of how it behaves in the marketplace are potent sources of perceived authenticity (Beverland, 2006; Morhart, Malär, Guèvremont, Girardin, & Grohmann, 2015). From this perspective, a family firm’s heritage has been found to be a guarantor of authenticity (Balmer, 2011; Smith Maguire, 2010). What seem particularly important in the realm of family-based firms are the ways in which authenticity’s value became salient and consumers’ contributions to making authenticity central as a mechanism that governs market exchanges. The growing body of studies on market system dynamics (see Giesler & Fischer, 2017) provides a benchmark to inform a specific research stream on this issue. However, although family firms’ authenticity is gaining importance in the literature, further research is needed. In particular, we see great potential for studies focused on these questions:

How do consumers ascribe authenticity to family firms?

How does authenticity differ between family firms and nonfamily firms from a consumer perspective?

What roles do market actors (family firms, consumers, intermediaries, and institutions) have in creating ‘authentic’ narratives?

Firms’ Family Nature and the Formation of Novel Market Categories

When markets are concentrated in the hands of large-scale multinational producers, new and small local players proliferate to satisfy the demand for different, non–mass market products (e.g., Carroll, 1985; Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000; McKendrick & Hannan, 2013). Consumers and family firms can play a key role in this process. In particular, our literature review revealed that consumers animate ideological conflicts, utilizing firms’ family nature as an oppositional category code in order to support the emergence of new markets, such as the organic food industry (Luedicke, Thompson, & Giesler, 2010; Mikkonen et al., 2014; Press et al., 2014). The large body of research on market and category formation and evolution (for a review, see Negro, Koçak, & Hsu, 2010) offers a multitude of theoretical perspectives and research traditions that can help scholars to shed much light on consumers’ and family firms’ potential roles in determining these dynamics of new market formation in transitioning existing markets and product categories in their favor. In this stance, more knowledge can be developed at the macro level, starting with these questions:

Which ideologies that relate to firms’ family nature do consumers, as market actors, utilize to support the emergence of new product categories?

In product categories that are under significant transition, what makes being a family firm more reliable than a nonfamily firm in the eyes of consumers?

For which nascent product category types isfirms’ family nature more salient for consumers and thus for product category emergence?

Conclusion

We have sought to answer the following question: What do we know about how consumers form meanings about firms’ family nature? A mixed-methods approach that combined a traditional systematic literature review with an ontological thematic analysis of 83 papers has enabled us to shed light on key aspects that led to the identification of a novel approach to the academic conversation on the topic and that led us to define a new research agenda.

In contrast to previous literature reviews (Beck, 2016; Binz Astrachan et al., 2018; Bravo et al., 2017; Sageder et al., 2018), where 90% of the papers adopted a micro-level approach, only 2% a meso-level approach, and 8% a macro-level one, our literature review offers a more balanced view of the literature to date, since it is far less skewed toward the micro level. Consumers have a key role not only in the mental processing of firms’ meanings but also—and foremost—in shaping firms’ family nature as a key attribute upon which the purchasing process may depend, and through which some marketplace dynamics may be affected. In particular, as this review reports and as we contend, the meanings about firms’ family nature are formed through dynamic interactions involving (individual) consumers, consumer collectives (e.g., social groups and cultural aggregates), and wider market environments (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Askegaard & Linnet, 2011).

These findings contribute to the family business literature, in two ways. First, we have made it possible to advance the theorizing about firms’ family nature by introducing a new ontological perspective, one in which consumers are actively involved in forming the meanings implied in firms’ family nature at the micro, meso, and macro levels. This ontological perspective led us to propose a new research agenda that we trust will encourage further investigation into family firm brands as socially constructed phenomena developed via interactions between market actors. We also trust that this work will stimulate new research efforts at the intersection of marketing and family business, so as to also derive important suggestions for practitioners.

Second, our review offers an overview of the meanings that consumers form about firms’ family nature and how these drive consumers’ individual choices, provide cultural material, form social collectives, and affect the dynamics of market shaping and formation (see Arnould & Thompson, 2005), ultimately providing competitive advantages to firms (Keller, 1993). Furthermore, our findings can be very relevant for family firms, for competitive reasons, and for managerial decisions relating to market entrance and exit strategies, niche concentration, and/or alliance selection (see, e.g., Miller et al., 2018). Framed in this way, family firms can exploit the unexplored resources that stem from consumers’ meaning formation, supporting, for instance, consumers’ identity projects, social advocacy groups, and making the family firm the industry’s prototypical organizational form.

This study has limitations. Our review process sought to reduce biases relating to the selection of results, and future analyses could find better methods to address this issue. Therefore, be that it did not use an independent group of researchers who could control and provide alternative thematic and ontological investigations. In future, replicating the methodology used for this literature review is advisable so as to understand the main theoretical streams around the meanings relating to firms’ family nature.

Supplemental Material

FBR890229_Supplementary_Material – Supplemental material for How Do Consumers See Firms’ Family Nature? A Review of the Literature

Supplemental material, FBR890229_Supplementary_Material for How Do Consumers See Firms’ Family Nature? A Review of the Literature by Daniela Andreini, Cristina Bettinelli, Giuseppe Pedeliento and Roberta Apa in Family Business Review

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Donald Neubaum and all the members of the editorial team for their guidance. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful suggestions on prior versions of this manuscript. All errors and omissions remain ours. We also thank participants of the 2017 Società Italiana Marketing conference (Bergamo, Italy), the 2018 Academy of Marketing Science conference (Porto, Portugal), and the 2018 International Family Enterprise Research Academy conference (Zwolle, Netherlands), for their suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cristina Bettinelli

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online

Notes

Author Biographies

Daniela Andreini is an associate professor of Marketing at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interest is related to digital brand and consumer behavior. Her studies have been published in Organization Studies, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Information Management, Management Decision, and Journal of Service Theory and Practice.

Cristina Bettinelli is a family business–passionate, associate professor of Management at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests rotate around the family nature of firms manifestation in behavioral and strategic aspects. Her work has appeared in international journals such as Family Business Review, Journal of Family Business Strategy, Journal of Business Research, Small Business Economics, and Journal of Small Business Management and in edited books.

Giuseppe Pedeliento is an associate professor of Marketing and Management at the University of Bergamo. His research focuses on business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing and branding, and consumer behavior. His articles appeared in journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Business Ethics and in other academic outlets.

Roberta Apa is an adjunct professor of Marketing at the University of Milan and former adjunct professor at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests are focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and interorganizational networks. Her research has been published in national and international journals such as Research Policy and R&D Management. She has also contributed to several national and international book chapters.

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