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Introduction
Branding literature has evolved significantly over the past two decades. The shift from object (e.g. brands provide cues to influence product choices) to self-centered view (e.g. individuals use brands to express their desired self-identities) laid the groundwork for brand affects and symbolic meaning to occupy a central position. This is exemplified by the concepts of brand attachment (Thomson et al., 2005), trust (Chen, 2010), love (Batra et al., 2012), authenticity (Morhart et al., 2013; Nunes et al., 2021) and coolness (Warren et al., 2019). Brands achieved a wider social impact, amplified by hyperconnectivity and social media, creating communities and operating as relationship builders (Fetscherin et al., 2019; Fetscherin and Heinrich, 2015; Veloutsou and Liao, 2022; Veloutsou and Ruiz Mafe, 2019).
Sustainability and well-being are at the heart of this evolution. Brands seek to take a stance on important societal issues and expand their role (Golob et al., 2020; Swaminathan et al., 2020). Unsurprisingly, the body of literature addressing these themes expanded rapidly in the marketing and branding context, as demonstrated by the prevalence of studies on proenvironmental and ethical consumer behaviors (e.g. Copeland and Bhaduri, 2020; Davies and Gutsche, 2016; Hosta and Zabkar, 2021), and the call for achieving a more holistic view of stakeholder value and societal concerns (Marketing Science Institute, 2022). Likewise, practitioners realize the importance of sustainable management for leveraging brand equity and achieving new competitive advantages (Kumar and Christodoulopoulou, 2014).
Given the impacts of sustainability on business, some studies summarized the current knowledge base on specific subthemes related to brand equity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Ishaq and Di Maria, 2020; Prasad and Kumar, 2022), but the overlap between sustainability and branding workstreams is not addressed. They are anchored on domain-based perspectives, not incorporating a holistic perspective (Veloutsou et al., 2022). Other reviews draw on conceptual, bibliometric or meta-analytical approaches (Bamberg and Möser, 2007; Groening et al., 2018; Nascimento and Loureiro, 2022), examining individual-level behaviors and do not address the impacts of sustainability on branding.
This study aims to address these gaps and provide academics and managers with a state of art and dynamics of sustainability branding research for advancing the field by specifically:
identifying key contributions and contributors, and...