Purpose-Driven Branding Across Cultures: Balancing Authenticity, Risk, and Consumer Trust

Call for Papers

Purpose-Driven Branding Across Cultures: Balancing Authenticity, Risk, and Consumer Trust

Journal : Article Collection in Cogent Business & Management

Submission deadline: 21 July 2026

This Article Collection focuses on how purpose-driven brands navigate social, environmental, and ethical causes across culturally diverse markets. It examines the tension between authenticity and opportunism, and asks when brand activism builds trust versus when it triggers backlash, scepticism, or reputational harm.

Brands today are expected to take positions on issues such as climate change, racial equality, and gender rights, but those same positions can land very differently across regions, identities, and stakeholder groups. The collection therefore aims to generate culturally grounded, cross-market insights on how brands build meaningful narratives while managing controversy, consumer trust, and long-term performance.

Editors and contact

Guest Advisors

• Dr. Full Professor Maria Palazzo, Universitas Mercatorum, Rome, Italy.

• Dr. Asad Abbas Jaffari, Birmingham City University.

Commissioning editor contact

• Dr. Molly Cole, molly.cole@taylorandfrancis.com.

Why this collection matters

Purpose-driven branding can strengthen loyalty when consumers see a brand’s stance as genuine, but it can also backfire when audiences perceive the message as performative or inconsistent. This collection is designed to help scholars and practitioners understand how authenticity is judged across cultures, how risk accumulates in polarized environments, and how consumer trust can be protected when brands speak out.

It also invites work that looks beyond a single market and instead compares how identity politics, media narratives, social media dynamics, stakeholder expectations, and governance structures shape brand responses across countries. That makes the collection especially useful for research that connects branding with culture, ethics, and organizational strategy.

Themes invited

The article collection welcomes original research and review articles on topics including:

• Cross-cultural perceptions of brand activism and purpose.

• Media narratives in traditional and digital spaces.

• Consumer backlash, loyalty, and resistance.

• Identity politics, including race, gender, religion, and class.

• Stakeholder trust among employees, investors, and communities.

• Social media, virality, influencers, and polarization.

• Risk, governance, ethics, and reputational safeguards.

• Long-term financial, reputational, and relational outcomes.

• Global case studies of successful and failed brand activism.

Submission details

The submission deadline is 21 July 2026. Manuscripts should be submitted through Cogent Business & Management’s standard submission system and prepared according to the journal’s author guidelines. Cogent Business & Management is a peer-reviewed open-access journal with APC-based publication fees, and it serves a broad management and marketing audience.

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