We have performed a focalized investigation to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) moderates the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ financial performance. We applied a panel regression to examine this relationship from a sample of 3400 Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) listed firms, based on yearly observations from 2009 to 2018. Our results show that the presence of female directors on the board is associated with improved firms’ performance and that corporate social responsibility (CSR) moderates this relation, thus indicating that sharing strategic decision-making with female board members revealed a better relationship between CSR and firms’ financial performance. Our findings showed that foreign institutional investors positively influenced firms’ financial performance and that CSR moderates the relation between foreign institutional shareholders and the firm’s financial performance. Supported by corporate governance theories, such as resource dependence and stakeholder theory, our results help to better understand the nexus among corporate governance, firms’ performance and corporate social responsibility. These findings are advantageous to government departments in emerging countries in terms of encouraging marketing practitioners and participants to implement CSR practices and change the attitude associated with CSR implications. This study highlighted the problems of the foreign institutional investors’ scheme, which was the main contribution to the financial market reform of China after 2003. These findings offer significant implications to corporate affairs executives and managers, practitioners, academicians, state officials, and policy-makers, and might provide China with the opportunity to extend its market liberalization to the global markets. This research also contributes to the existing literature, which investigates how CSR moderates the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ financial performance in the Chinese market context.

The explosive development of social media has given great opportunities to academic and industry research on consumer brand knowledge. Particularly, the brand associative network has been most frequently used to describe consumer brand knowledge structure. However, few researchers have examined the embedded connotation of the brand knowledge structural measurement in regard to sustainable brand performance and adjusted their brand strategies accordingly. Combining psychological cognitive theory and the network analytic method, this paper aims to extend this area by investigating the relationship between brand structural position in consumers’ associative knowledge network and sustainable brand awareness. Using a monthly dataset of around 130 million user posts, we find that compared to a prior determined brand strategy, brand network centrality in consumer’s brand associative knowledge network shows a much more significant positive effect on sustainable brand awareness. Importantly, we further examined the symmetric matching of brand positioning strategy and consumer’s brand knowledge structure for sustainable brand awareness. We find that sustainable brand awareness will be promoted by a symmetric matching brand positioning strategy with its position in the associative knowledge work. Our study facilitates an understanding of brands based on consumer perceptions for managers and enables businesses to adjust their relevant strategies for the achievement of sustainable brand performance.

With the explosion of social media, consumers’ minds have become important assets in brand competitions. Determining a brand’s competitive structure based on consumers’ desires is particularly important to effectively establish a brand and maintain sustainable competitiveness. The traditional methods of determining brand competitiveness are costly and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an efficient, systematical, highly automated, and real-time method to determine brand competitiveness based on consumers’ brand associations with the brand’s social tags. Using a set of 45 brands in the automobile industry and around 50,000 social tags, we compared our brand competitiveness determination method with data provided by Interbrand and directly elicited survey data, finding a significant correlation and a better predictive power in consumers’ perceived brand competitiveness than the traditional method. Our proposed method enables managers to create and maintain sustainable brand advantages in consumers’ minds.

As social media has been popularized, users have shifted from the receiver of knowledge to the creator and communicator of knowledge. Besides, the relationship between users has become more sophisticated. In two way and one-way networks, different network relationship structures formed between users have different impacts on the knowledge learning of information recipients. Some studies highlighted that knowledge, according to the different forms of knowledge generation and expression, can be split into explicit and tacit knowledge. Thus, in the network structure with different levels of relationship intensity, which type of knowledge can be spread and learned better? To answer this question, this study first uses second-hand data analysis. As revealed from the results of empirical research, under Weibo and WeChat, i.e., two different network structures, a variety of knowledge dissemination learning will have different effects. Then, by analyzing questionnaire data, the phenomenon and its internal mechanism are explained in accordance with the theory of regulatory focus.