Thirty years of product and brand management research: a retrospective review of the Journal of Product and Brand Management using bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose The Journal of Product and Brand Management (JPBM) has a 30-year long history. To commemorate the journal’s 30th anniversary, this research paper aims to present a retrospective overview of JPBM. Design/methodology/approach This research examines the performance of the research constituents, social structure and intellectual structure of scholarly publications produced by JPBM between 1992 and 2021 using bibliometric analysis. Findings This research sheds light on the growing influence of JPBM through four major knowledge clusters (themes): strategic brand management; consumer behavior; product development and innovation management; and brand engagement. A temporal analysis of decade-by-decade cataloguing of the JPBM corpus revealed another set of three distinct knowledge clusters (themes): retailing and pricing strategies; marketing communications; and relationship marketing. Research limitations/implications Though the state-of-the-art overview herein offers seminal and useful insights about product and brand management research curated by JPBM, which can be used by the editorial board and prospective authors to curate and position the novelty of future contributions, it remains limited to the accuracy and availability of bibliographic records acquired from Scopus. Originality/value This research advances the internal review and subjective evaluation of the evolution of brand management thinking in JPBM by Veloutsou and Guzmán (2017) with an objective retrospection on the performance and scientific evolution of product and brand management research in JPBM.