Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. Fashion companies disagree. Despite the controversy, actual research has been scarce. This study compares the sizes of clothes that the four leading mass-marketing fashion retailers in Sweden offer to the body sizes of the population. Although branding theory would support the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands, such practices were not evident. The main contribution of this article is that it provides the first quantified empirical evidence on the theory of typical user imagery. In the discussion, it is posited that, although mass-market fashion brands should be susceptible to negative user imagery related to overweight and obese users, the companies avoid such problems by making garments that are not directly attributable to a specific brand, thus mitigating the negative effect of overweight and obese user imagery. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

This article develops a conceptual foundation for Conscientious Corporate Brands (CCBs) by exploring the role that (i) environmental and (ii) climate change issues, and that (iii) internal and (iv) external corporate codes of ethics play as dimensions of CCBs. The article's aim is to extend previous research in ethical branding by proposing an empirically grounded conceptual foundation of the conscientious dimension of a corporate brand. The empirical context is based on Nordic business-to-business relationships. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.