When thinking about research projects and how to make a contribution, academics can often wonder which element to focus on. In a recently published paper we report on empirical findings which support several hypotheses relating to retailer brand collaborations. However, our article provides a good illustration of a general model for how academics interesting in business and economics can make a contribution to the literature using the 4 C’s of context, concepts, components and computations. In this review, we highlight those four elements using our article as an illustration as well as reiterate the main general takeaways for business researchers. More specifically, our context was the burgeoning but relatively under researched area of retailer collaborations to which we brought the concepts of brand inheritance and using multiple theories like, Construal Theory, Congruity Theory, Categorization Theory, and the Selective Activation, Reconstruction and Anchoring Model to explain our phenomenon. The most revealing component of our conceptual model was the striking difference between symbolic vs. functional brands and our new computational approach to analysing brand image via Double entry intra-class correlation (ICCDE) was not only perfectly suited to our data, but also represented a new approach within the field. The 4C’s model is a useful guide for business and economics researchers to consider for their work.
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