Marketing

Whether a business is large or small, its brand is probably its most important and valuable asset. How a brand is managed has tremendous impact on an organization's ability to attract and hold customers, achieve high revenue and profits, and ensure future success. The most powerful brands are worth billions of dollars, but to build a powerful brand at any level requires time, effort, discipline, and understanding the way brands work.

Purpose — The purpose of this research is to examine how consumers form beliefs and evaluate derivatives (e.g. handheld computers) and branded derivatives (e.g. Palm handheld computers). The aim is to study how consumers combine two categories (e.g. ?handheld products? and ?computers?) to form beliefs, how the similarity between the categories influences beliefs, how the addition of a brand changes beliefs, and how the presence of brand associations impacts on evaluations.

Here's a familiar story: A new communications technology that allows one to broadcast live to millions.

The profitability of remanufacturing systems for different cost, technology, and logistics structures has been extensively investigated in the literature. We provide an alternative and somewhat complementary approach that considers demand-related issues, such as the existence of green segments, original equipment manufacturer competition, and product life-cycle effects. The profitability of a remanufacturing system strongly depends on these issues as well as on their interactions.

We model the commercial World Wide Web as a directed graph that emerges as the equilibrium of a game in which utility maximizing websites purchase (advertising) in-links from each other while also setting the price of these links. In equilibrium, higher content sites tend to purchase more advertising links (mirroring the Dorfman-Steiner rule) while selling less advertising links themselves.

Companies need tools and models that accurately describe and forecast the diffusion process of new products. Most tools for predicting the diffusion of an innovation, given early data, use aggregate models (such as the Bass model) that capture the impact of advertising and word-of-mouth on adoption. Because of their aggregate nature, however, (i.e., these models treat each month or each year as one observation), they are often unable to produce reliable predictions early in the diffusion process, when such predictions would be most helpful (e.g., in order to adjust the launch campaign).

The massive costs of health care ($1.7 trillion and counting) and the problems posed by various diseases (e.g., AIDS, obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, mental illness) are well known and documented. People worry more about their personal health care costs than losing their jobs, being a victim of a violent crime, or terrorist attacks. As a consequence, massive efforts to improve knowledge about detection, prevention, and treatment have been undertaken. In addition, there is growing realization that health communication strategies need to be tailored to specific segments.

Perhaps because of its importance, brand performance has been approached in several different ways by several different researchers employing several different measures. Lehmann, Keller, and Farley examine a broad range of these measures to explore their overlap and to uncover core underlying dimensions and the structure of brand performance metrics that balance parsimony and completeness. They also examine how different dimensions of brand performance and profiles of leading brands vary by country (i.e., the United States and China).