品牌质量差异、消费者产品涉入程度对品牌敏感的影响研究

品牌敏感是消费者品牌行为研究方面的一个新课题,它反映了消费者在购买决策过程中对品牌的重视程度.同一产品类别不同品牌之间的质量差异和消费者的产品涉入程度被认为是品牌敏感的两类主要解释变量.本文利用结构方程模型进行的实证分析表明,品牌质量差异和消费者产品涉入程度总体上对品牌敏感起正向影响作用,但该作用因产品类别而异,因产品质量和产品涉入程度的维度而异.     

产品涉入度、消费者从众与品牌承诺:品牌敏感的中介作用——以轿车消费市场为例

在高度竞争的市场环境下,提高消费者品牌承诺是企业获得长期竞争优势的有效方法。本文提出了产品涉入度、消费者从众及品牌敏感对品牌承诺的影响机制模型,并以轿车消费市场为例运用结构方程模型进行了实证研究。结果表明,产品涉入度和消费者从众对品牌承诺有正向显著影响,品牌敏感在产品涉入度、消费者从众和品牌承诺间起部分中介作用。     

品牌敏感:消费者品牌行为研究的一个新课题

品牌在消费者购买决策过程中所占据的地位反映了消费者对品牌的敏感程度。品牌敏感与品牌权益既有差别,也有联系。本文通过模型构建阐明了品牌敏感的概念并提出其解释因素,实地调查和假设验证留待下一步研究。     

基于属性水平的品牌来源国作用机制研究——信息处理的视角

制造和质量控制技术在全球范围的转移,导致制造国影响减弱,这对传统原产地研究提出了新的挑战。本研究在区分品牌来源国和产品制造国的基础上,通过把产品属性划分为搜索属性和信任属性,探索品牌来源国如何在属性评价层面上影响消费者。本研究发现,品牌来源国主要在信任属性上影响消费者对产品的评价。不仅如此,与新手型消费者相比,专家型消费者评价信任属性时更多地受到品牌来源国刻板印象的影响。     

Examining the Firm's Value Creation Process: A Managerial Perspective of the Firm's Value Offering Strategy and Performance

The primary pursuit of any business is to understand what customers value and to create that value for them. While customers are the final arbiter of value, it is the firm's role to explore, interpret and deliver value based on what they believe customers are seeking. Based on this premise we adopt the firm's perspective on value creation to extend both Bowman and Ambrosini's theoretical framework and the work of DeSarbo, Jedidi and Sinha and focus on two issues. The first is the strategic emphasis firms place on the design and delivery of their value offering. The second is the extent the firm's value offering explains performance differentials at the customer‐centric performance level. We present a conceptual model of how firms gain positional advantage via their value offering and the realized outcomes they achieve. We present two approaches to modelling the firm's value offering (type II and type IV models) and articulate the theoretical underpinnings and results for these models. Our results validate the conceptualization of the firm's value offering and suggest that creating superior value offerings enables firms to achieve superiority in customer‐centric performance.     

Stakeholder-oriented brand management: A Venn-diagram approach to monitor brand associations

Adopting a multi-stakeholder perspective on brand management, this paper discusses different methodological approaches that allow for a cross-stakeholder evaluation of associations the brand triggers. Our main contribution is the proposal and illustration of a Venn-diagram approach as a simple-to-implement, yet insightful methodology to visualize findings from free association questions. This approach helps brand management understand and compare the associations attached to a brand by multiple stakeholders and their degree of match with management-desired brand associations. We illustrate the managerial relevance of this approach with results from an international study comparing brand associations desired by the management of a company with brand associations elicited by customers and employees, with some 1500 respondents respectively. For the particular case investigated, we find that management-desired associations may not (yet) be top-of-mind for customers, employees or both groups, while these groups hold (and partly share) associations not desired by the organization. The findings also show that specific types of associations are more likely to be top-of-mind with multiple stakeholders than others. We discuss how brand management should use the insights gained via this Venn-diagram approach in their brand-building efforts.     

Does umbrella branding really work? Investigating cross-category brand loyalty

Numerous studies on the drivers of brand extension success found evidence that parent-brand characteristics and the fit between parent brand and transfer product are the main and most influential factors driving brand extension success. However, the ability of a brand to transfer its brand loyal customers from the parent to the extension category has been widely neglected. Brand loyalty can be regarded as a consequence of the underlying assumption of customers transferring their quality perceptions, their brand knowledge, and their experience with the brand from one category to the other. We find empirical evidence that consumers who are loyal to the brand in the leading (parent) product category show a higher probability to be loyal to that same brand in another (extension) category compared to those consumers who are not loyal in the leading category. Moreover, as the overall success of the extension includes positive retroactive effects of the extension product on the parent product or brand, the arising question is whether there are differences between extension product categories regarding their attachment to the parent category and their ability to stimulate brand loyal purchases in the parent category, i.e., speaking of ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ categories in terms of brand loyal purchase behavior. This might even hold true for the relationship of any two categories the brand competes.     

Approximate weighting method for multiattribute decision problems with imprecise parameters

A multiattribute decision problem with imprecise parameters refers to one in which at least one of the parameters such as attribute weights and value scores is not represented by precise numerical values. Some well-known types of incomplete attribute weights are chosen and analyzed to find their extreme points. In doing so, we show that their coefficients matrix, by itself or by the change of variables, belongs to a class of M-matrix which enables us to find its extreme points readily due to the inverse-positive property.The knowledge of extreme points not only helps us to prioritize alternatives but also supports iterative exploration of decision-maker’s preference by investigating modified extreme points caused by additional preference information. A wide range of eligible attribute weights, however, often fail to result in the best alternative or a complete ranking of alternatives. To address this situation, we consider an approximate weighting method, so called the minimizing squared deviations from extreme points (MSD) which locates the attribute weights at the barycenter of a weight set. Accordingly, the MSD approach extends the rank order centroid (ROC) weighting method which is known to outperform other approximate weighting methods in case of ranked attribute weights. The evidence of the MSD’s superiority over a linear program-based weighting method is verified via simulation analysis under different forms of incomplete attribute weights.     

国内消费者对本国品牌的态度及其改变的可能性研究

文章的立论基础是消费者的态度决定着品牌的命运,而消费者对品牌产品的态度取决于其对产品的质量评价。文章首先对态度内涵进行了分析,说明为什么态度非常重要。然后通过假设提出、调查及假设检验,证实了在国内消费者的心目中跨国公司的产品质量确实优于国内的名牌产品,并通过海尔的例子证明了品牌国际化是改变国人对国内品牌态度的有效方法。其对政府和企业的政策意义是:必须大力推进品牌国际化,这才是有效应对跨国公司竞争的有力武器。     

炫耀性产品品牌策略：品牌延伸或新品牌？

企业在推出炫耀性产品时，可以采用两种品牌策略：品牌延伸或新品牌。为分析企业的炫耀性产品品牌策略，通过博弈论本文建立了无新产品、品牌延伸和新品牌三种模型，并得到了垄断情形与竞争情形下企业在不同品牌策略下的最优定价和利润。研究发现：在垄断情形下，企业总是采用品牌延伸策略。而在面临企业竞争时，如果消费者对地位身份不敏感，则企业选择不推出新产品；如果消费者对身份地位敏感，则当创建新品牌成本较小时，企业采用新品牌策略，否则企业选择放弃推出新产品。此外，一定条件下，企业推出新品牌会增加竞争对手的利润。     

Green and lean: a Gemba–Kaizen model for sustainability enhancement

Abstract

Despite the encouraging results obtained from the application of Green Lean, organizations have found the integration of Green and Lean, and their implementation as an integrated approach, challenging. This paper therefore presents a model for integrating Lean and Green based on the Gemba-Kaizen approach. The proposed model was developed on the basis of a through literature review on Gemba and Kaizen, conducted on peer reviewed journal articles and pragmatic books, and the more than 40 years of accumulated experience of the authors as academics, researchers, industrialists and consultants. The model was validated through two cases study in the aerospace and automotive industries. The results showed that the proposed model helped the case organizations to reduce the consumption of resources and improve their environmental performance. The proposed model can be the basis for further research on Lean and Green, contributing to help organizations to improve their sustainability performance.     

基于粗集理论的属性权重确定方法

通常属性权重的确定方法是根据决策者的先验知识来确定。本文根据粗集理论中属性重要度的判断方法,提出将决策者先验知识给定的权重同粗集理论确定的属性重要度结合起来最终确定属性权重,即基于粗集理论的属性权重确定,实现主观先验知识同客观情况的统一,从而得出更加理想的权重确定结果。     

Meaning threats heighten consumer attachment: implications for global brand management

Global brand consumers have become more prone to engage in variety-seeking and loyalty-switching behavior, so global brand managers are in urgent need to develop effective strategies to reinforce brand loyalty and lower the propensity of consumer defection. As a growing body of research indicates, consumer attachment and brand loyalty are closely correlated. The current study, linking the concepts of fluid meaning compensation and consumer attachment, unravels a novel loyalty-reinforcing avenue. Three experiments, manipulating scenarios of meaning threats commonly seen in everyday life (sense of absurdity, anxious uncertainty and social exclusion) on global brand consumers, verify that meaning threats heighten attachment of consumers toward their most attached brands. More importantly, this finding applies to global brand consumers across product or service brand categories with luxury or non-luxury brand positions. Hence, maximizing the fluid meaning compensation function of attached brands is conducive to reinforcement of global brand loyalty. Academic and strategic implications are gleaned from the research result for global brand management.     

Optimal planning of the joint placement of photovoltaic panels and green roofs under climate change uncertainty

Photovoltaic (PV) panels directly convert sunlight into electricity; but, sunlight also heats the panels, negatively impacting their efficiency. Green roofs are vegetative layers grown on rooftops, mainly to provide added insulation on the roof to save energy. Green roofs also cool near-surface air temperature. Hence, the joint installation of PV panels and green roofs may potentially lead to higher efficiency of PV panels in certain climates. We develop a two-stage stochastic programming model to optimally place PV panels and green roofs under climate change uncertainty to maximize the overall profit from energy generated and saved. We calibrate the model using the literature, industry reports, and the data from different, at times conflicting, climate projections. We then conduct a case study for a mid-size city in the U.S., perform extensive sensitivity and robustness analyses and provide insights.     

Exploring the link between human resource practices and turnover in multi-brand companies: The role of brand units’ images

Using exploratory qualitative research undertaken in a multi-brand fashion company, this article investigates the role that brand units’ images play in the link between human resources management (HRM) practices and employee internal and external turnover. Our results suggest that the existence of imbalanced and differently attractive brand units’ images might weaken or remove the effectiveness of corporate HRM practices in keeping internal and external turnover rates low. This because employees may be interested in transferring to the most appealing brand(s) or, if not possible to do so, leaving the company. This article contributes to the debate regarding the use of HRM practices in multi-brand companies, especially in industries where both the brand and the product have a highly-symbolic content. Based on our conclusions, we recommend that brand units with less prestigious images compensate for their lower attractiveness with specific brand unit HRM practices to attract and retain their employees. Theoretical and policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Servant leadership,employer brand perception,trust in leaders and turnover intentions: a sequential mediation model

The study aimed to examine the impact of the servant leadership style on employee turnover intentions by investigating the sequential mediating effects of employer brand perception and level of trust subordinates have in their leaders. Results of the study were obtained by analysing data collected from 253 employees working in Indian organizations. The results fully support the hypotheses proposed in the study, illustrating that perceived servant leadership style is negatively associated with employee turnover intentions. Further, servant leadership-turnover intentions relationship is sequentially mediated by employer brand perception and the level of trust subordinates have in their leaders. The study also found that only the servant leadership style followed by leaders was not enough to directly influence the level of trust employees placed in their leaders. A positive and strong employer brand perception emerged as an important mechanism that helped servant leaders gain the trust of their followers. The theoretical and managerial implications are further discussed in the light of these findings.     

一种新的混合型多属性决策方法及在供应商选择中的应用

研究了一种属性权重未知的混合型多属性决策模型.为了简化计算,把区间数和模糊数转化成精确数得到规范的决策矩阵.基于属性的熵,建立了具有柔性的客观权重模型,把客观权重和主观权重线性合成为综合权重.给出了客观权重和综合权重合理性的判定定理.最后的案例说明该法是可行、有效的.     

消费者品牌忠诚对品牌商再制造市场策略的影响

独立再制造商IR的市场进入给品牌商带来了显著的竞争压力。品牌忠诚源于消费者对某个产品品牌的信任和特殊情感,在产品选择中具有明显的倾向性和排他性,进一步增加了品牌商市场策略的复杂性。针对这一现象,本文采用博弈论结合数值仿真研究了消费者具有品牌忠诚特性下的品牌商再制造市场策略问题。建立并求解了IR不进入且品牌商不再制造（n）、IR不进入且品牌商再制造（nR）、IR进入且品牌商不再制造（nr）、IR进入且品牌商再制造（nrR）四种市场模式,对模型结果进行了灵敏度分析,并探讨了各成员的模式偏好。研究表明：新产品价格、品牌再制品价格、一般再制品价格均与品牌忠诚度正相关;品牌忠诚度的提高一定增大品牌商的利润,但不一定会降低IR利润;当新产品制造成本较高时,品牌商的模式偏好始终为nR$\succ$nrR$\succ$n$\succ$nr,较低时模式偏好受到消费者品牌忠诚度的大小的影响;nr和nrR模式下,品牌忠诚度仅可能提高品牌消费者剩余,但会降低普通消费者剩余、总消费者剩余和社会总福利。     

网购快递物流服务系统测评的枝模型仿真

以网购环境为背景,运用物流服务理论与系统动力学理论,通过对快递物流服务的流程分析,构建网购快递物流服务系统测评体系,对此体系和物流服务质量这一主变量分别进行了因果关系分析,进而构建了物流服务质量下的配送及时率这一附属变量的系统动力学枝模型,并对模型进行了量纲化检验、敏感性检验以及极端条件测试以证明模型的正确性;在此基础上,将申通、圆通、中通以及韵达四家快递企业的数据运用到Vensim软件对枝模型进行实证仿真并得出以此变量为根据的快递企业排名,为网购快递物流服务的测评提供一种新的方法。