Business Commons^™

Campaign In A Box: Creating A Universal Public Relations Plan For Community Success For Any Small Business, Emily Branson

Journalism

No abstract provided.

An Examination Of Branding Strategies For Selected Major League Baseball Organizations, Kaitlyn Defanti

Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Administration

The implementation of successful branding strategies is crucial for all sport organizations to enhance revenue, sponsorships, and brand loyalty. To facilitate successful practices, it is important that organizations are aware of the most common branding strategies as well as the strategies of their competitors. The purpose of this study was to examine the best practices of branding strategies for the five Major League Baseball franchises in the state of California. Data were collected from five selected Major League Baseball teams. The instrument utilized in this study was a checklist covering branding strategies with an additional section for notes. The results …

An Examination Of The Best Practices Of Experiential Marketing In Selected Popular Beverage Companies, Taylor Matthews

Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Administration

In recent years, marketing efforts have shifted from traditional marketing strategies toward experiential marketing in order to ensure that consumers become emotionally attached to a brand. Experiential marketing strategies help companies create relationships with consumers and engage them through unique and memorable experiences. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of experiential marketing in three popular beverage companies. The research for this study was conducted using a best practices matrix created by the researcher, which examined experiential marketing strategies for selected popular beverage companies in the soft drink industry. The results of this study indicate that each …

2013 Performance Horse Sale At The Cal Poly Equine Center, Jennifer Rauch

Animal Science

No abstract provided.

Giving To Be Seen: The Influence Of Facebook Charitable Advertisements On Conspicuous Donation Behavior, Lei Jia

Theses and Dissertations

The arduous financial environments that nonprofit organizations face today motivate nonprofits to continuously search and leverage new communication platforms such as social media to approach a wider individual donor base. This thesis examines whether a Facebook charitable appeal promoting a donation via Facebook Gifts may attract

Facebook users to give for conspicuousness (a public display of a donation behavior). Findings of this thesis revealed a gender difference in responses to the Facebook charitable appeal due to the gender difference in self-construals such that men were more likely to give via Facebook Gifts when the ad promoting the donation via Facebook …

A Study On Rebranding Strategies, Megan Bryant

Graphic Communication

This project is a study on rebranding strategies. Companies go through a rebrand to change their strategy and direction. Many companies succeed by going through these processes, while many others fail.

In addition to extensive research on past company rebrands, a questionnaire was conducted on a sample of 25 individuals of various ages about their experiences with brands and rebranding in order to compare their responses with actual company decisions.

Participants provided insight on their own personal behaviors, decisions, and perceptions about brands and purchasing products. The study concluded that, on average, quality was more important than price in almost …

Successful Marketing Strategies For Promoting Event Destinations, Evease Iniece Tucker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Travel and tourism has been recognized as being an important driver of jobs, growth and economic recovery in the United States. Meetings, events and incentive travel contribute $98.7 billion of the direct spending, $15.0 billion in taxes and 859,000 jobs. As a result, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in the United States are taking advantage of this impact for growth in their destinations. As a destination marketing organization's main job responsibility is to promote their destination to attract visitors, which requires superior marketing strategies to achieve these goals.

This research investigates the marketing strategies of DMOs in the United States. The …

The Effect Of Product Density On Perceived Price And Quality, Joshua Jc Holston

Honors Theses

This study explores whether product density affects crowding, perceived quality, and perceived price of products within the retail space. The goal is to determine whether product density directly affects customers’ perceptions of price and quality of merchandise within retail spaces. It tests the hypotheses that increased product density will lead to an increase in crowding perceptions but a decrease in perceived price and quality. The study uses photographs of retail spaces with differing densities to manipulate product density and an online questionnaire to gather data. A student sample is used to collect the data. ANOVAs are used to determine the …

The Influence Of Mobile Website Quality On Consumer Satisfaction And Behavior, Xiuyuan Gao

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mobile shopping has grown into a huge market and an increasing number of consumers have begun to use mobile websites to shop. Therefore, how mobile shopping websites provide good shopping to customers is significant. The object of this study is to relate factors of website quality to college students’ satisfaction with mobile shopping experiences, which in turn influence their intentions to return to the website and/or to purchase on the website. Five dimensions of website quality, which were information quality, navigation, visual appeal, response time and interactivity, were selected in this study. The model of self-regulatory process (Bagozzi, 1992) has …

Consumer Animosity And Purchase Behavior : The Role Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Chun Zhang

Theses & Dissertations

Consumer animosity may have a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior for foreign products. The consequences of the negative influence include boycotting and reluctant to purchase. This study explores the research on consumer animosity and focuses on how to attenuate the negative effect of consumer animosity towards consumers’ purchase behavior. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is considered to have a moderating effect on the relationship between consumer animosity and purchase intention. In addition, individual thinking styles are expected to influence the moderating role of CSR. In this study, a 2 (consumer animosity: high vs. low) x 2 (CSR: high vs. low) …

Dia-Beat-It: An Online Game For Children And Teenagers With Type 1 Diabetes, Emily M. Stone

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Two Marketing Essays: Evolution Of Attribute-Specific Preferences Through Consumer Learning And The Effect Of Gift Exchange On The Purchase Behavior, Ji Hong Min

Open Access Dissertations

The first essay investigates the evolution of attribute-specific preferences through consumer learning. Most extant consumer learning models allow for learning about alternative-specific preferences such as brand preference in a brand choice model. However, there exist product categories which offer many varieties of products with different attributes. In such cases, it is important to model consumer learning of attribute-specific preferences rather than simply modeling alternative-specific preferences in order to more accurately and parsimoniously describe consumer behavior. In this paper, we propose a structural model of consumer's Bayesian learning of attribute-specific preference, using scanner panel data. We show that the proposed model …

An Eriksonian Approach To Consumer Identity, Sandra Rathod

Open Access Dissertations

Rathod, Sandra R. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2013. An Eriksonian Approach to Consumer Identity. Major Professor: Richard A. Feinberg.

Ego development is the fifth stage in Erikson's Lifecycle Development theory (1959) and is a major psychosocial stage beginning in adolescence and lasting into emerging adulthood. Past research based upon Marcia's Ego Identity Status Paradigm (1996) has investigated a number of ideological and interpersonal domains relevant to one's ego identity, however in today's consumer societies, where what you have is at least as important is who you are or what you do, an Eriksonian approach to consumer ego identity (CEI) has …

Modeling The Marketability Of Tourism Small Businesses: Oman's Experiences, Hamed Ibrahim Al Azri

Open Access Dissertations

Tourism Small Businesses (TSBs) are vital factors in the prosperity of local communities and the development of authentic and satisfying tourism experiences. Because of their small size, they are unable to effectively use textbook marketing models and techniques. The purpose of this study is to help TSBs market their products in a way that suits their unique nature and business environment. Specifically, this study aims to develop a theoretical model of TSB marketing, identify the main factors affecting TSB marketing, and discern relationships between these factors. Since the aim of the study is to develop a theoretical model, the method …

The Impact Of Narcissism On Value Evaluations Resulting From Virtual Good Purchases, Nathan Mcdougle

Doctoral Dissertations

Social network sites and virtual worlds have become an intriguing area of study within Marketing. The uncertainty of the effects of marketing efforts within these worlds, especially with add-on purchasable items, has received some research attention, but research has not delved deeply into the factors that affect a consumer's intention to purchase these items online. In order to better understand these actions, the present study attempts to empirically examine the effects of several of these variables—specifically narcissism—on purchase intentions, value, and quality of life. Two competing theories are proposed to explain these relationships—a theory of experiential consumption and a theory …

Customer Selection For Direct Marketing : Bi-Objective Optimization Using Support Vector Machine, Qian Wang

Theses & Dissertations

A major challenge in direct marketing is to build a customer-selection model that can help achieve higher response rate and greater profit at the same time. In this study, I adopt a bi-objective optimization (BOO) approach and propose a two-stage method using support vector machine (SVM) and support vector regression (SVR) to maximize response rate and profit simultaneously. To deal with the difficulty of learning models from imbalanced data, synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is used to generate more balanced datasets. Experiments are conducted on two datasets, a direct marketing dataset and the KDD-98 dataset, to compare the predictive performance …

A Guide To Event Promotion: Internet Marketing For A Live Musical Event In Las Vegas, Kelly C. Quinnan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A global industry of festivals and musical events has evolved and developed rapidly especially since the late 1960’s starting with Woodstock. The industry continues today with large-scale multiple stage events that bring in over hundreds of thousands of people. Las Vegas is known by many as the city of entertainment, with world-renowned Cirque Du Soleil shows, poolside concerts at the Cosmopolitan, and the thriving Electric Daisy Carnival. The phenomenal growth of this industry coupled with increased consumer awareness and choice requires sustained development and expansion in the future. Concerts and festivals are unique events that attract audiences. Music-based events are …

Money, Morals, And Human Rights: Commercial Influences In The Marketing, Branding, And Fundraising Of Amnesty International And Human Rights Watch, Danielle Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the marketing, branding, and fundraising activities of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and critically examines promotional texts used to communicate with the public. This thesis is multidisciplinary, combining scholarly work on the topics of history, humanitarianism, marketing, branding, commercialization, representation, and consumer culture. By adopting market logic and corporate strategies from the private sector, both organizations have increased revenue and created a strong identifiable brand. Each organization attempts to balance between the moral foundation or grassroots origins of the organization and the need to raise immediate revenue to sustain operations. This money-morals dilemma is also at …

The History Of Trial Gardens, Hallie Schmidt

Horticulture and Crop Science

Essay explores the history of home gardening and seed industry in America and the conditions that led to the development of the All-America Selections.

A Roadmap To Mindful Consumption Through Informative Labeling Practices: The Effects Of Sustainability Disclosure Formats On Consumer Product Evaluations, Yoon-Na Cho

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the interest of consumers in sustainable and environmentally friendly products, only a limited number of studies have focused on sustainability level disclosures for consumer packaged goods. The general overarching purpose of this dissertation is to extend the internal reference point and information processing literatures to better understand how consumers will process sustainability disclosures. Applying the theoretical lens of assimilation bias in conjunction with self-enhancement offers an important extension to prior work. Across two retail lab studies and four online experiments, I demonstrate that the perceived sustainability utility (i.e., the difference between a specific brand's level of sustainability and category-level …

Essays On Dispersion, Fairness Perception And Partitioning Of Online Prices, Yiyuan Liu

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is primarily on online pricing, by empirically investigating how formats and structures of prices influence consumer responses and subsequent purchasing behavior, brand choice, etc. Currently, three essays of my dissertation explore topics on price fairness perception, price dispersion, as well as price partitioning.

First, although previous researchers have tested effects of price changes on consumer's perceptions on price (e.g., Maxwell 1999, Campbell 2007), little work has focused on the effects of prices/costs levels on online price judgments and virtually none has examined it jointly with both internal/external reference prices from multiple comparison parties. Less work has applied price …

Understanding Collaborative Dynamics: A Critical Review And Inductive Investigation, Amydee Mackley Fawcett

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Collaboration has been a topic of discussion for over 20 years. Managers are consistently calling for better collaboration and researchers have argued that managing tightly coupled relationships creates a co-mingling of complementary competencies that establishes distinctive advantages for firms. Even though there have been a few exemplar companies that have been capable of truly developing these complementary competencies, few companies truly understand the dynamics of a collaborative capability. This dissertation reviews the theoretical conceptualization and operationalization of tightly coupled relationships and through an interpretive analysis, begins to provide clarity to the following questions:

* Under what conditions are tightly coupled …

The Legitimation Of Novel Technologies: The Case Of Nanotechnology, Anastasia E. Thyroff

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nanotechnology is the control, manipulation, and application of matter on an atomic and molecular level. The technology is complex and confusing to consumers, and its long-term safety and effect on the human body, as well as the environment, are unknown. However, for the past decade, nanotechnology has been used to develop consumer products and food with novel and attractive attributes.

Since nanotechnology is still not well known, it is not legitimized; that is, it has not been deemed safe and accepted by society. However, the market for nanotechnology is in the legitimation process. It will take an entire network of …

Toward Understanding The Subcultural Mosaic: Fragmentation Of The Culture And The Symbiotic Interplay Of The Market And Subcultures, Emre Ulusoy

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study brought to light the need for a more nuanced analysis and approach for understanding the observed tendency toward eclectic, fragmented, and paradoxical subcultures in contemporary society. It was critical to explore the impact of market hegemony and the response of subcultures to this hegemony leading to the development of contemporary subcultural sensibilities. The central purpose of this research was to develop a theory of subculture that accounted for the fragmentation observed in contemporary culture, and how this fragmentation influences subcultures leading to fragmentation within subcultures. To this end, using in-depth interviewing, netnography, and participant observation, I investigated the …

Perceived Creative Partnership: A Consequence Of Music's Social Use, Paul Gennaro Barretta

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

As contemporary consumers interact with one another and the market in a more symbolic manner, the ways music and other products are used are changing. Scholarly research has investigated the use of music in a social manner, mostly in terms of self-identity, and practitioners have explored the sharing of music, particularly with regard to the use of technology. The present research takes a closer look at the social use of music and proposes a consequence that is termed Perceived Creative Partnership; people use music in a social manner in order to achieve a state of being where they feel as …

Dressing Indian: Appropriation, Identity, And American Design, 1940-1968, Alison Rose Bazylinski

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines the ways the American fashion industry and fashion publications appropriated aspects of Indian cultures as marketing tools from 1940 to 1968 and the ways representations stereotypes created through fashion outlets denoted American and individual, rather than Native, identity. Representational stereotypes created at the turn of the twentieth century provided fashion merchandisers and sellers with a home-grown marketing scheme, while the development of an American fashion industry based on mass-produced, ready-to-wear sportswear led to nation-wide dissemination and use of "Indian" colors, patterns, and designs.

Retailer Television Advertising: Consumers' Skepticism Of Informational Vs. Emotional Ads, Janna Michelle Parker

Doctoral Dissertations

The bombardment with ads that consumers face daily has led to increased Skepticism toward Advertising. This increased advertising costs billions of dollars, yet, the research has shown conflicting results (Stafford and Day 1995) (Obermiller and Spangenberg 1998) (Obermiller, Spangenberg and MacLachlan 2005) regarding which strategies work best for reducing the negative influence of Skepticism toward Advertising.

For over a decade, retailers have ranked #2 in television advertising spending (Advertising Age 2002-2012). Television advertising research has focused on advertising by manufacturers. These findings should not be generalized to retailers because retailers and manufacturers have different goals, use different promotional tools, and …

Smart Meter Technology And The Effects On Grocery Retailers, Cara Cremeans

Honors Theses

This study investigates the relationship grocery retailers have with their utility company and the smart meter technologies that will be implemented in their grocery stores in the near future. I engaged in background research and conducted qualitative interviews of several Chief Executive Officers and owners of local grocery supermarkets, as well as a contract Chief Financial Officer who works closely with small grocery retail stores. For each interview, the men were asked a series of questions relating to sustainability, smart meters, and store operations.

Saving money at grocery retail stores does not notably come in the form of energy consumption, …

Marketing In A Multimedia Era, Jamie Armstrong

Music

No abstract provided.

Women And Their "Food Time" An Investigation Into Food Purchases, Preparation, And Consumption Atmosphere Using Smartphone Survey Technology, Garland Jaeger

Master's Theses

Women’s food purchasing and eating habits have been studied in detail, but are still not entirely understood. Prior research has sought to segment the female food shopper market, but typically use only demographic characteristics. In this study, fifty females were recruited in San Luis Obispo, CA from March 2012 to May 2012 to keep an electronic food-time diary for one week. By collecting information through surveys distributed using a smartphone application, SurveySwipe, the study investigated the amount of time expended for each meal, as well as the manner in which the meal was prepared or purchased, and the context surrounding …