During the past 15 years, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. Despite the attention it has received during this period, no consistent measure of brand equity has been adopted. In this article, the authors propose a new framework for conceptualizing brand equity that distinguishes between brand equity, conceived of as an intrapersonal construct that moderates the impact of marketing activities, and brand value, which is the sale or replacement value of a brand. Such a distinction is important because, from a managerial perspective, the ultimate goal of brand equity research should be to understand how to leverage equity to create value.

As brands expand them in terms of customer portfolio, they have recognized their needs to be compatible with multicultural and multinational customer groups. In order to capture wider customer groups in different sectors, the companies have begun extension process by vertical and horizontal methods. Thus, this paper aimed to explain this process in terms of theories of categorization, regulatory focus and typical-based which were developed by previous scholars.

In the current context of globalization, firms have concentrated their efforts on the development of international brands. As a result, international brand portfolios have been restructured, and many successful local brands have been eliminated. This article's objective is to improve the understanding of local brand differences and competitive advantages relative to inter- national brands. To achieve this, the authors reanalyzed

The notion of the brand, like any concept that dominates markets and public consciousness, is a challenge to define. Is it a simple differentiator of the cereals in our cupboards, a manipulative brainwashing tool forced on us by corporations, or a creative triumph as capable as any art form of stimulating our emotions and intellect? For those of us who grapple with these questions on a daily basis, Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits elevates the discussion to the level of revelation. Each chapter is an extensive dialogue between Debbie Millman, herself a design visionary, and a different leader in the field. By asking questions deeply informed by her own expertise, Millman coaxes lucid, prescient answers from twenty-two interview subjects, among them Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and godfather of modern branding Wally Olins. This engaging and enlightening book is an unprecedented forum on the state of modern branding and how companies and consumers can best understa...

Typography performs a critical role integrating signs into contemporary culture yet typography’s role in the design and conceptualization of meaning has been underestimated and its position as a critical component in the discourse of visual culture has been neglected. The role of design is fundamental in maintaining social stability and cohesion and the manipulation of form, structure and behaviour of typography’s letterforms are instruments in this system. Typography operates as a linguistic and visual communication device and possesses the agency to be symbolically meaningful to individuals and groups and representative of social, cultural and economic concerns. Professional practices demonstrated in the design, media and arts industries have far outpaced the extent to which this phenomenon has been written about in the academic or public domain. As such, little is known about the complex role typography performs in the social, economic or cultural realm of contemporary practice.
This research study aims to make visible the mechanisms through which social classes and social institutions are established and validated in contemporary culture offering critical insight into the investment toward expressing how particular facets of tastes are constructed to demarcate cultural distinctions.  Cultural festivals are a form of cultural capital in an objectified state and an increasingly important aspect of our contemporary experience. Branding is a vital part of this festival space presenting impressions of urban freedoms, rich histories, and cultured places, that seek to subvert our daily existence while performing the task of engaging local, national, and international visitors and participants. There is prestige in holding culturally relevant and socially acceptable festivals that serve the discourses of “city branding” and the “creative industries” in a competitive global context. Festivals have become a central figure of not only the political economy of tourism but also of urban regeneration and cultural tourism. The intention is to establish recognition suited to the significant role typography performs within this context and to offer a contribution to design research that not only engages with the artifacts of design but with the conceptualization of designed meaning in 21st century visual culture.

In our study, agroparks’ contribution to inter- nationalization of our branded agricultural products has been evaluated within a conceptual framework. Agropark practices in the world and Turkey have been examined and some suggestions have been developed for forwarding the outputs, produced in those agroparks, to foreign markets. In this context, it has been determined that producers in the agroparks should come together for production and market- ing and should compose a consortium, get the geographi- cal sign, increase the awareness of Turkish products with ingredient branding and aim to become more competitive in internationalization.With the study, which focuses the agroparks in terms of marketing, it has been aimed to make contribution to literature related to the subject in Turkey and to provide a strategic view to the practitioners as well.

The focus of this paper is to apply sensory branding to the case of Lego. Henceforth, the thesis question for my paper is the following: To what extent does Lego use sensory branding and what should the company do in the future in terms of utilizing sensory branding?

The reason for choosing this topic is first of all, that I myself grew up with Lego and as so many in my age range intuitively understand the sensory characteristics of the touch and look of the Lego brand. Second of all I chose this topic because Lego seems to be applying sensory branding only in a limited sense.

This is interesting first of all, because it indicates, that there is room for improvement in Lego’s overall branding strategy. Second of all, it is interesting because according to fellow Danish marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, the future belongs to companies who fully adopt sensory branding. This is particularly relevant for Lego considering they are in an industry where function is relatively easily copied. Therefore, if Lego does not improve its sensory branding efforts, the company risks being overtaken by competitors applying a more holistic sensory branding strategy.

International marketing’s commitment to a technical and universalizing
approach to solving managerial problems has meant that
researchers have adopted an ethnocentric approach to branding. This
is becoming problematic as the global marketplace develops. The
authors argue that to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of global branding, international marketing scholars will need
to revise some key premises and foundations. Branding research in
the future will need to be contextually and historically grounded,
polycentric in orientation, and acutely attuned to the symbolic significance of brands of all types. The authors offer some conceptual foundations for a culturally relative, contextually sensitive approach to
international branding in which the construct of brand mythology is
central.

The reboot case focuses on Major League Soccer (MLS), its successful diversity initiatives, the importance of its Hispanic/Latino fan base, and the rebranding of Chivas USA as the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC). It is designed to examine the challenges faced by a professional sports expansion team in the United States, which in this particular case had a mission to focus its outreach efforts on the Hispanic/Latino community. Comparing and contrasting the acknowledged failures of Chivas USA, juxtaposed with the successes of the LA Galaxy and Seattle Sounders FC, students are able to investigate why Chivas USA shuttered its operations following the 2014 season and analyze the LAFC relaunch in 2018.

From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands uses a Chinese
perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese brand culture to
serve as a complement to existing models of brand globalization.
Moving away from the trend to study the managerial aspects of
Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we examine how
Chinese branding efforts express significant aspects of their own
brand culture. Our selection of Jay Chou, the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening ceremony, and Shanghai Tang, an aspiring global fashion brand with aesthetic roots in Chinese historical culture, as illustrative cases, is fully consistent with this unwritten and unspoken consensus around exploiting Chinese cultural specificity towards the global development of Chinese brands. Although these three cases may seem “under the radar,” we believe that, together, they provide unique insights into the relation between brands and Chinese culture, and offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about global Chinese brands.

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

1 is Associate Professor at the University of the West of England, Department of Organisation Studies. He was Dean of the College of Business at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research (KIMEP), 2006-2007. He has a PhD ...

The study and practice of marketing have broadened considerably, from an emphasis on marketing as a functional management issue, to a wider focus on the strategic role of marketing in overall corporate strategy (e.g., Kotler, 2000; Sudharshan, 1995). This broadening of the marketing concept, to include strategic as well as operational decisions, has resulted in an overlap between marketing and strategic management. Managers around the globe are recognizing the increasing importance for the firm to develop marketing strategies to compete effectively in worldwide markets. The emergence of a more open world economy, the globalization of consumers’ tastes, and the development of a worldwide commercial web all have increased the interdependency and interconnections of markets across the globe. In such a global environment, firms should develop their marketing strategy around three key dimensions (Zou and Cavusgil, 2002): (1) standardization-adaptation, (2) configurationcoordination, and (3) strategic integration. Following Sudharshan (1995), we define a firm’s marketing strategy as the development of and decisions about a firm’s relationships with its key stakeholders, its offerings, resource allocation, and timing.

Brand zealotry was defined as a specialized form of opinion leadership. Brand zealots are consumers who frequently engage in brand-related opinion leadership, report high interest in identifying the best brands to buy, and regularly purchase the brand name products they favor. The concept was operationalized by means of an index of the propensity to engage in brand zealotry. Brand zealotry was found to be associated with the demographic factors such as younger and higher income consumers. Certain personality characteristics and media preferences pointed to the possibility that brand zealots are discerning consumers who rely on information provided in advertising and on the Internet.

This study is part of an ongoing investigation into what we would like to identify as a unique, and so far underexplored, form of knowledge dissemination by means of online academic bionotes. By focusing on academic online identity construction, we intend to highlight the core discursive mechanisms underlying such a practice as well as differentiate specific features from more familiar ones characterising general social networking public profiles (Fitzpatrick 2015). Although a relatively new convention in the academic workplace, the practice of scholars crafting their own academic identity through online personal branding has been gaining momentum during the past decade. This is mainly due to the rapidly changing world of work and the proliferation of online social networking sites (SNS) which have blurred the boundaries between work and personal lives (Garzone 2015; Duffy/Pooley 2017). With the Web becoming a workplace, where involvement in networking practices and the construction of a social presence are no longer a choice, scholars are now seriously reflecting on the importance of defining personal branding tools for the dual purpose of individual advancement and knowledge dissemination.
Consequently, by exploring scholarly knowledge sharing practices occurring on academic SNSs, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the social construction of academic identity overlaps and interdiscursively blends together with previously investigated and more traditional processes of disciplinary knowledge dissemination (KD) (Hyland 2012a, 2015). This study, in fact, is taking a broader approach to KD by using Hyland’s own perspective as a starting point, especially when he argues that: "In pursuing their professional goals and constructing knowledge, academics engage with others, and because of this, discourses carry assumptions about knowledge, relationships and how this should be structured and negotiated" (Hyland 2012a: 175).
Hence, our approach explores these renegotiated discourses as enacted by renewed digital knowledge sharing practices such as those occurring in dynamic Web 3.0 environments. To this end, the investigation is based on the analysis of a multimodal corpus comprising a collection of profiles crafted by university scholars and posted on the academic social networking site (ASNS) known as Acadmia.edu. This platform, which is not an educationally affiliated organization, foregrounds the entrepreneurial mission of “accelerating the world’s research”3 as it is essentially designed for academics whose main intention is to share research papers and interests as well as other general information concerning affiliation and academic engagements. Also part of Academia.edu’s mission is to afford scholars the opportunity to monitor the impact of their research through deep analytics (Price 2012) while tracking the work of other academics they choose to follow (Thelwall/Kousha 2014). Established in 2008 in San Francisco by Richard Price as part of the Open Science movement, to date, Academia.edu is reported having nearly 31,000,000 registered account-holders contributing over 20 million papers and attracting nearly 26 million unique visitors a month.
Against this backdrop, it is quite evident that data collected from ASNSs are of major interest for linguistic exploration, mainly owing to the impact that the above-mentioned academic social networking practices may have on how language is devised and packaged in order to facilitate knowledge dissemination. For the purpose of shedding light on this still grey area of language innovation, the online profiles collected from the Academia.edu site are the object of this study as they comprise multimodal instantiations of both knowledge dissemination and self-branding resources.

Resumo: Este artigo apresenta discussões pertinentes à prática pedagógica no ensino de história no contexto atual, ou seja, o uso das tecnologias como recurso e metodologia. Entendemos por emprego de tecnologias na educação não somente as ferramentas digitais, como internet, jogos ou redes sociais para dinamizar as aulas, mas também a utilização de diversos recursos audiovisuais no fomento tanto ao ensino como na pesquisa histórica. Nesse sentido, indicaremos as possibilidades educacionais mediante o uso de variadas tecnologias, dentre as quais, destacamos: computador, iconografia, filmes, música, arquivos, museus, mapas e literatura de cordel. A inserção dos referidos recursos no ensino é significativa, sobretudo, por estimular a participação e interação dos discentes na construção do conhecimento. Esta perspectiva se insere nas diretrizes propostas pelos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais, no tocante ao ensino de história no nível fundamental e médio. O referencial teórico refere-se a obras cuja abordagem é análoga a proposta deste artigo.

Aaker's (1995) seminal work in constructing a scale to measure brand personality has reinvigorated research in this area. Her work and those that have subsequently used the brand personality scale have followed conventional analysis procedures (exploratory factor analysis and ...

Storytelling has become the hot topic in marketing for many reasons. Truly successful marketers however try not to just build their brands around stories but imbue and elevate them through myths. In the course of the past four years, the authors have analyzed more than 100 cases across all price tiers and product categories and spoke to an uncounted number of experts and practitioners. The result: Today's strongest and most price-insensitive players use meta-narratives to give their brands depth and gravitas while at the same time catapulting themselves to superior heights and long-lasting stature. Most apply one of two strategies: They try to 'reach beyond', allowing their targets to feel as if they were connecting to a higher truth. Or they use the 'guiding power' of myths, projecting archetypes that inspire and which many can aspire to, no matter their realities.

This two-part paper deals with the power of market-leading brands and how to harness that power. The first part of the paper, in Vol. 1, Issue 3 in the journal, set the scene by discussing many of the factors that positively and negatively effect the long-term sustainability of market-leading brands. The second part of the paper presents the detergent industry as a case study, and shows how companies are exploiting their market-leading brands.

Ever since the late 1960s when Virginia Slims cigarettes released their logo ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’, tapping into women’s liberationist tropes, scholars have been aware of the ways corporations have adopted feminist slogans and rhetoric to sell their products. While there is growing scholarly interest in the ways corporations promote ‘brand-led’ or ‘commodity activism’ (see Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012), there is a surprising dearth of research on the other side of the coin - the ways activists are increasingly adopting slick PR and marketing strategies into their campaigns including, branding, commercialising, franchising, merchandising, and the increased use of celebrity icons.
Given the contemporary ‘hot-ness’ of feminism around the globe (Gill 2016), and the plethora of recent initiatives such as the global SlutWalk movement and the Women’s Marches in January 2017, this is a timely and fruitful space in which to apply theories from promotional and critical consumer studies. In this talk, I will outline a new theoretical account of what I term ‘brand feminism’, which attends to the ways feminist activists are increasingly drawing on corporate strategies to ‘brand’ their activism, using case studies such as SlutWalk, Hollaback!, and various women’s marches around the globe. While ‘framing’ (Entman 1993) may have been a key concept in the past to understand social change movements, I propose that as neoliberalism continues to gain global dominance, we need a new theoretical framework in which to understand the relationship between activism, promotional culture, and social change.

Keynote Talk delivered at the German Association of Communication Research. Cite as:

Mendes, K. (2017) ‘Brand Feminism: Promotional culture and contemporary feminist activism’ German Association of Communication Research, Frankfurt/Main, 6 October.

This research essay examines the target audience’s profile and preferences for the development of the garment brand Gaia & Dubos, which creates and produces ecological and ethical high-end garments for women in the province of Quebec, and explores the best environmental and ethical practice to establish a sustainable fashion enterprise. The research methods for this project combine a literature review, an online survey and four individual interviews with the target audience in an attempt to answer the research questions: (1) Who is the target audience (demographics, values, lifestyle and habits)? (2) What are the target audience’s preferences when it comes to ecological and ethical clothing? (3) What is the best environmental and ethical practice for a clothing brand?

The fast evolution from local agriculture to food industry created a mismatch between the production behind most supermarket products and the food narratives embedded in western cultures. Accessibility to remote or non-seasonal products elonged the supplier chain up to a level were production and consumption are almost disconnected. This gap created an opportunity for companies to create narratives around the products to reinforce branding as a competitive tool, and consumer demand for authenticity urged design to counterbalance that with hyperreal material narratives that are now possible with the current advanced printing technologies. This article identifies four categories of material simulations and examines how they are used as a communication tool. The relationship between brand narratives and product attributes is analysed using Jean Baudrillard’s four stages of simulacrum, and lastly, the relationship between actual and simulated materials is explored using Boris Groys concept of media sincerity.

In today’s globalisation, countries compete with each other in the same manner as the multinational corporations do. Recently, the term ‘nation-brand’ has appeared, together with a nation-brand index that tracks how a particular country's reputation responds to activities, promotions and events at home and around the world. Countries, like corporations and products have brand values and reputations. These ‘branding’ factors are analogous to identity formulation on a national and personal level. For example, visual motifs and icons have a dramatic impact on how successful that country is in attracting tourists, foreign investment, capital, talent, cultural relations and political allies. Such manifestations of identity are vital to the marketing of products and services abroad. In order for a country to develop itself as a competitive nation-brand, it needs to have a strong national identity. The paper will argue that in a same manner as the corporate identity, the national identity serves as a foundation on which the ‘brand image’ is built. The brand’s image is a representation of the brand’s culture (in this case the nation’s culture); therefore, how the image is formed and what kind of form it takes should be of concern to the government, the industry and the local communities. For that reason, strong interdisciplinary partnerships need to be established, as only then the communication of the country’s image can bring success in the above-mentioned areas of interest.

A historiographic and interpretative methodology will be used to present the analogous case of corporate and national identity formulation.  The current political situation in Macedonia will be used to exemplify the argument. This paper will address the subtheme ‘Identities/Subjectivities’ for the conference and will engage with activities in the boundaries of corporational-ism and nationalism.

Typography is one of basic elements in Visual Communication Design. Almost every promotional tools and media are using typography as a message conveyor. It is also has become an important yet attractive branding feature from Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) or Industri Mikro, Kecil dan Menengah (UMKM) in Indonesia. Nevertheless, the lack of knowledge and understanding from the SMEs on how to build their brand has been camouflaged by the use of typography to represent a brand. There are at least 11.610 of Small Medium Enterprises available in the City of Semarang nowadays. This usage of typography as a brand representation is shown from packagings of apparel products, snacks, and processed foods comes from local plantations. These products will not be able to compete with any other modern day packaged products if not interfered by the knowledge on how to build a brand using visual communication design. The purpose of this research is to provide brand building knowledge bridging fo...

Abstract: A review of nearly 20 years of sociocultural research and trends on “ghostly episodes” (ghosts, haunted houses, and poltergeists) suggests that personal accounts, group investigations, and popular depictions of anomalous experiences function as active, meaningful, and potent cultural memes. These, in part, reflect interpersonal or group dynamics grounded in Durkheimian models, as well as Social Identity and Conflict theories. Expanding on and integrating these themes, this paper provides a general framework that explains the enduring popularity of ghost narratives in terms of their versatility, adaptability, participatory nature, universality, and scalability (VAPUS model). This perspective implies that ghostly episodes, as experiences and narratives, embody and exemplify the marketing concepts of “brand personality” and consumer engagement. Accordingly, social and cultural influences are discussed as important and inherent contextual variables that help to produce, promot...

The purpose of this paper was to reviewed a number of issues such as the concept of branding in the context of higher education, brand reputation management, and the role of the Communication Department in building the institutional reputation of the Ministry of Education. The data points to positive results for higher institutions which desire to invest and maintain strong brand identity and image given that these facets influence competition. For branding and advertising to effectively promote the image of institutions, a strategically planned branding programme is recommended to attract more constituents.

Mired in inconsistency, contradiction, and scandal, Donald J. Trump’s presidency appears to be anything but normal. This has prompted a great deal of searching among social scientists and journalists to understand what exactly is behind Trump’s erratic governing style. These narratives center the new normal of American presidential politics on the extreme form of Trump’s narcissistic behavior and his flagrant commitment to ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal practices. However, because these narratives rely on traditional political strategies and theories, they do not fully capture the most novel aspects of the Trump mode of governance. What is “not normal” about President Donald Trump is that his governing style is irreducible to conventional statecraft and political goals because Trump is not just a celebrity/businessman-turned-politician. Rather, Trump the person is inherently tied to Trump the personal brand, and the governing style of President Trump follows the market-oriented logic of personal brands, which is primarily oriented towards maximizing symbolic capital. Rather than position Trump’s governing style as motivated to achieve self-adulation, white supremacy, an authoritarian state, or neoliberal utopia, we reconsider Trump’s governing style as an attempt to capture the attention of the collective consciousness and focus it on Trump as a personal brand.

In this age of worldwide competition, deteriorating brand differentiation, and growing mass media, organizations are reaching beyond the conventional marketing tools to enhance the value of intangible assets. During the past few decades a move from function centric branding to emotion centric and value centric branding is visible. The external communication used by organizations for gaining recognition through these cause-related campaigns can become a relevant strategic marketing tool. This paper studies the Cause Marketing initiatives of three well known organisations of which one is a private firm, another an NGO and the third one an entrepreneurial initiative turned cause marketing company. Through this qualitative research, the role of external communication in marketing campaigns as a whole and specifically on these three different kinds of organizations is compared. What is cause marketing? Cause Related Marketing (hereafter referred as CRM) can be described as " strateg...

In Corporate Branding in Facebook Fan Pages: Ideas For Improving Your Brand Value, the authors show how companies can improve their brand value by fostering their online corporate reputation. Communication actions on Facebook fan pages are an important tool on the road to reputation. Considering that reputation is essentially the long-term image of a brand, the book suggests strategies for improving this image in the short term by nurturing engagement with consumers. Engaged consumers who participate in a communal environment are co-producers of a brand, who build meanings and endorse a brand they trust. Word of mouth (WOM) is an important tool for creating and replicating the image of a trustworthy company, and these repeated images can result in a solid reputation, or increased brand value. Also addressed is how company's strategies influence this process, and how online communication benefits from the integration of the manager's vision with communication policies. This b...

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper was to reviewed a number of issues such as the concept of branding in the context of higher education, brand reputation management, and the role of the Communication Department in building the institutional reputation of the Ministry of Education. The data points to positive results for higher institutions which desire to invest and maintain strong brand identity and image given that these facets influence competition. For branding and advertising to effectively promote the image of institutions, a strategically planned branding programme is recommended to attract more constituents. KEYWORDS: higher education institutions, brand reputation management

In this paper there was characterized the phenomenon of marketing communication outsourcing. There were presented the basic concepts related to this issue. There was discussed a range of possible ways to implement marketing communication with the involvement of external service providers, such as agencies, individual experts and consultants. Phenomenon of marketing communications outsourcing was presented as a way to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Attention was also paid to negative aspects of outsourcing, like loss of control over the brand.

W artykule scharakteryzowano zjawisko outsourcingu komunikacji marketingowej. Przedstawiono podstawowe pojęcia związane z tym zagadnieniem. Omówiono zakres możliwych sposobów realizowania komunikacji marketingowej przy korzystaniu z ofert zewnętrznych podmiotów, takich jak agencje czy indywidualni specjaliści i doradcy. Outsourcing komunikacji marketingowej przedstawiony został jako sposób na redukcję kosztów i poprawę skuteczności działania. Zwrócono również uwagę na jego negatywne aspekty, w tym przede wszystkim możliwą utratę kontroli nad marką.

The effectiveness estimation of positioning strategies perceived by consumers is a challenge for marketers and confusion is still there in their minds, at the same time in the mind of strategy makers that which strategy is more successful.Successful positioning and its well established perception on consumer side are the symptoms of company’s long run progress and product’s success. Empirical, the relative effectiveness of taken positioning strategies is measured. A multidimensional scale is used to measure the effectiveness. The scale is constituted by the four dimensions including dissimilarity, uniqueness, favorability and credibility. Each dimension is assessed by the associated elements that are seventeen in total. Practically, three print advertisements from cellular industry are selected with the
experts’opinion. Each advertisement represents the given positioning strategy. Quantitative data were gathered by showing these advertisements to the 100 consumers that are selected via purposive sampling technique.The statistical technique, ANCOVA is applied herein the study.The results showed both benefit
positioning strategy and surrogate strategy received the much higher and significant score against the three dimensions of positioning effectiveness (i.e., favorability, dissimilarity and uniqueness) whereas results are not significant for credibility dimension.

The Indian petrol market has two categories of players i) Government regulated organizations ii) private players like Reliance and Essar. The refining capacity of the country is increased from 187.386 million metric tones per annum MMTPA in 2011 to 213.066 (MMTPA) in 2012. Prior to globalization, Distribution was the only marketing function dominated in petroleum industry as the entire industry is fully owned and controlled by the government. Holistic marketing concept started gain the respect in petroleum industry after the privatization. Customer services started gain importance at petrol stations. There are nearly 45,000 petrol retail outlets spread across India in 2012 including public and private sectors. This study aims at identifying the factors influencing customers to prefer a specific petrol retail outlet. This also includes the comparative analysis of factors influencing preference of petrol retail outlet between cosmopolitan city and tier 2 city. This study also measures the customer commitment in petrol retail outlets. The four levels of customer expectations are also identified through this study.

This paper describes work in progress for the development of a structured process that helps crossfunctional development teams to bridge the gap between a company’s brand strategy and experiences for customers. The process is aimed to assist and structure the very early stages of the service development process, the fuzzy front end. Further, it describes a tool that has been developed that can be used to assist this transformation, by scoping the ‘target experience’ for a proposed service. The tool uses role-playing, using professional actors to improvise upon key experience words such that behaviours and customer experiences are explored. The paper describes the theoretical basis for this work, the process and the tool itself, together with early reflections upon its use.

The study aims to explore the owner-managers' attitudes and opinions towards branding and brand management in small and medium enterprises across Dubai, UAE. The study also explores the causes that are acting as barriers to brand building. The data collected is through questionnaires from a sample of 62 respondents and interviews with Small and Medium Enterprises owners-managers. The research found that many Small and Medium Enterprises do not practice branding strategies and most of the respondents believe that incorporating branding strategies is insignificant for the success of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME).