Buying a sponsor's brand : the role of affective commitment to the sponsored team

Sponsorship is increasingly important in a firm's communication mix. Research to date has focused on the impact of sponsorship on brand awareness and its subsequent consequences for image congruency and consumer attitudes towards sponsors' brands. A lesser studied area is the effect of sponsorship on consumers' purchase intentions and behaviours. We argue that existing models of sponsorship driven purchase behaviour fail to account for affective commitment, which mediates relationship between affiliation with the team and social identification with the team. We propose a modified framework describing the effect of sponsorship on purchase intentions in the context of low and high performing sports teams. The framework is tested using structural equations modelling; employing PLS estimation and data collected via online survey of AFL chat room participants. Results confirm the role of affective commitment in sport sponsorship purchase intentions and indicate that team success has a significant influence on fans' purchase behaviours.

Channel blurring and consumer expectations : evidence in Chile

An important trend in Chilean retailing industry is the increase in channel blurring. This investigation attempts to identify the relevant store attributes for different retail formats (grocery, department store, drug store, and home improvement). Do consumer store attribute saliency vary for different retail formats? Interviews identified twelve salient store attributes for the different retail formats. Survey results showed differences in store attribute saliencies for consumers when shopping at different formats. Seven of the twelve variables showed significant differences across formats. However, two attributes were relatively important for all four retail formats: product quality and responsiveness of employees.

The economics of credence goods: An experimental investigation of the role of verifiability, liability, competition and reputation in credence goods markets

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods markets. While theory predicts that either liability or verifiability yields efficiency, we find that liability has a crucial, but verifiability only a minor effect. Allowing sellers to build up reputation has little influence, as predicted. Seller competition drives down prices and yields maximal trade, but does not lead to higher efficiency as long as liability is violated.

Behavioural biases and information disclosure laws relating to residential property sales : narrowing the gap between existing laws and calls for future reforms

Market failures involving the sale of complex merchandise, such as residential property, financial products and credit, have principally been attributed to information asymmetries. Existing legislative and regulatory responses were developed having regard to consumer protection policies based on traditional economic theories that focus on the notion of the ‘rational consumer’. Governmental responses therefore seek to impose disclosure obligations on sellers of complex goods or products to ensure that consumers have sufficient information upon which to make a decision. Emergent research, based on behavioural economics, challenges traditional ideas and instead focuses on the actual behaviour of consumers. This approach suggests that consumers as a whole do not necessarily benefit from mandatory disclosure because some, if not most, consumers do not pay attention to the disclosed information before they make a decision to purchase. The need for consumer policies to take consumer characteristics and behaviour into account is being increasingly recognised by governments, and most recently in the policy framework suggested by the Australian Productivity Commission

Service quality in the Malaysian fast food industry : an examination using DINESERV

This study addresses calls in the literature for the external validation of Western-based marketing concepts and theory in the East. Using DINESERV, the relationships between service quality, overall service quality perceptions, customer satisfaction, and repurchase intentions in the Malaysian fast food industry are examined. A questionnaire was administered to Malaysian fast food consumers at a large university, resulting in findings that support the five-dimensional nature of DINESERV and three of four proposed hypotheses. This study contributes to knowledge of service quality in developing countries and is the first to examine DINESERV in the Malaysian fast food industry.

Sudanese refugees in Australia the impact of acculturation stress

Refugees from Sudan are the fastest growing community in Australia. Australian mental health professionals have to be prepared to offer services to this ethnic group along with the other mainstream and diverse consumers. In order to offer culturally competent services, these mental health professionals are required to be familiar with this emerging community. As such a review was undertaken with two main goals. Firstly, the review aimed to educate Australian mental health professionals about the demographics and culture of Sudan, the traumas encountered as a result of the civil war, factors leading to massive exodus, and the difficulties of the transit and post migration phase. Secondly, the review intended to inform Australian mental health professionals about the possible acculturation stress that is manifested in the form of intergeneration and role conflict and marital difficulties. The review highlights that there are few studies addressing acculturation stress of Sudanese refugees, and even fewer on the impact it has on relationships. Future research directions are discussed.

Business process extensibility

Vendors provide reference process models as consolidated, off-the-shelf solutions to capture best practices in a given industry domain. Customers can then adapt these models to suit their specific requirements. Traditional process flexibility approaches facilitate this operation, but do not fully address it as they do not sufficiently take controlled change guided by vendors’ reference models into account. This tension between the customer’s freedom of adapting reference models, and the ability to incorporate with relatively low effort vendor-initiated reference model changes, thus needs to be carefully balanced. This paper introduces process extensibility as a new paradigm for customising reference processes and managing their evolution over time. Process extensibility mandates a clear recognition of the different responsibilities and interests of reference model vendors and consumers, and is concerned with keeping the effort of customer-side reference model adaptations low while allowing sufficient room for model change.

The international regulation of transnational mergers

Transnational mergers are mergers involving firms operating in more than one jurisdiction, or which occur in one jurisdiction but have an impact on competition in another. Being of this nature, they have the potential to raise competition law concerns in more than one jurisdiction. When they do, the transaction costs of the merger to the firms involved, and the competition law authorities, are likely to increase significantly and, even where the merger is allowed to proceed, delays are likely to occur in reaping the benefits of the merger. Ultimately, these costs are borne by consumers. This thesis will identify the nature and source of regulatory costs associated with transnational merger review and identify and evaluate possible mechanisms by which these costs might be reduced. It will conclude that there is no single panacea for transnational merger regulation, but that a multi-faceted approach, including the adoption of common filing forms, agreement on filing and review deadlines and continuing efforts toward increasing international cooperation in merger enforcement, is needed to reduce regulatory costs and more successfully improve the welfare outcomes to which merger regulation is directed.

A secure architecture for Australia’s index based e-health environment

This paper proposes a security architecture for the basic cross indexing systems emerging as foundational structures in current health information systems. In these systems unique identifiers are issued to healthcare providers and consumers. In most cases, such numbering schemes are national in scope and must therefore necessarily be used via an indexing system to identify records contained in pre-existing local, regional or national health information systems. Most large scale electronic health record systems envisage that such correlation between national healthcare identifiers and pre-existing identifiers will be performed by some centrally administered cross referencing, or index system. This paper is concerned with the security architecture for such indexing servers and the manner in which they interface with pre-existing health systems (including both workstations and servers). The paper proposes two required structures to achieve the goal of a national scale, and secure exchange of electronic health information, including: (a) the employment of high trust computer systems to perform an indexing function, and (b) the development and deployment of an appropriate high trust interface module, a Healthcare Interface Processor (HIP), to be integrated into the connected workstations or servers of healthcare service providers. This proposed architecture is specifically oriented toward requirements identified in the Connectivity Architecture for Australia’s e-health scheme as outlined by NEHTA and the national e-health strategy released by the Australian Health Ministers.

Virtual product placement as a new approach to measure effectiveness of placements

Product placement is a fast growing multi-billion dollar industry yet measures of its effectiveness, which influence the critical area of pricing, have been problematic. Past attempts to measure the effect of a placement, and therefore provide a basis for pricing of placements, have been confounded by the effect on consumers of multiple prior exposures of a brand name in all marketing communications. Virtual product placement offers certain advantages: as a tool to measure the effectiveness of product placements; assistance with the problem of lack of audience selectivity in traditional product placement; testing different audiences for brands and addressing a gap in the existing academic literature by focusing on the impact of product placement on recall and recognition of new brands.

The impact of brand and product placements in electronic games

In an environment where it has become increasingly difficult to attract consumer attention, marketers have begun to explore alternative forms of marketing communication. One such form that has emerged is product placement, which has more recently appeared in electronic games. Given changes in media consumption and the growth of the games industry, it is not surprising that games are being exploited as a medium for promotional content. Other market developments are also facilitating and encouraging their use, in terms of both the insertion of brand messages into video games and the creation of brand-centred environments, labelled ‘advergames’. However, while there is much speculation concerning the beneficial outcomes for marketers, there remains a lack of academic work in this area and little empirical evidence of the actual effects of this form of promotion on game players. Only a handful of studies are evident in the literature, which have explored the influence of game placements on consumers. The majority have studied their effect on brand awareness, largely demonstrating that players can recall placed brands. Further, most research conducted to date has focused on computer and online games, but consoles represent the dominant platform for play (Taub, 2004). Finally, advergames have largely been neglected, particularly those in a console format. Widening the gap in the literature is the fact that insufficient academic attention has been given to product placement as a marketing communication strategy overall, and to games in general. The unique nature of the strategy also makes it difficult to apply existing literature to this context. To address a significant need for information in both the academic and business domains, the current research investigates the effects of brand and product placements in video games and advergames on consumer attitude to the brand and corporate image. It was conducted in two stages. Stage one represents a pilot study. It explored the effects of use simulated and peripheral placements in video games on players’ and observers’ attitudinal responses, and whether these are influenced by involvement with a product category or skill level in the game. The ability of gamers to recall placed brands was also examined. A laboratory experiment was employed with a small sample of sixty adult subjects drawn from an Australian east-coast university, some of who were exposed to a console video game on a television set. The major finding of study one is that placements in a video game have no effect on gamers’ attitudes, but they are recalled. For stage two of the research, a field experiment was conducted with a large, random sample of 350 student respondents to investigate the effects on players of brand and product placements in handheld video games and advergames. The constructs of brand attitude and corporate image were again tested, along with several potential confounds. Consistent with the pilot, the results demonstrate that product placement in electronic games has no effect on players’ brand attitudes or corporate image, even when allowing for their involvement with the product category, skill level in the game, or skill level in relation to the medium. Age and gender also have no impact. However, the more interactive a player perceives the game to be, the higher their attitude to the placed brand and corporate image of the brand manufacturer. In other words, when controlling for perceived interactivity, players experienced more favourable attitudes, but the effect was so weak it probably lacks practical significance. It is suggested that this result can be explained by the existence of excitation transfer, rather than any processing of placed brands. The current research provides strong, empirical evidence that brand and product placements in games do not produce strong attitudinal responses. It appears that the nature of the game medium, game playing experience and product placement impose constraints on gamer motivation, opportunity and ability to process these messages, thereby precluding their impact on attitude to the brand and corporate image. Since this is the first study to investigate the ability of video game and advergame placements to facilitate these deeper consumer responses, further research across different contexts is warranted. Nevertheless, the findings have important theoretical and managerial implications. This investigation makes a number of valuable contributions. First, it is relevant to current marketing practice and presents findings that can help guide promotional strategy decisions. It also presents a comprehensive review of the games industry and associated activities in the marketplace, relevant for marketing practitioners. Theoretically, it contributes new knowledge concerning product placement, including how it should be defined, its classification within the existing communications framework, its dimensions and effects. This is extended to include brand-centred entertainment. The thesis also presents the most comprehensive analysis available in the literature of how placements appear in games. In the consumer behaviour discipline, the research builds on theory concerning attitude formation, through application of MacInnis and Jaworski’s (1989) Integrative Attitude Formation Model. With regards to the games literature, the thesis provides a structured framework for the comparison of games with different media types; it advances understanding of the game medium, its characteristics and the game playing experience; and provides insight into console and handheld games specifically, as well as interactive environments generally. This study is the first to test the effects of interactivity in a game environment, and presents a modified scale that can be used as part of future research. Methodologically, it addresses the limitations of prior research through execution of a field experiment and observation with a large sample, making this the largest study of product placement in games available in the literature. Finally, the current thesis offers comprehensive recommendations that will provide structure and direction for future study in this important field.

Visual arts, technology and education : how can teaching and learning in high school visual arts classrooms be enriched by the use of computer technology?

Whilst a variety of studies has appeared over the last decade addressing the gap between the potential promised by computers and the reality experienced in the classroom by teachers and students, few have specifically addressed the situation as it pertains to the visual arts classroom. The aim of this study was to explore the reality of the classroom use of computers for three visual arts highschool teachers and determine how computer technology might enrich visual arts teaching and learning. An action research approach was employed to enable the researcher to understand the situation from the teachers' points of view while contributing to their professional practice. The wider social context surrounding this study is characterised by an increase in visual communications brought about by rapid advances in computer technology. The powerful combination of visual imagery and computer technology is illustrated by continuing developments in the print, film and television industries. In particular, the recent growth of interactive multimedia epitomises this combination and is significant to this study as it represents a new form of publishing of great interest to educators and artists alike. In this social context, visual arts education has a significant role to play. By cultivating a critical awareness of the implications of technology use and promoting a creative approach to the application of computer technology within the visual arts, visual arts education is in a position to provide an essential service to students who will leave high school to participate in a visual information age as both consumers and producers.

Complaining in cyberspace : the motives and forms of hotel guests’ complaints online

Traditionally, consumers who have been dissatisfied with service have typically complained to the frontline personnel or to a manager in either a direct (face-to-face, over the phone) manner, indirect by writing, or done nothing but told friends and family of the incident. More recently, the Internet has provided various “new” ways to air a grievance, especially when little might have been done at the point of service failure. With the opportunity to now spread word-of-mouth globally, consumers have the potential to impact the standing of a brand or a firm's reputation. The hotel industry is particularly vulnerable, as an increasing number of bookings are undertaken via the Internet and the decision process is likely to be influenced by what other previous guests might post on many booking-linked sites. We conducted a qualitative study of a key travel site to ascertain the forms and motives of complaints made online about hotels and resorts. 200 web-based consumer complaints were analyzed using NVivo 8 software. Findings revealed that consumers report a wide range of service failures on the Internet. They tell a highly descriptive, persuasive, and credible story, often motivated by altruism or, at the other end of the continuum, by revenge. These stories have the power to influence potential guests to book or not book accommodation at the affected properties. Implications for managers of hotels and resorts are discussed.