Achieving at university and beyond : does it help to be good looking?

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the associations between attitudes to academic achievement and post university success using perceptions of attractiveness, gender, ethnic identity, personality, and social acceptance as antecedents. Design/methodology/approach – An online questionnaire was completed by male (N=116) and female (N=126) university students from various cultural backgrounds. To evaluate the proposed relationships, multiple regression analysis was used. Findings – The findings suggest that attractiveness is related to attitudes to academic achievement and success through its association with social appeal and acceptance. Ethnic identity is also related to both academic achievement and post university success. Personality is not positively related to academic achievement. Finally, social acceptance is positively related to academic achievement for males and to success for females. Research limitations/implications – Whilst the survey targeted students from various cultural backgrounds studying in Australia, it did not look at university students from other countries. A cross-cultural perspective could reveal further differences in attitudes. Originality/value – This study links attractiveness and academic achievement theories. The findings have implications for tertiary institutions and suggest academics and policy-makers to vigorously promote core personality and values such as intelligence, communication skills, and sincerity, rather than allow superficial values such as attractiveness to be placed at the centre stage of students' endeavour.

Comparing and complementing methods : traditional market research vs. deep customer insights

Quantitative market data has traditionally been used throughout marketing and business as a tool to inform and direct design decisions. However, in our changing economic climate, businesses need to innovate and create products their customers will love. Deep customer insight methods move beyond just questioning customers and aims to provoke true emotional responses in order to reveal new opportunities that go beyond functional product requirements. This paper explores traditional market research methods and compares them to methods used to gain deep customer insights. This study reports on a collaborative research project with seven small to medium enterprises and four multi-national organisations. Firms were introduced to a design led innovation approach, and were taught the different methods to gain deep customer insights. Interviews were conducted to understand the experience and outcomes of pre-existing research methods and deep customer insight approaches. Findings concluded that deep customer insights were unlikely to be revealed through traditional market research techniques. The theoretical outcome of this study is a complementary methods matrix, providing guidance on appropriate research methods in accordance to a project’s timeline.

Making the train : an examination of five perspectives of rail access and how they resonate with existing and potential passengers

Rail operators recognize a need to increase ridership in order to improve the economic viability of rail service, and to magnify the role that rail travel plays in making cities feel liveable. This study extends previous research that used cluster analysis with a small sample of rail passengers to identify five salient perspectives of rail access (Zuniga et al, 2013). In this project stage, we used correlation techniques to determine how those perspectives would resonate with two larger study populations, including a relatively homogeneous sample of university students in Brisbane, Australia and a diverse sample of rail passengers in Melbourne, Australia. Findings from Zuniga et al. (2013) described a complex typology of current passengers that was based on respondents’ subjective attitudes and perceptions rather than socio-demographic or travel behaviour characteristics commonly used for segmentation analysis. The typology included five qualitative perspectives of rail travel. Based on the transport accessibility literature, we expected to find that perspectives from that study emphasizing physical access to rail stations would be shared by current and potential rail passengers who live further from rail stations. Other perspectives might be shared among respondents who live nearby, since the relevance of distance would be diminished. The population living nearby would thus represent an important target group for increasing ridership, since making rail travel accessible to them does not require expansion of costly infrastructure such as new lines or stations. By measuring the prevalence of each perspective in a larger respondent pool, results from this study provide insight into the typical socio-demographic and travel behaviour characteristics that correspond to each perspective of intra-urban rail travel. In several instances, our quantitative findings reinforced Zuniga et al.’s (2013) qualitative descriptions of passenger types, further validating the original research. This work may directly inform rail operators’ approach to increasing ridership through marketing and improvements to service quality and station experience. Operators in other parts of Australia and internationally may also choose to replicate the study locally, to fine-tune understanding of diverse customer bases. Developing regional and international collaboration would provide additional opportunities to evaluate and benchmark service and station amenities as they address the various access dimensions.

A cross-discipline and collaborative approach to identifying the predictors of environmentally friendly and health protective behaviour

Background. As a society, our interaction with the environment is having a negative impact on human health. For example, an increase in car use for short trips, over walking or cycling, has contributed to an increase in obesity, diabetes and poor heart health and also contributes to pollution, which is associated with asthma and other respiratory diseases. In order to change the nature of that interaction, to be more positive and healthy, it is recommended that individuals adopt a range of environmentally friendly behaviours (such as walking for transport and reducing the use of plastics). Effective interventions aimed at increasing such behaviours will need to be evidence based and there is a need for the rapid communication of information from the point of research, into policy and practice. Further, a number of health disciplines, including psychology and public health, share a common mission to promote health and well-being. Therefore, the objective of this project is to take a cross-discipline and collaborative approach to reveal psychological mechanisms driving environmentally friendly behaviour. This objective is further divided into three broad aims, the first of which is to take a cross-discipline and collaborative approach to research. The second aim is to explore and identify the salient beliefs which most strongly predict environmentally friendly behaviour. The third aim is to build an augmented model to explain environmentally friendly behaviour. The thesis builds on the understanding that an interdisciplinary collaborative approach will facilitate the rapid transfer of knowledge to inform behaviour change interventions. Methods. The application of this approach involved two surveys which explored the psycho-social predictors of environmentally friendly behaviour. Following a qualitative pilot study, and in collaboration with an expert panel comprising academics, industry professionals and government representatives, a self-administered, Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) based, mail survey was distributed to a random sample of 3000 residents of Brisbane and Moreton Bay Region (Queensland, Australia). This survey explored specific beliefs including attitudes, norms, perceived control, intention and behaviour, as well as environmental altruism and green identity, in relation to walking for transport and switching off lights when not in use. Following analysis of the mail survey data and based on feedback from participants and key stakeholders, an internet survey was employed (N=451) to explore two additional behaviours, switching off appliances at the wall when not in use, and shopping with reusable bags. This work is presented as a series of interrelated publications which address each of the research aims. Presentation of Findings. Chapter five of this thesis consists of a published paper which addresses the first aim of the research and outlines the collaborative and multidisciplinary approach employed in the mail survey. The paper argued that forging alliances with those who are in a position to immediately utilise the findings of research has the potential to improve the quality and timely communication of research. Illustrating this timely communication, Chapter six comprises a report presented to Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC). This report addresses aim's one and two. The report contains a summary of participation in a range of environmentally friendly behaviours and identifies the beliefs which most strongly predicted walking for transport and switching off lights (from the mail survey). These salient beliefs were then recommended as targets for interventions and included: participants believing that they might save money; that their neighbours also switch off lights; that it would be inconvenient to walk for transport and that their closest friend also walks for transport. Chapter seven also addresses the second aim and presents a published conference paper in which the salient beliefs predicting the four specified behaviours (from both surveys) are identified and potential applications for intervention are discussed. Again, a range of TPB based beliefs, including descriptive normative beliefs, were predictive of environmentally friendly behaviour. This paper was also provided to MBRC, along with recommendations for applying the findings. For example, as descriptive normative beliefs were consistently correlated with environmentally friendly behaviour, local councils could engage in marketing and interventions (workshops, letter box drops, internet promotions) which encourage parents and friends to model, rather than simply encourage, environmentally friendly behaviour. The final two papers, presented in Chapters eight and nine, addresses the third aim of the project. These papers each present two behaviours together to inform a TPB based theoretical model with which to predict environmentally friendly behaviour. A generalised model is presented, which is found to predict the four specific behaviours under investigation. The role of demographics was explored across each of the behaviour specific models. It was found that some behaviour's differ by age, gender, income or education. In particular, adjusted models predicted more of the variance in walking for transport amongst younger participants and females. Adjusted models predicted more variance in switching off lights amongst those with a bachelor degree or higher and predicted more variance in switching off appliances amongst those on a higher income. Adjusted models predicted more variance in shopping with reusable bags for males, people 40 years or older, those on a higher income and those with a bachelor degree or higher. However, model structure and general predictability was relatively consistent overall. The models provide a general theoretical framework from which to better understand the motives and predictors of environmentally friendly behaviour. Conclusion. This research has provided an example of the benefits of a collaborative interdisciplinary approach. It has identified a number of salient beliefs which can be targeted for social marketing campaigns and educational initiatives; and these findings, along with recommendations, have been passed on to a local council to be used as part of their ongoing community engagement programs. Finally, the research has informed a practical model, as well as behaviour specific models, for predicting sustainable living behaviours. Such models can highlight important core constructs from which targeted interventions can be designed. Therefore, this research represents an important step in undertaking collaborative approaches to improving population health through human-environment interactions.

Pornography as creative industry

Much academic writing on pornography focuses on the genre’s exceptionalism (the ways in which it is different from other forms of culture). This paper rather focuses on its typicality as a Creative Industry. As with other Creative Industries, in the production and distribution of pornography it is producers who make most money. While a small number of on-camera performers become wealthy and powerful the majority lack creative control and are poorly paid. The careers of performers are typically short examples of “nomadic labour”. Many creative workers are involved in the production of pornography apart those in front of the camera, and the skills of these behind-the-camera creatives can be transferable across sectors. Like other Creative Industries, the pornography business is facing challenges from increased digitalization and globalization; and like other Creative Industries the solutions to these challenges lie in branding, niche marketing, and exploiting new technological possibilities.

Social media and physicians : exploring the benefits and challenges

Healthcare professionals’ use of social media platforms, such as blogs, wikis, and social networking web sites has grown considerably in recent years. However, few studies have explored the perspectives and experiences of physicians in adopting social media in healthcare. This article aims to identify the potential benefits and challenges of adopting social media by physicians and demonstrates this by presenting findings from a survey conducted with physicians. A qualitative survey design was employed to achieve the research goal. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 physicians from around the world who were active users of social media. The data were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The study revealed six main reasons and six major challenges for physicians adopting social media. The main reasons to join social media were as follows: staying connected with colleagues, reaching out and networking with the wider community, sharing knowledge, engaging in continued medical education, benchmarking, and branding. The main challenges of adopting social media by physicians were also as follows: maintaining confidentiality, lack of active participation, finding time, lack of trust, workplace acceptance and support, and information anarchy. By revealing the main benefits as well as the challenges of adopting social media by physicians, the study provides an opportunity for healthcare professionals to better understand the scope and impact of social media in healthcare, and assists them to adopt and harness social media effectively, and maximize the benefits for the specific needs of the clinical community.

Blended delivery and online assessment : scaffolding student reflections in work-integrated learning

This paper documents a teaching innovation addressing the challenges of embedding and assessing reflective practice in work-integrated learning, specifically marketing internships. We identify four issues relating to this problem: lack of knowledge or skill for reflection, limitations of physical journals, facilitation of different forms of reflection, and suitable models for teaching and assessing reflection. The paper outlines a blended approach combining face-to-face workshops and online resources, and using online reflective journals and digital stories as assessment. The approach and assessment tasks can be implemented in a variety of marketing and business units.

Visions and values : the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s prizing of picture books in the twenty-first century

The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers the oldest national prize for children’s literature in Australia. Each year, the CBCA confers “Book of the Year” awards to literature for young people in five categories. In 2001, the establishment of an “Early Childhood” category opened up the venerable “Picture Book” category (first awarded in 1955) to books with an implied readership up to 18 years of age. As a result, this category has emerged in recent years as a highly visible space within which the CBCA can contest discourses of cultural marginalisation insofar as Australian (“colonial”) literature is constructed as inferior or adjunct to the major Anglophone literary traditions, and the consistent identification of children’s literature (and, indeed, of children) as lesser than its ‘adult’ counterparts. The CBCA is engaged in defining, evaluating, and legitimising a tradition of Australian children’s literature which is underpinned by a canonical impulse, and is a reflexive practice of self-definition, self-evaluation and self-legitimisation for the CBCA itself. While it is obviously problematic to identify award winners as a canon, it is equally obvious that literary prizing is a cultural practice derived from the logic of canonicity. In his discussion of the United States’s Newbery Medal, Kenneth Kidd notes that “Medal books are instant classics, the selection process an ostensible simulation of the test of time” (169) and that “the Medal is part of the canonical architecture of children's literature” (169). Thus, it is instructive to consider the visions and values of the national, of the social, and of the literary-aesthetic, in the picture books chosen by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) as the “best” of the early twenty-first century. These books not only constitute a kind of canon for contemporary Australian children’s literature, but may well come to define what contemporary Australian children’s literature means in the wider literary field. The Book of the Year: Picture Book awards given by the CBCA since 2001 demonstrate that it is not only true of the Booker Prize that, “The choices of winning books reflect not only on the books themselves, then, but also back on the Prize, affecting its reputation and creating journalistic capital which is vital for the Prize to achieve its prominence and impact.” (81). Many of the twenty-first century CBCA award-winning picture books complicate traditional or comfortable understanding of Australianness, children’s literature, or “appropriate” modes of form and content, reminding us that “moments when texts resist or complicate recuperation into national discourses offer fruitful points for exploring the relationships between text and celebratory context” (Roberts 6). The CBCA has taken the opportunities offered by the liberation of the Picture Book category from an implied readership to challenge dominant constructions of children’s literature in Australia, and in so doing, are engaged in overt practices of canonicity with potentially long-lasting effects. Works Cited: Kidd, Kenneth. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery Gold.” Children's Literature 35 (2007): 166-190. Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2011. Squires, Claire. “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize.” Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Eds. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 71-82.

Experiential brand deployment : improving tourism brand evaluations

This article examines the use of an experiential branding process to help leisure resort businesses evaluate their brand. We integrate experiential marketing and the quality function development approach in combination to help understand the brand from the perspectives of both the consumer and firm, to help resort service businesses build their experience-oriented competitive brands. The value of this study is that it provides a real-world brand framework, especially those resorts with limited resources. Much is spoken about the influence of the brand and why it is important, but little is known about decisions related to developing a brand, especially for firms that have limited resources such as resort tourism operators. Tourism operators tend to be small-to-medium enterprises that do not necessarily have the capacity to do everything suggested. Therefore, we explore how firms assess the critical elements of their brand by using an integrated approach. For example, the study finds that, first, by using the quality function development method resorts can identify the most critical brand elements, and second, we identify the associated strengths of each brand element and confirm the identified resort’s critical brand elements for investment. Results show the potential strategies to create a more holistic set of experiences.

Cryptic marketing : strategic targeting of subculture markets

This research aims to understand what factors influence consumers' behaviour to subculture marketing and how companies can strategically overcome potential brand alienation. Findings validate cryptic marketing as a strategy for organizations to communicate effectively with their chosen market through the use of cryptic cues, symbols and messages while circumventing negative responses from non-target audiences. The thesis contributes to extending current understanding of marketing communication through the use of covert strategies, employing covert tactics on the non-target, wider market instead of the target, subculture market.

'It's Africa. It's Arizona. It's Antarctica. It's Afghanistan. Actually, it's Alberta' : Marketing locations to film producers

This chapter begins by outlining the dynamics of contemporary international film production and the inherent tension between ‘design interest’ and ‘location interest’. A history of the promotion of particular places as filmmaking locations (including Hollywood) is presented, prior to the establishment of the first film commissions. The creation of international associations and their role in professionalization, norm setting and the standardization of offerings and activities, is then described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of commissions’ work, the emergent discourse of ‘film friendliness,’ and the differences between location marketing and other kinds of destination marketing.

Submission for the Queensland Government Parliamentary Inquiry into personal health promotion interventions using telephone and web-based technologies

Telephone and web-based technologies such as SMS, smartphone apps, gamification, online/mobile games, online quizzes and tools can be used in personal health interventions in two ways: health promotion or social marketing. In response to the Queensland government's call for submissions to the parliamentary inquiry, a social marketing and design submission from four of the faculties at Queensland University of Technology was submitted. There appears to be a great deal of confusion in government circles about the terms ‘social marketing’ and ‘health promotion’ and often they are used interchangeably when they are actually significantly different approaches. Social marketing is the science and practice of behaviour change and involves goods and services that offer a value proposition, and which incentivises citizens to change their behaviour voluntarily. However, social marketing is often mistakenly used to describe advertising and communication or social media marketing. This submission contains an overview of how technology interventions need to be implemented to be successful, provides examples of the evidence that telephone and web-based interventions can effectively influence public health outcome. This submission poses seven critical factors.

Social media in higher education: Strategy and support for staff and students

In 2013, social networking was the second most popular online activity after internet banking for Australians (ABS, 2014). The popularity and apparent ubiquity of social media is one of the most obvious and compelling arguments for integrating such technologies into higher education. Already, social media impacts a wide range of activities ranging in scope from marketing and communication to teaching and learning in higher education (Hrastinski & Dennen, 2012). Social media presents many exciting possibilities and opportunities for higher education. This session will focus on one staff focussed and one student focussed social media innovation currently underway at QUT. First, it will focus on the actions of QUT’s social media working group. The working group’s aim is to ensure an overarching social media policy for the university is developed and implemented that supports staff in the use of social media across a range of activities. Second, it will discuss the eResponsible and eProfessional Online resources for students project. The focus of this project is to develop a suite of online resources targeted at the devel opment of social media skills for undergraduate students at QUT. These initiatives are complementary and both aim to minimise risk while maximising opportuniti es for the university

Digital innovation in social marketing: A systematic literature of interventions using digital channels for engagement

Social marketing uses commercial marketing techniques to deliver interventions for social benefit in order to improve quality of life for individuals and communities. Behaviour change is the primary objective of social marketing interventions (Andreasen 2002). The aim of this systematic review is to provide insight into social marketing interventions and their evaluations published in peer-reviewed journals so as to identify the key elements of social marketing employed by these interventions. as well as understand the use of digital channels for engagement.

Social Influence and Blood Donation: Cultural Differences Between Scotland and Australia

People can be motivated to carryout behaviours which contribute to improvement of quality of life for reasons driven by cultural norms. There is a common perception that people within a cultural cluster, particularly one with a common language such as English, will exhibit similar consumer behaviours. However there is an emerging field of research investigating intra-cultural differences in marketing that challenges this perception. In particular, the role of peers and norms as drivers of altruistic behaviours that benefit society may differ between these countries. Altruism is an important motivation for pro-social behaviours such as blood donation, water conservation and peer counselling for health problems. Understanding the social influences for these behaviours assists marketers to develop programs that meet the needs of donors and potential donors. An ongoing foundation of altruistic consumers is essential for delivering services that improve quality of life for people. Without blood donors, there would be no blood products for cancer sufferers or accident victims, without a sufficient water supply the quality of life for residents would be compromised and without breastfeeding peer counselling, new mothers and their babies would have reduced quality of life. This chapter reports the findings of two online surveys with Scottish and Australian blood donors and demonstrates differences in the way social norms influence donation behaviour, and importantly different impacts of cultural factors in the two populations.