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Listening to the customers has long been a key phrase and success element in product branding. This paper aims to highlight the importance of listening to residents during the branding of a place. The study explores ways of listening to residents to ensure they are heard and also discusses the challenges and benefits related to place branding flowing from having residents participate in decision-making processes.

Listening to residents and offering opportunities to participate requires place branders to fully attend to, comprehend and respond to residents’ comments, requests, ideas and feedback. This study reports on how two Nordic cities – Turku and Helsinki – listen to their residents. The data used comprise face-to-face interviews, telephone and e-mail conversations and documentary material.

Residents should not be considered as one homogeneous target; participation options and channels should be adapted to the demographics and geographic issues of the different regions and resident groups.

The role of residents and the importance of listening are crucial features in the emerging concept of inclusive place branding (Kavaratzis et al., 2017); its future conceptual development could benefit from the case examples at hand.

City authorities should listen to residents and provide them with opportunities to actively contribute to decision-making. Other cities could learn from the examples introduced in the paper.

This paper documents two Nordic examples of cities putting into practice a policy of listening to the residents, a previously neglected research area.

This paper evaluates the implementation of a school-based physical activity intervention and discusses how the intervention outcomes can be influenced by the implementation.

In four of the nine lower secondary schools in which the intervention was conducted, the authors examined implementation fidelity, adaptation, quality, responsiveness and dose received. The authors conducted focus group interviews with teachers (n = 8) and students (n = 46) and made observations. Dose delivered was examined quantitatively, with weekly registrations.

Results showed that two out of four schools made few and positive adaptations, implemented the intervention with high fidelity and quality and responded positively. Four main factors were found to influence implementation: frame factors, intervention characteristics, participant characteristics and provider characteristics.

A cross-sectional design was used and may not represent implementation throughout the whole school year.

In terms of large-scale implementation, the intervention may be generalizable. However, intervention criteria such as adequate facilities and a flexible timetable may be unattainable for some schools. The intervention can be adapted without compromising its purpose, but adaptations should be a result of cooperation between students and teachers.

Process evaluations on this topic are rare. This study adds to a limited knowledge base concerning what factors may influence implementation of school-based physical activity interventions for adolescents.

The recently developed resource orchestration theory studies the processes by which managers handle resources to create competitive advantages. According to this theory, it is the way that resources interact with each other that results in such advantages. Resource integration, i.e. the alignment, or fit between resources, is one important outcome of resource orchestration processes. This paper aims to develop a scale and outline approaches to measuring such resource integration.

Using a typology of five types of resources derived from value theory, the authors develop a scale for measuring the fit between resource types, i.e. the degree of resource integration. The authors illustrate the method using a case example of an IT company and demonstrate how a variety of statistical methods including hierarchical cluster analysis, structural equation modeling, social network analysis and methods from biostatistics can provide measures of resource integration.

The authors develop a scale and associated measures that can help scholars systematically measure and identify firms with a high or low level of resource integration capability. This makes it possible to investigate further these companies and reconstruct how they support dynamic capabilities, as well as commonalities across firms with high and low levels of this capability.

Existing studies on resource orchestration have failed to provide us with a reliable measurement instrument that can be used both in cross-sectional work, and in repeated or time-series studies, allowing us to assess the degree to which a wider range of resources in an organization are integrated. The authors develop and demonstrate such an instrument.