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Companies in all industries are searching for new sources of competitive advantage since the competition in their marketplace is becoming increasingly intensive. The resource-based view of the firm explains the sources of sustainable competitive advantages. From a resource-based view perspective, relational based assets (i.e., the assets resulting from firm contacts in the marketplace) enable competitive advantage. The relational based assets examined in this work are brand image and corporate reputation, as components of brand equity, and customer value. This paper explores how they create value. Despite the relatively large amount of literature describing the benefits of firms in having strong brand equity and delivering customer value, no research validated the linkage of brand equity components, brand image, and corporate reputation, simultaneously in the customer value–customer loyalty chain. This work presents a model of testing these relationships in consumer goods, in a business-to-business context. The results demonstrate the differential roles of brand image and corporate reputation on perceived quality, customer value, and customer loyalty. Brand image influences the perception of quality of the products and the additional services, whereas corporate reputation actions beyond brand image, estimating the customer value and customer loyalty. The effects of corporate reputation are also validated on different samples. The results demonstrate the importance of managing brand equity facets, brand image, and corporate reputation since their differential impacts on perceived quality, customer value, and customer loyalty. The results also demonstrate that companies should not limit to invest only in brand image. Maintaining and enhancing corporate reputation can have a stronger impact on customer value and customer loyalty, and can create differential competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the response of the spinal cord, the transmembrane potential, during lumbar magnetic stimulation, using a figure of eight coil.

In order to obtain a precise stimulation of the spinal cord and not the nearby nervous fibres, the coil from the electric circuit of the magnetic stimulator is optimized. The new proposed design is based on the turns’ placement inside the coil, the number of turns required to produce activation. Once the coil configuration is established, the paper addresses other issues that need to be solved: reducing power consumption (the low efficiency of power transfer from the coil to the tissue is a major drawback) and reducing coil heating.

The traditional commercial coils, used for magnetic stimulation in some preliminary experiments, had proved their inability to specifically stimulate the target tissue, without activating the surrounding areas and the low efficiency of power transfer from the coil to the nervous tissue. A more realistic modelling of the stimulating coil, based on the distribution of turns inside the coil can lead to directly stimulation of the spinal cord, during lumbar magnetic stimulation.

If the electrical circuit of the magnetic stimulator is improved, the direct stimulation of the spinal cord is obtained; so, this technique could facilitate functional motor activities, including standing and stepping in paralyzed people, without requiring implantation of electrodes like in electrical stimulation.

The authors underlined that the spinal cord stimulation can be achieved by magnetic stimulation, only if the parameters of the stimulator circuit are optimized. Therefore an original and realistic modelling of the inductive coil was proposed based on number and turns’ distribution within the coil. The coil is designed so that reducing the excessive heating makes it difficult in obtaining a more frequent repetition of stimulus.