Search results

This paper aims to explore the relationship between brand functionality and consumer-based brand equity.

A mixed-methods approach was adopted including a qualitative study and multiple survey-based studies. Mediation and moderated-mediation paths were tested using PROCESS and three-stage least squares simultaneous estimation models.

Study 1 finds that consumers perceive highly functional brands can enhance their self-competence to perform a task. This phenomenon is labelled brand skill and defined as the extent to which consumers perceive their own performance as emanating from their use of a particular brand. Study 2 finds that brand skill mediates the relationship between brand functionality, brand connection and consumer-based brand equity, while a post hoc study showed that these relationships are robust among private meaning brands. Study 3 demonstrates that these mediated relationships are moderated by the type of dominant benefit the brand provides (i.e. hedonic-versus utilitarian-dominant benefits).

Based on self-determination theory, brand skill is posited as the link between brand functionality, brand connection and consumer-based brand equity.

Brand managers are urged to not overlook the role of brand functionality in favor of other non-functional brand dimensions. Brand functionality enhances consumers’ perceived self-competence and fosters brand connection, especially for brands that offer superior utilitarian benefits.

This is the first study that empirically examines the process by which brand functionality leads to consumer-based brand equity and the role brand skill plays in making that connection.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature on mental health resilience and other positive mental health capacities of urban and internal migrants.

The methodology for this narrative review included a search of articles published up to 2017. The abstracts were screened and relevant articles studied and discussed. Literature on the particular mental health challenges of urban migrants in India was also studied. References found in the literature relating to neurourbanism were also followed up to explore broader historical and conceptual contexts.

Several key sources and resources for mental health resilience were identified – including familial and community networks and individual hope or optimism. Nevertheless, much of the literature tends to focus at the level of the individual person, even though ecological systems theory would suggest that mental health resilience is better understood as multi-layered, i.e. relevant to, and impacted by, communities and broader societal and environmental contexts.

This paper provides insight into an aspect of migrant mental health that has tended to be overlooked hitherto: the mental health resilience and positive mental health capacities of urban migrants. This is particularly relevant where professional “expert” mental health provision for internal migrant communities is absent or unaffordable. Previous work has tended to focus predominantly on mental health risk factors, despite growing awareness that focusing on risk factors along can lead to an over-reliance on top-down expert-led interventions and overlook positive capacities for mental health that are sometimes possessed by individuals and their communities.

The purpose of this paper is to consider corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) within the supply chain. The discussion focuses on the social component of social responsibility and explores its effects on end-users. Moreover, this paper presents moral intensity, a construct introduced in the ethics literature, as a potential guide to managers who struggle to navigate the gray area between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSI.

This paper conceptualizes CSI within the supply chain and offers a framework and propositions for understanding and preventing irresponsible behavior from a moral intensity perspective.

The moral intensity framework provides a normative approach with the potential to guide managers who face choices involving decisions that might lead to irresponsible behavior in interorganizational settings.

This paper draws attention to business-to-business CSI and the limited research that focuses on the social aspects of CSR, rather than the environmental and economic factors emphasized in prior research. It also introduces the moral intensity framework to the supply chain literature and highlights the end-user’s (i.e. consumer’s) role in influencing the performance of the overall value chain.

A £750,000 paint plant has gone on stream at the Bisley plant of UK office furniture manufacturer, F. C. Brown. Brian Rooks went to see how robots are incorporated into the plant.

This paper considers the demand for evidence‐based practice in mental health communication and describes how evidence from studies of health communication, as well as recommendations from educational models, professional bodies and policy directives have been incorporated into our ‘Brief, Ordinary and Effective’ model for communication in nursing. A key challenge in putting evidence to work in health care and bridging the theory‐practice gap concerns the social and organisational context that may not always work to sustain new initiatives. Accordingly, we will describe an attempt to support and consolidate awareness of the role of evidence in health care communication via a Managed Innovation Network and the development of the Brief, Ordinary and Effective model of health care communication. This enables us to align the quest for new knowledge and insights that are practice‐congruent with the kinds of applicability criteria that modern health care providers set out. This has yielded important insights about how research can be embedded in informed practice and how evidence‐based communicative practice can be nurtured and made viable in communication in mental health care.