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This article chronicles a collaborative effort between entrepreneurial farmers in Southern California's Imperial Valley and University of California researchers to introduce cane sugar into the Valley.

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible,” said the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Now, nearly half a century later, his words still have merit in many contexts. Given the chaos created by quantum leaps in such areas as global development, information management, technology, genetics and other sciences, the terms “absurd” and “impossible” are, well, relative.

Mexico has revealed that it will use an element of the ISO 9000 system of standards to prevent some United States goods from being sold in Mexico. Luis Guillermo Ibarra, director general of the Mexican Standards Directorate, announced his country's intentions in March to the stunned audience of industry, trade, and standards experts representing Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The group, gathered in Washington, D.C., were attending the First North American Conference on NAFTA and ISO 9000 Standards sponsored by Edison, New Jersey‐based. Stat‐A‐Matrix. ISO 9000 standards, created by the European Union to facilitate trade among the member states, have the potential to ease trade in North America.

Accuracy is only part of the planner's mission; the other is knowing what to forecast in the first place. The best way to improve some forecasts, it seems, is to eliminate them.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) represents a new approach to understanding the process of human communication. Developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the early 1970s, it is derived from linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, kinetics, and cybernetics. NLP is designed to help its users—whether they are therapists, salespersons, or teachers—more quickly gain rapport with their subjects.

Consumer demand for authentic brands is steadily rising. With increased pressure to accommodate this demand, researchers and marketers seek to understand how to influence a brand’s perceived authenticity. The purpose of this paper is to build a link between previous research on authenticity and thus gain a deeper understanding of the influencing factors of brand authenticity and its consumer outcomes.

Building on an extensive literature review, the authors identify various antecedents of brand authenticity that are closely connected with the brand’s past, its virtuousness, consumers’ self-identification with the brand perceiver’s own self and individuals representing the brand, as well as relational outcomes as consequences of a brand’s perceived authenticity. As brand authenticity is a subjective construct, the authors include brand involvement to test for moderator effects. For data collection, they conduct an online survey that generates 509 datasets. To test the hypotheses, the authors use structural equation modeling.

The results demonstrate that brand authenticity can be influenced by the identified variables (i.e. brand heritage, brand nostalgia, brand commercialization, brand clarity, brand’s social commitment, brand legitimacy, actual self-congruence and employee’s passion). Moreover, brand authenticity positively affects brand relationship quality, which in turn positively influences consumers’ behavioral intentions. The analyzed relationships do not vary due to consumer-specific characteristics (i.e. brand involvement).

In sum, the results regarding the antecedents of brand authenticity demonstrate that a company can influence brand authenticity through different approaches, and that it is therefore important to analyze which of the identified antecedents brand management should manipulate to positively impact the perception of the brand’s authenticity. In addition, the findings confirm the positive consequences on consumer behavior ascribed to the authenticity concept by marketing literature.