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This chapter defines channels and explains their role in creating and exchanging knowledge assets. Channels are where many of today’s knowledge assets live. Knowledge is increasingly bundled with communication technologies in the chaotic and dynamic channel market. It challenges the preservation and curation of an organization’s knowledge assets. We cannot ignore channels because they are essential to knowledge exchange and flows and engaging in business. At the same time, knowledge preservation and curation strategies mandate that organizations make wise channel choices and manage knowledge assets in a channel-agnostic way. The chapter reviews the evolution and range of channels active today. It explains how channels create complex knowledge environments in scale and scope.

Effective safety communication facilitates the sharing of relevant knowledge that helps to improve safety behaviours, such as superior hazard identification and compliance. This study aims to explore channels by which construction companies can effectively communicate health and safety (H&S) among communities of their operations.

Based on a quantitative research approach, this study addressed the knowledge gap through a cross-sectional survey of 250 contractors (comprising 155 building and 95 road contractors) involved in various projects in the Ghanaian construction industry. These contractors were selected by using a stratified simple random sampling technique. Data obtained from the survey was analysed through descriptive (i.e. frequencies, mean and standard deviation) and inferential (i.e. exploratory factor analysis) statistical analyses.

The findings from the mean scores revealed that all the 12 communication channels identified in the literature, confirmed through piloting and examined by the respondents, were important channels through which construction companies can effectively communicate H&S amongst communities of their operations. The exploratory factor analysis revealed a clustering of the 12 channels of communication into 5 components: “safety demonstration in the community”; “social media”; “mass media”; “community engagement”; and “opinion leaders”.

This study offers construction project managers the means of managing one of the major stakeholders of a construction project (the community). It provides an actionable opportunity that can be leveraged strategically to integrate community members into projects to promote synergy and local content inclusion while gaining a peaceful atmosphere to achieve their project goals.

Practically, this study provides construction project managers with a means of managing one of the major stakeholders of a construction project (the community) and also demonstrates the integration of community members into projects to promote synergy and local content inclusion. This would give construction organisations a peaceful atmosphere to accomplish their project objectives.

The social implication of this study is that the study offers society a means of creating safer Ghanaian communities by offering them the knowledge of identifying hazards and avoiding risky behaviours, creating a good safety atmosphere in these communities.

This study presents construction organisations with a unique opportunity to transfer and share novel external knowledge within a different social system (the community). It contributes to the state-of-the-art knowledge in H&S communication by providing channels through which H&S can be communicated in a developing country such as Ghana.

This study aims to capture how the association between a multichannel relational communication strategy (MRCS) and customer performance is contingent upon such customer performance (low- versus high-performance customers) and to reconcile past contradictory results in this marketing-related topic. To this end, the authors propose and validate the method of quantile regression as an unconventional, yet effective, means to proceed to that reconciliation.

This study collected data from 4,934 customers of a private pension fund firm and accounted for both firm- and customer-initiated relational communication channels (RCCs) and for customer lifetime value (CLV). This study estimated a generalized linear model and then a quantile regression model was used to account for customer performance heterogeneity.

This study finds that specific RCCs present different levels of association with performance for low- versus high-performance customers, where outcome customer performance is the dependent variable. For example, the relation between firm-initiated communication (FIC) and performance is stronger for low-CLV customers, whereas the relation between customer-initiated communication (CIC) and performance is increasingly stronger for high-CLV customers but not for low-CLV ones. This study also finds that combining different forms of FIC can result in a negative association with customer performance, especially for low-CLV customers.

The authors tested the conceptual model in one single firm in the specific context of financial services and with cross-sectional data, so there should be caution when extrapolating this study’s findings.

This study offers nuanced and precise managerial insights on recommended resource allocation along with relational communication efforts, showing how managers can benefit from adopting a differentiated-customer performance approach when designing their MRCS.

This study provides an overview of the state of the art of MRCS, proposes a contingency analysis of the relationship between MRCS and performance based on customer performance heterogeneity and suggests the quantile method to perform such analysis and help reconcile past contradictory findings. This study shows how the association between RCCs and CLV varies across the conditional quantiles of the distribution of customer performance. This study also addresses a recent call for a more holistic perspective on the relationships between independent and dependent variables.

This empirical study aims to examine luxury fashion retailers' localised multiple channel distribution strategies in China.

Through case studies of 15 participating retailers, qualitative data were collected from 33 semi-structured interviews.

Strong impacts of internationalisation strategies, distribution strategies and channel length towards multiple channel retailing are revealed. Multi-channel retailing is widely employed by firms who have entered China and further developed their businesses through local partnerships and adopted a selective distribution strategy via relatively longer channels. Omni-channel retailing is only suitable for the few retailers using an exclusive distribution strategy through direct marketing and wholly owned customer relationship management. As a dynamic transformation from multi- to omni-channel retailing, cross-channel retailing is adopted by those who are withdrawing from local partnerships and shifting to wholly owned expansions and operations in host markets.

The results are potentially challenged by relatively small sample size.

Practitioners are suggested to adapt multiple channel retailing to their international expansion strategies, distribution strategies and channel length in the host markets.

This paper contributes to the literature in both multiple channel retailing and international retailing by offering insights into the motives, development patterns and suitability of multiple channel retailing in the international retail marketing context.

This study explored whether the critical incident management systems (CIMS) model can predict the EMS performance in the COVID-19 context. Past research has established the significance of early detection and response (ER) in the context of Ebola virus disease (EVD), prompting a question of whether the model can also be helpful in the COVID-19 context. Consequently, the authors assessed whether ER influences the impact of communication capacity (CC), reliable information channel (RC) and environment (EN) on COVID-19 EMS performance. Assessing these relationships will advance emerging infectious disease (EID) preparedness.

The authors employed standardized measurement instruments of the CIMS model (CC, ER, RC and EN) to predict the performance of COVID-19 EMS using structural equation modeling (SEM) in a study of 313 participants from frontline responders.

The results show that the relationship of ER and EN with COVID-19 EMS performance is positive, while that of EN on CC is negative. The relationship between EN and COVID-19 EMS performance was insignificant. Contrary to the hypothesis, CC was negatively significant to COVID-19 EMS performance due to poor communication capacities.

The authors acknowledge some limitations due to challenges faced in this study. First, Data collection was a significant limitation as these questionnaires were built and distributed in June 2020, but the response time was prolonged due to the recurring nature of the pandemic. The authors had wanted to implore the inputs of all stakeholders, and efforts were made to reach out to various Ministry of Health, the local CDC and related agencies in the region via repeated emails explaining the purpose of the study to no avail. The study finally used the frontline workers as the respondents. The authors used international students from various countries as the representatives to reach out to their countries' frontline workers. Second, since the study was only partially supported using the CIMS model, future studies may combine the CIMS model with other models or theories. Subsequent research reassesses this outcome in other contexts or regions. Consequently, further research can explore how CC can be improved with COVID-19 and another future EID in the region. This may improve the COVID-19 EMS performance, thereby expanding the lesson learned from the pandemic and sustaining public health EID response. Additionally, other authors may combine the CIMS model with other emergency management models or theories to establish a fully supported theoretical model in the context of COVID-19.

The findings have practical implications for incident managers, local CDCs, governments, international organizations and scholars. The outcome of the study might inform these stakeholders on future direction and contribution to EID preparedness. This study unfolds the impact of lessons learned in the region demonstrated by moderating early detection and responses with other constructs to achieve COVID-19 EMS performance. The findings reveal that countries that experienced the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak, were not necessarily more prepared for an epidemic or pandemic, judging by the negative moderating impact of early detection and response. However, these experiences provide a foundation for the fight against COVID-19. There is a need for localized plans tailored to each country's situation, resources, culture and lifestyle. The localized plan will be to mitigate and prevent an unsustainable EID management system, post-epidemic fund withdrawals and governance. This plan might be more adaptable and sustainable for the local health system when international interventions are withdrawn after an epidemic. Public health EID plans must be adapted to each country's unique situation to ensure sustainability and constantly improve EID management of epidemics and pandemics in emergency response. The high to moderate importation risk in African countries shows Africa's largest window of vulnerability to be West Africa (Gilbert et al., 2020). Therefore, they should be in the spotlight for heightened assistance towards the preparedness and response for a future pandemic like COVID-19. The West African region has a low capacity to manage the health emergency to match the population capacities. The COVID-19 outbreak in West Africa undoubtedly inflicted many disruptions in most countries' economic, social and environmental circumstances. The region's unique challenges observed in this study with CC and reliable information channels as being negatively significant highlight the poor maintenance culture and weak institutions due to brain drain and inadequate training and monitoring. This outcome practically informs West African stakeholders and governments on aspects to indulge when trying to improve emergency preparedness as the outcomes from other regions might not be applicable.

This study explored the relevance of the CIMS model in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing different patterns of influence on COVID-19 EMS performance. In contrast to the extant literature on EVD, the authors found the moderating effects of ER in the COVID-19 context. Thus, the authors contribute to the COVID-19 EMS performance domain by developing a context-driven EMS model. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to present an up-to-date survey on the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique with co-operative strategy, a fast-evolving fifth-generation (5 G) technology. NOMA is used for serving many mobile users, both in power and code domains. This paper considers the power-domain NOMA, which is now discussed as NOMA.

The first part of the paper discusses NOMA-based cooperative relay systems using different relay strategies over different channel models. In various research works, the analytical expressions of many performance metrics were derived, measured and simulated for better performance of the NOMA systems. In the second part, a brief introduction to diversity techniques is discussed. The multiple input and multiple output system merged with cooperative NOMA technology, and its future challenges were also presented in this part. In the third part, the paper surveys some new conceptions such as cognitive radio, index modulation multiple access, space-shift keying and reconfigurable intelligent surface that can be combined with NOMA systems for better performance.

The paper presents a brief survey of diverse research projects being carried out in the field of NOMA. The paper also surveyed two different relaying strategies that were implemented in cooperative NOMA over different channels and compared several performance parameters that were evaluated and derived in these implementations.

The paper provides a scope for recognizable future work and presents a brief idea of the new techniques that can be united with NOMA for better performance in wireless systems.

Aligning corporate communications through different information sources is a great challenge for marketers, especially those operating in the tourism sector, which has been harshly affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides a deep analysis of the implementation of seven basic principles of the integrated marketing communications (IMC) paradigm in a crisis situation.

In-depth interviews with tourism and hospitality service providers were conducted in the fourth quarter of 2021 in Croatia, a destination that showed remarkable results in terms of the number of international tourist arrivals during the pandemic.

Most firms successfully transitioned from tactical to strategic IMC implementation. Some problems were reported in the coordination of communication tools and channels. Whereas the use of digital technology was enhanced, database management did not receive sufficient attention. Message clarity represented the greatest challenge, while consumer-centric communication was the most neglected principle. Relationship building was pursued mainly through B2B rather than B2C communication, whereas brand equity development pursued through communication mix mostly focused on increases in awareness, perceived quality and attitudinal loyalty.

This research is qualitative in nature and provides opinions on IMC adoption from the managerial perspective only.

This paper provides guidelines for the successful integration of marketing communications (marcom) in an extremely ambiguous and uncertain environment.

The contribution of this work lies in the proposal of a new refined and expanded theoretical framework of IMC principles and numerous marcom strategies for operating during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus providing relevant implications for academia and industry.