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The aim of this paper is to discuss and conceptually support the statement that a critical and holistic approach to branding requires interplay of the methods and methodologies of different disciplines and the so-called decompositional approach.

The study is based on the thorough secondary research based on content analysis of the studied literature dealing with the methodological approach to brand management and branding, especially the comparison of brand management categorization and development of approaches from the customer centrality and strategic priority to the adaptive and relational paradigms.

The major outcome of this research is the confirmation of the fact that changes of paradigmatic approaches to research are rooted in economic and social changes. The predominance of relational, community, cultural approaches stem from the growth of customers' value and a new role of customers in the economic and social sphere.

The topic of branding in management in tourism destinations is still emerging, especially understanding of transition of paradigms and approaches to the research of branding in tourism.

Important is the explanation of differences between the approaches to branding and especially the fact that some of the approaches (relational, community and cultural approach) are based on systems-thinking and contribute to the competitive advantage creation.

The paper aims to highlight the fact how global social and economic forces and changing cycles (Kondratiev) have influenced the empirical research and the implementation of ideas on economic interventions and social problems topics. This fact embraced major themes in a society and has influenced research on innovation and branding. It might be compelling to discuss the changes in paradigms and explain why social responsibility and other core themes resonate and influence the managerial practices in tourism and the paradigms in research of tourism dealing with brand management.

The set of compositional approaches to product space development is expanded to include confirmatory methods. Specifically, describes and compares product space development (perceptual mapping) via confirmatory factor analysis and partial least squares with the aid of an empirical example. Both of these procedures are widely used in causal or structural equation modelling. Since they tend to be confirmatory extensions to factor analysis and principal components analysis, the approaches are also well suited to the development of product spaces. Confirmatory approaches have several advantages over exploratory approaches including the incorporation of prior knowledge, the elimination of rotational indeterminacy, and the use of a wide variety of measurement tools to assess the reliability and validity of model results.

This study analyzes farmers' preferences for agricultural credit and its market structure in rural Benin using the conjoint analysis approach.

The data used come from primary sources collected from 228 randomly selected farmers. The conjoint analysis approach was used to produce the results. The bias associated with the heteroscedasticity of the error terms was fixed using the weighted least squares estimation method. Agricultural credit markets were segmented using the Calinski algorithm.

The study results reveal that farmers prefer a long-term agricultural credit with a low interest rate received via mobile banking. The interaction between a type of credit with collateral and a low interest rate is positively correlated with farmers' credit demand. The authors also found that agricultural credit markets are heterogeneous because of the heterogeneity in farmers' credit demand. This result has led to three different rural credit market segments identified in the selected study's sites. The market share simulation reveals a significant market share for the type of credit preferred by farmers in two segments.

The proven evidence from this study can guide the development of appropriate agricultural financial products that promote financial inclusion among farmers in rural Benin. More specifically, agricultural financial policies that promote digital long-term credit with low interest rate and appropriate guarantee mechanisms can promote financial inclusion among farmers and reduce the problem of asymmetric information in agricultural credit market. The study also calls for the promotion of differentiated policies across the three identified segments in order to positively impact the welfare of all farmers.

The use of agricultural financial products that include digital long-term credit with low interest rate and appropriate guarantee mechanisms promote financial inclusion and reduce asymmetric information problems in agricultural credit markets in rural Benin.

The promotion of long-term digital and cheap credit improves farmers household's wellbeing in rural Benin.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the structure of rural credit markets. It also reveals the most preferred characteristics of rural credit profiles by farmers. Besides, it validates the importance of the use of guarantee as an appropriate mechanism which minimizes the problem of asymmetric information between financial agents and farmers.

This paper aims to report on homebuyers’ preferences and willingness to pay for installed home photovoltaic systems. Their influence on the market position of a dwelling is relatively unknown. Considering that expected lifespan of photovoltaic systems is at least 25 years, it is likely that many dwellings with a photovoltaic system will enter the housing market.

Few houses with installed photovoltaic systems have been sold in the market to date. Lack of real market data imposes a method based on the stated preference data. Therefore, the general preferences toward photovoltaic systems are determined by a discrete choice model based on responses of 227 homebuyers in the Eindhoven region, The Netherlands. Further, the model estimates were used to assess the indirect willingness to pay for home photovoltaic systems. This initial willingness to pay is further reassessed with the direct willingness to pay collected in an open-ended questionnaire format.

Results of the model show that the homebuyers’ preferences for home photovoltaic systems are large and significant. In addition to general preferences, this article reports on the taste heterogeneity carried out by separating observations based on the respondents’ characteristics. For example, photovoltaic systems are more appealing to homebuyers in more urban or central neighbourhoods. Further, the results of the direct survey lead to the conclusion that people are probably willing to pay close to the replacement value of the system and only 22 per cent of all respondents did not want to pay anything for the installed photovoltaic system.

These findings are exploratory and they raise a number of questions for further investigations, such as those regarding the real estate value of the installed photovoltaic systems. The reported findings must be regarded as local, thus further research is necessary to understand the impact on European housing markets.

Preferences and willingness to pay for home photovoltaic systems can provide a variety of economic, social and political recommendations to different interested parties such as homeowners, buyers, realtors, retailers, energy companies and governments. For instance, a homeowner would like to know what would be the effect of a photovoltaic system on the housing market.

As per the knowledge of authors, this is the first paper to estimate the impact of an installed photovoltaic system on housing choice, measured by stated choice data in the local housing market. It expands the existing body of knowledge for increasingly important issues of valuing and measuring preferences for photovoltaic systems installed on dwellings.

This article presents an approach for measuring consumer preferences in developing countries. The role of marketing research in developing countries and the salient factors which have an impact on how marketing research should be conducted in these countries are briefly discussed. The popular preference measurement procedures developed in the advanced nations are briefly reviewed and found to be unsuitable for use in developing countries. Hence, an alternative approach is proposed which reduces the data collection demands imposed on the respondents. It makes use of pictorial or visual stimuli and requires input from the respondents using a simple binary scale. An empirical investigation illustrating the proposed approach is reported. The convergent validity of the proposed procedure is assessed and found to be highly satisfactory.

Theory has made many assumptions about the consequences of a “good” corporate reputation. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the effect of a positive corporate reputation on the firm's future financial performance by means of a more differentiated concept of reputation than the one commonly used in literature.

In contrast to prior research, reputation is conceptualised by means of a two‐dimensional approach. Therefore, two distinct reputational components are hypothesised as affecting financial performance differently. A large‐scale representative survey of 30 of the largest German firms is conducted to gain reputational evaluations of these firms. The overall assessment of reputation is differentiated into a part that is explained by past financial performance and an idiosyncratic part to control for the effect of past performance on today's reputation. Finally, the idiosyncratic effect of reputation on future performance is assessed with an econometric model.

Both the cognitive and the affective reputational dimension significantly influence future financial performance after controlling for past performance. Furthermore, the results suggest that the decompositional model outperforms a non‐decompositional approach in terms of goodness of fit.

There is only a limited possibility to generalise the results to all firms.

The results imply a need for differentiated reputation management, since the cognitive and affective components of corporate reputation drive financial performance differently.

The two‐dimensional reputational approach broadens prior research with a focus on the differences in performance – the effects of both the reputational components.

This research draws upon decision-making theory to study job choice decisions. Past studies measured job choice as a single-stage, compositional process addressing the weights and part-worth utilities of a selected number of job and organizational attributes. However, the presence of noncompensatory attributes and whether the utilities and weights attached to the attributes vary among applicants have not been addressed. The authors posit that a conjoint analysis is an accurate methodological technique to explain job choice and overcome these limitations.

Using a random sample of 571 participants, we conducted an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis to estimate the weighted utilities of eight employer attributes and a cluster analysis to identify differences in preferences among employee profiles.

The results reveal that the use of the conjoint technique contributes to the literature in two ways. First, the results demonstrate the relevance of nonnegotiable attributes in the design of job offers. The results show that Salary, Flexibility and Ethics serve as cutoff points. Second, the results highlight the importance of considering the latent preferences of applicants in crafting effective job offers and adequately segmenting job applicants. More specifically, the following three groups are identified: Career-seeking applicants, Sustainability-oriented applicants and Pragmatic applicants.

The managerial implications of this study are relevant for HR and employer brand managers since a better understanding of the job-choice process and implementing a decompositional method to understand applicants' preferences could allow firms to provide more customized and relevant job offers to employees of interest.

This study concludes that to implement efficient employer-attraction branding strategies, employers should understand the attributes considered noncompensatory by their employee target audience, promote the most valued/important attributes to ensure that job offers are customized to fit employees' underlying preferences, and devise trade-off strategies among compensatory attributes.

Heterogeneous employee preferences may encumber employers' attempts to standardize expatriate compensation packages. The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical approach that informs employers about their employees' preferences concerning an international assignment.

Utility theory and conjoint measurement techniques are applied. Employees, it is argued, derive utility from the multiple characteristics of the assignment in terms of working conditions, career prospects, and living conditions. Employees perceive that utility relative to their country‐specific status quo. Such preferences may be measured with conjoint analysis.

To illustrate the methodology, German and Spanish employees in one company were given the scenario of an assignment in the USA. Measured preferences, though partly heterogeneous, were systematically related to the home country's institutional and cultural environment (societal effect).

More countries should be included in future studies. Studies of this kind may be related to the concepts of institutional and cultural distance.

Based on these findings, worldwide policies and procedures on expatriate compensation packages may be formulated to strike a better balance between standardization and the needs of a heterogeneous global workforce.

The paper presents a first systematic model of the preferences that guide the employee decision to accept or decline an international assignment, and it illustrates how these preferences can be measured.

Divisia component data is used in the training of an Aggregate Feedforward Neural Network (AFFNN), a general-purpose connectionist system designed to assist with data mining activities. The neural network is able to learn the money-price relationship, defined as the relationships between the rate of growth of the money supply and inflation. Learned relationships are expressed in terms of an automatically generated series of human-readable and machine-executable rules, shown to meaningfully and accurately describe inflation in terms of the original values of the Divisia component dataset.