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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an essential part of business, and companies should genuinely incorporate social responsibilities toward internal and external stakeholders in their operations. The most important stakeholder group is the personnel, which is why employers should pay attention to strengthening the employer–employee relationship. The purpose of this text is to demonstrate the connections between employer branding and CSR.

Theory on employer branding and CSR indicates that there are both strategic and operational connections. Strategically, employer branding can be considered the outcome of the co-operation among branding, CSR, and human resource management (HRM). At an operational level, there are several CSR activities that can be of use when developing and implementing economic, functional, and psychological employer-branding elements.

In order to establish how CSR is used in employer branding in practice, a qualitative content analysis of the website communication of three multinational IT companies was made. All of the companies have been acknowledged for their strong internal employer brands, and the analysis focused on what types of CSR activities they communicate externally as part of their employer branding efforts.

The study concludes that CSR can be relevant to employer branding and presents a categorization model for facilitating a concrete integration of CSR and employer-branding elements.

This chapter explores the relationship between emotional design and customer experience. It begins with an introduction to the concept of emotional design, comprising behavioral, visceral, and reflective elements. Next, the nature of service experiences is examined, leading to a framework that classifies services according to their functional and experiential positions. Understanding customer goals allows this framework to be used to design customer experiences, in terms of the journey that customers take when consuming a service. The chapter then discusses the cognitive traits associated with designers and argues that they are well suited to understanding the customer journey and designing the prerequisites for the desired experience. Two different approaches to understanding and acting on customer requirements are explored – user centered and design driven.

This chapter presents a short overview of core branding values and provides a description of how to capture them in a business-to-business (B2B) context. However, the reader should keep in mind that the value of branding is a broad term consisting of different aspects, which makes it challenging to capture and present them all in one chapter. For this reason, the authors have chosen to introduce diverse facets of brand identity and image, customer values, and sustainability issues, which are part of the core values of branding in a B2B context. These issues are also elaborated in more detail in Chapters 2, 5, and 10. In addition, the authors present brand-building tools for managers, such as personal selling, direct marketing, public relations, trade shows and exhibitions, as well as advertising and sales promotion. Finally, the applicability of these tools is demonstrated through the practical example of Axel Technologies and their Fuugo service.

Islamic banking institutions have been in operation for nearly 50 years now and despite having been in competition with much more entrenched conventional rivals have demonstrated remarkable potential for growth and sustainability in different countries in both Muslim-dominated and Muslim-minority jurisdictions. The sustained upsurge in Islamic banks’ operations level to even a double-digit mark is not accidental but a replica of the levels of engagement of customers with Islamic banking institutions among other factors. There are various studies on Islamic banking, which covered wide range of issues, including those on Islamic banks customers’ patronage factors.

Accordingly, this chapter presents discussions on factors that influence customers’ engagement/patronage with Islamic banking. From plethora of studies conducted over long period of time and in different countries, many different factors have been identified as the determinants of customers’ engagements. The factors include but are not limited to customers’ personal attributes such as their understanding, knowledge, and perceptions of banking products, the banking institutions’ related factors such as product pricing, technology adopted by bank, environmental factors, and other myriads of determinants.

The chapter introduces a model of destination branding and reports a project that applied the model to examine the current image of Greece. The project was undertaken on behalf of the Greek national tourism organization by a binational consortium. Through conducting primary and secondary research on the public perception and self-portrayal of Greece, the project team found the current brand image and identity not to be in accordance with the country's reality. Indeed, although the brand image elements currently expressed are relevant, they represent only a small portion of a much larger existing offering. To that end, the team proposed new branding strategies based on the model, offering a series of recommendations on how to implement the strategies.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the differences in consumers’ willingness to pay for different types of design attributes due to different levels of specific anticipatory emotions evoked by them. The research aims to show how firms can benefit by leveraging the findings that different types of design attributes – that is, functionality, aesthetics, and environmental sustainability – affect profit margin per unit differently. Further, the chapter claims that design is a core competency that can pay dividends in terms of profit margins for firms. It is important for firms to develop expertise in understanding and leveraging relationships between the types of design attributes, specific emotions, and consumers’ willingness to pay.

The chapter uses the product categories of cell phones and laptop computers in the three experiments to test the hypothesized relationships between design attributes (functionality, aesthetics, and environmental sustainability), specific emotions, and willingness to pay.

The research finds that different attributes of design – functionality, aesthetics, and sustainability – evoke different types of emotions and different levels of willingness to pay.

The data were primarily collected via experiments in a behavioral laboratory.

Firms can leverage different attributes of design to position and price products according to emotional requirements of the target customer segment to match their willingness to pay and maximize profit margin per unit.

The research specifically measures willingness to pay in joint presentation – independent evaluation scenarios to assess differences in how functionality, aesthetics, and sustainability impact willingness to pay.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Purpose: Consumer acceptance is considered the most important factor in functional food success and is given top priority in new product development. This study focussed on finding factors that influence consumer perceptions about active food and the pattern of active food consumption. This chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of taste trading based on a consumer decision-making framework.

Research Methodology: Cross-sectional consumer data were collected by floating G-Doc containing the questionnaire which was supposed to be answered by people according to their behaviours, preferences, knowledge regarding functional foods etc. It contained questions about their income, gender, preference towards functional foods, factors affecting decision-making while purchasing functional foods etc.

Results of the Study: The findings suggest that the consumers' attitude towards functional foods was mainly influenced by the quality and suitability of the product. Purchase intent was found based on age, literacy of population, income and health benefits of active foods. Awareness of functional foods and their price significantly affected the purchase of functional foods. Most people were willing to spend more on functional foods in the future regardless of the taste and provided high quality and product suitability.