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With increasing competition, Islamic banks in Kuwait are currently facing difficulties in retaining their customers as customers now have the option to switch from one bank to another. As the banking industry offers almost identical products and services, customers are more likely to change their bank when they get a better offer from another bank, especially if the customer is dissatisfied with the current bank. Thus, this study aims at identifying the most significant factors that make Islamic bank customers switch their bank.

The data for this study was collected through a survey with a response rate of 25.5%. Logistic regression was used to analyze the collected data and examine the effect of each factor on the customer switching behavior.

The results of empirical analysis reveal that the service convenience, service reliability, level of technology and Sharia compliance are the most significant factors influencing the customer switching behavior in Kuwaiti Islamic banks. Thus, Islamic bank managers should focus on these factors when building their strategies to increase their customer’s satisfaction and loyalty. Loyal customers are more profitable than new customers as they are more likely to use more services, spread a positive word of mouth and, more importantly, they are more likely to resist competitors’ offers.

Identifying and understanding these factors will enable Islamic bank managers to direct their efforts and resources to the most cost-effective ways that help them to retain their customers, and accordingly, increase bank profits.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the customer switching behavior in Kuwait, and one of the few to present a model that explains the stages through which customers pass until they reach the switching decision.

The purpose of this paper is to close the gap between the theoretical nature of existing contributions in customer engagement value (CEV) and its need to practically empower business decisions. This is done by proposing a framework that consists of three techniques, each of which combines the components of CEV to make it more comprehensive and applicable. The paper also reviews and analyzes the work that has been done so far in the area of CEV whether in business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) or consumer to consumer (C2C) markets.

CEV is a comprehensive term that measures the total value of the customer through capturing his transactional and non-transactional behaviors. Hence, it is an essential term for measuring the value of the customer in direct marketing. This motivates researchers to compete in developing models to maximize CEV. Meanwhile, most of the existing models are conceptual and the majority of them lack applicability due to many reasons. First, these models relied on a linear version of the CEV model, hence double-counting the value of the customer; also they weighted the components of CEV equally, which is unrealistic. Finally, the effect of the environmental components in determining the engagement level of each customer was almost ignored. In this paper, two main contributions are presented. First, a summary and analysis of the contributions of the literature in the CEV field for different market types whether in B2C, B2B or C2C. Furthermore, three modifications are added to the existing models. The first model introduces a non-linear relationship of the components of CEV. The second model is a weighted linear model of these components. Finally, the third model adds the environmental factors to the CEV components. All the proposed models are theoretical in nature, however, these models are expected to show superiority when being applied to real data sets due to their ability to capture the complexity in the relationship between the firm and its customers in real-life situations. The proposed models are expected to attract the practitioners and other researchers and they both are encouraged to apply the proposed models on real-life data sets, test their performance, compare them against each other, to be able to apply each of them on the best suitable data set and business scenario.

Based on the review and analysis that has been done on about 87 papers, it is found that the majority of the contributions that have been done in the area of CEV are theoretical in nature, in spite of the effectiveness of CEV in empowering business decision. It is also found that few researchers proposed a set of theoretical comprehensive frameworks that combined CEV’s components together. Meanwhile, those frameworks are not practically applicable.

Although the contribution of the proposed models expected to attract both researchers and practitioners, these are not applied to real-life case studies to prove their effectiveness.

The research in this paper has many industrial and managerial implications. First, it helps managers and decision takers to treat the customers as assets and cost-free resources who can work with the firm to achieve what’s both aims to (i.e. increase customer satisfaction and firm’s profitability). Second, it helps the firm to determine the total value of each customer and treat its customers accordingly. Third, it empowers the managers to do target marketing, based on grouping the customers upon their total engagement. This would save time and cost and for sure increase the profitability and customer satisfaction. Forth, the proposed models take into consideration not only the transactional behavior of the customers but also the non-transactional factors that play a significant role in formulating the relationship between the firm and its customers.

This is hereby to certify that the paper is original, neither the paper nor a part of it is under consideration for publication anywhere else. Also, this study has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Most benchmarking methods are based on comparing financial and operational indicators with that of the leader in the market. Financial and operational indicators may not be sustainable in facing the speed and competitiveness of today's marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to propose a dynamic customer‐driven benchmarking approach that captures changes in customer perceptions and expectations and subsequent changes in service standards set by experienced customers as best practice.

This paper is based on examining the current literature on benchmarking and suggesting a new approach for benchmarking that puts the experienced customer as the standard for benchmarking. The customer‐driven benchmarking approach is one that will ensure that companies are continuously improving and advancing their values to meet the needs of the sophisticated and demanding customers.

The use of customer‐driven benchmarking will not only provide a clear direction and methods for learning from customers by initiating value‐added services that exceed their expectation, but moreover, help to sustain a company's performance and competitiveness in the long‐term.

Benchmarking performance against competitors on the basis of financial and operational indicators may not guarantee a sustainable competitive edge. This paper highlights the importance of customer‐driven benchmarking as a strategic approach for a sustainable market performance, emphasizing the standards set by “experienced customers as best practices”.

Several studies on corporate reputation have proposed a customer‐based approach for assessing corporate reputation. Other studies proposed examining corporate reputation from the perspective of other primary stakeholder groups such as employees, investors or suppliers. Hence this paper aims to examine corporate reputation by considering both the customer's and the non‐customer's views.

This study was applied to the US wireless telecommunications industry. A random sample of 1,088 respondents composed of 518 customers and 570 representing the non‐customers, was generated for this study. The sample was randomly distributed by age, gender, income, education and geographic location.

The findings of this study revealed that the formation of perceptions about corporate reputation differ between customers and non‐customers. The dimension of emotional appeal is specific to the customer group and the dimension of vision and leadership is specific to the non‐customer group. Finally, social and environmental responsibility was not a significant element in forming the perceptions about corporate reputation for both customers and non‐customers.

The study does not incorporate the effect of variables such as change in price or service quality nor take the impact of mergers and acquisitions into consideration.

This study helped to identify the primary and secondary elements for managing a company's reputation.

This study contributes to the literature on corporate reputation by determining how customers and non‐customers form their perceptions. The model provides a comprehensive assessment on how perceptions about corporate reputation are formed and what are the subsequent outcomes of those perceptions.

A wealth of research has explored different configurations of consumer environmental beliefs, attitudes, and values, and their influence on consumer environmental behavior. It is essential that a more comprehensive understanding of what lies at the root of consumer environmental beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors be developed. This study aims to address some of the limitations in the current literature by theorizing and examining a consumer environmental behavior model that includes three antecedents, a mediator, and a moderator construct. The authors offer a new configuration that includes moderated and mediated effects of consumer cognitive, psycho-social and demographics variables on consumer environmental behavior.

This study was administered to respondents from Saudi Arabia. The sample consists of Saudi-Arabians, non-Saudi Arabs, Americans, Europeans, South-East Asians, sub-continentals as well as other expatriates. Unavailability of sample frames necessitated the past researchers to use some kind of judgmental sampling techniques in Saudi Arabia. A total of 677 usable responses were used for this study.

The model included three antecedents – consumer environmental awareness, consumer perception of human-nature relationship, and consumer perception of local environmental condition – representing the most important categories of predictors of environmental behavior identified in meta-analysis. The effects of these antecedents on consumer environmental behavior were mediated by consumer environmental responsibility, which, in turn, influenced consumer environmental behavior. The model also assumed that consumer faith in science and technology moderated all the four relationships involving antecedents, mediator and the outcome.

The findings of the study identified several important observations. First, the roles of environmental psycho-social and cognitive variables in determining consumer environmental behavior are contingent upon levels of faith in science and technology and may not be direct but rather indirect through the mediator of consumer environmental responsibility. More importantly, the authors have provided support for a non-conventional moderated and mediated model of consumer environmental behavior.

This study measures to what extent different factors including Islamic religious beliefs influenced Egyptian's voting behavior intentions in the last parliament elections, given the moderating effect of the media and its role in shaping the existence of the Islamic political brand in Egypt. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Qualitative research was initially conducted to modify the Newman and Sheth model to fit the Egyptian culture. A final total of 401 Muslim citizens that participated in the last parliament elections were then surveyed via face-to-face interviews using a structured questionnaire.

Most factors related to voting for a specific candidate or party seemed to be important for voters' in their decision making, specifically personal events related to the candidate, candidate's image, current events surrounding the elections process, interest in issues and policies and religious beliefs that was added by the authors to the model. The media also had a high level of importance and influence over the relationship between some of the factors affecting voter's decision and voter's behavioral intentions. Overall, citizens demonstrated approach voting behavioral intentions towards the elections process and indicated that they would actively participate in the upcoming elections. Pearson correlations and further analysis were also run to investigate the nature of relationships between the factors understudy and voting behavioral intentions; most of which had significant relationships, as well as the significant role of the media. Some factors were excluded after running stepwise regression for testing the fitness of the model proposed.

Study covering the capital city of Egypt; Cairo only.

It has become important for politicians and governments to understand what are the genuine needs of their societies and what are citizens looking for in political candidates and parties. Political marketing and particularly understanding voting behavior is a booming area that has become an important tool for building political brands as witnessed by this research and how it was used by Islamists to reach voter's and affect their decision making.

This research paper sheds the light on a very contemporary area related to political marketing which is political campaigning and factors affecting voters' intentions given the significant role of candidate's religious beliefs. Furthermore, focusing on the rise of Islamic political parties that are actively becoming important members of the political landscape in the Arab region after a long time of undercover practice and struggle with previous governments before the Arab spring events.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable model that would predict the compressive strength of slurry infiltrated fiber concrete (SIFCON) modified with various supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) using artificial intelligence approach.

This study engaged the artificial intelligence to predict the compressive strength of SIFCON through deep neural networks (DNN), artificial neural networks, linear regression, regression trees, support vector machine, ensemble trees, Gaussian process regression and neural networks (NN). A thorough data set of 387 samples was gathered from relevant studies. Eleven variables (cement, silica fume, fly ash, metakaolin, steel slag, fine aggregates, steel fiber fraction, steel fiber aspect ratio, superplasticizer, water to binder ratio and curing ages) were taken as input to predict the output (compressive strength). The accuracy and reliability of the developed models were assessed using a variety of performance metrics.

The results showed that the DNN (11-20-20-20-1) predicted the compressive strength of SIFCON better than the other algorithms with R² and mean square error yielding 95.89% and 8.07. The sensitivity analysis revealed that steel fiber, cement, silica fume, steel fiber aspect ratio and superplasticizer are the most vital variables in estimating the compressive strength of SIFCON. Steel fiber contributed the highest value to the SIFCON’s compressive strength with 16.90% impact.

This is a novel technique in predicting the compressive strength of SIFCON optimized with different SCMs using supervised learning algorithms, improving its quality and performance.

The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.

To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.

This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.

Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.

This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

Research indicates the challenges indeterminate sentenced prisoners (ISPs) face within open prison may have a potentially devastating impact on rehabilitation and prison sentence progression. The authors conducted a study in an English open prison to explore whether the closed prison environment within England and Wales is sufficiently preparing ISPs for the transition to open conditions. There is currently a gap in existing research concerning this issue, which this paper aims to narrow for the purpose of informing good practice and improving sentence progression and rehabilitation outcomes within His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

Qualitative and exploratory. Reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to identify themes (Braun and Clarke, 2019).

Findings indicated the need for policy in closed prisons to better prepare ISPs for open prison and the need for policy in open prisons to better support ISPs during the liminal phase.

Findings aimed to inform consideration for improvements to enhance preparation for, and transition to, open conditions. A 17-month follow-up after dissemination of the research found evidence for the practical application of the findings at a local level within HMPPS and potential for wider applications linking to strategy and ISP initiatives.

If applied more widely across HMPPS in both closed and open prisons, the research findings have the potential to improve sentence progression and rehabilitation outcomes for ISPs.