Search results

Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

Climate data, including historical climate observations and climate model outputs, are often used in climate impact assessments, to explore potential climate futures. However, characteristics often associated with “islandness”, such as smallness, land boundedness and isolation, may mean that climate impact assessment methods applied at broader scales cannot simply be downscaled to island settings. This paper aims to discuss information needs and the limitations of climate models and datasets in the context of small islands and explores how such challenges might be addressed.

Reviewing existing literature, this paper explores challenges of islandness in top-down, model-led climate impact assessment and bottom-up, vulnerability-led approaches. It examines how alternative forms of knowledge production can play a role in validating models and in guiding adaptation actions at the local level and highlights decision-making techniques that can support adaptation even when data is uncertain.

Small island topography is often too detailed for global or even regional climate models to resolve, but equally, local meteorological station data may be absent or uncertain, particularly in island peripheries. However, rather than viewing the issue as decision-making with big data at the regional/global scale versus with little or no data at the small island scale, a more productive discourse can emerge by conceptualising strategies of decision-making with unconventional types of data.

This paper provides a critical overview and synthesis of issues relating to climate models, data sets and impact assessment methods as they pertain to islands, which can benefit decision makers and other end-users of climate data in island communities.