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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb041005. When citing the article, please cite: K.W. LOWREY, L.R.I.C., (1974), “The use of epoxy resins in civil engineering”, Pigment & Resin Technology, Vol. 3 Iss: 6, pp. 4 - 5.

Over the past decade the use of high‐performance resin systems in the civil engineering field has greatly increased. This is no doubt due, in part at least, to the rising cost of labour, scaffolding and the like which make it imperative to keep maintenance and repair charges to a minimum. And, as the en‐vironment becomes more polluted with chemical waste and other aggressive elements, the need for an effective long‐term protection is becoming more apparent.

The impact of COVID-19 has led to a surge in the public’s reliance on the Internet for pandemic information, and the policy of home isolation has exacerbated this. This study aimed to investigate public information needs and ways of accessing and disseminating information during COVID-19 in mainland China.

This study used a qualitative research approach to conduct semi-structured interviews with 15 participants from 9 cities in mainland China about information needs and access behaviors during the COVID-19 outbreak. All interview recordings were converted into text and proofread, then coded and summarised in correspondence with the research questions using the grounded theory.

This study summarized the dynamics of public information needs during the 2.5-year pandemic and identified the difficulties in accessing certain information.

Although information needs of public health emergencies have been a hot topic during COVID-19, scant studies focus on information needs in specific countries in Asia, especially in mainland China, the first country with a major outbreak and stringent lockdown mandates. Therefore, the current study is well enriched by focusing on information demand behavior in the context of COVID-19. Possible measures for improvement were also given to existing and potential problems, taking into account the participants’ views.

This paper examines to what extent consonants in brand names influence consumers’ perceptions of feminine and masculine brand personality.

Four experiments empirically test the influence of consonants on feminine and masculine brand personality. The experiments involve different sets of new brand names, variations regarding the consonants tested (the stops k and t, the fricatives f and s), as well as different locations of the focal consonant in the brand name.

Consonants influence consumers’ brand perceptions: brand masculinity is enhanced by stops (rather than fricatives), and brand femininity is enhanced by fricatives (rather than stops). Consonants specifically affect feminine and masculine brand personality, but not other brand personality dimensions. Consumers’ responses to brand names and resulting brand gender perceptions (i.e. likelihood to recommend) were moderated by salience of masculinity or femininity as a desirable brand attribute.

This research has implications for brand name selection: consonants are effective in creating a specifically masculine or a feminine brand personality.

This research is the first to specifically link consonants and feminine/masculine brand personality. By specifically examining consonants, this research extends the marketing literature on sound symbolism that is characterized by a focus on vowels effects. This research is also the first to address whether the position of the focal phoneme in the brand name matters.

This research paper aims to understand how givers characterise and manage their gift giving networks by drawing on attachment theory (AT). This responds to the need to illuminate the givers–receivers’ networks beyond traditional role-based taxonomies and explore their changing dynamics.

A multi-method, qualitative approach was used involving 158 gift experiences captured in online diaries and 27 follow-up interviews.

Results show that givers organise receivers into gifting networks that are grounded in a contextual understanding of their relationships. The identification of direct, surrogate and mediated bonds reflects three different dimensions that inform gift-giving networks of support, care or belongingness rooted in AT. The relative position of gift receivers in this network influences the nature of support, the type of social influences and relationship stability in the network.

This study illustrates the complexity of relationships based on the data collected over two specific periods of time; thus, there might be further types of receivers within a giver’s network that the data did not capture. This limitation was minimised by asking about other possible receivers in interviews.

The findings set a foundation for gift retailers to assist gift givers in finding gifts that match their perceived relations to the receivers by adapting communication messages and offering advice aligned with specific relationship contexts.

This study illuminates gift-giving networks by proposing a taxonomy of gifting networks underpinned by AT that can be applied to study different relationship contexts from the perspective of the giver. This conceptualisation captures different levels of emotional support, social influences and relationship stability, which have an impact on the receivers’ roles within the giver’s network. Importantly, results reveal that the gift receiver is not always the target of gift-giving. The target can be someone whom the giver wants to please or an acquaintance they share with the receiver with whom they wish to reinforce bonds.

Buying online has become a widespread and common activity for consumers, and, for many organizations, e-commerce has become a very profitable alternative to sell their products and services, also allowing them to leverage their strategy in new geographical markets immediately. Although the literature on the subject is comprehensive, there is a gap in identifying the holistic constructs that are the determinants of consumers' choice of an online store. This research resorts to an exploratory study, based on a nonsystematic literature review, seeking to identify these constructs. The results obtained allowed us to identify the following constructs: consumer behavior, customer experience, web content, catalog, terms and conditions, customer support, perceived value, trust, security and privacy, satisfaction, and loyalty. Customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty constructs stand out from a strategic perspective.