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This paper aims to present the opinions of teaching staff at Spanish universities regarding the relative importance of a number of quality factors, and perceived levels of development of those factors in the context of their work.

The paper takes an empirical approach, with the opinions of teaching staff being collected via questionnaires and by telematic means.

Lecturers surveyed are particularly pessimistic in regard to the conditions in which students enter university, and probably do not share the priorities that education policy authorities and university management bodies proclaim in their discourses and policies.

This research may be supplemented with the use of more qualitative methods and extended to other geographical and cultural contexts.

The opinions of teaching staff comprise useful information for the design of education policies and quality management systems applicable to Spanish universities.

No studies have to date been conducted in Spain to identify the opinions of university teaching staff in regard to determinants of quality. Taken as a whole, the paper enables a diagnostic analysis to be made of university education quality conditions in Spain from the viewpoint of teaching staff.

Marketing and brand managers are under more pressure than ever before to demonstrate the impact of the managers' strategies and actions on company value, especially in an emerging market. In this context, the authors investigate the relationship between brand equity and company performance using the rankings of most valued brands from Brand Finance (BF), Brand Analytics (BZ) and Interbrand (IB).

The authors use used a panel from the period between 1990 and 2018 (29 years), consisting of a sample of 689 companies with shares traded in an emerging market representing 7,970 observations with unbalanced data. The authors applied a dynamic Differences-in-Differences Ordinary Last Squares (DID OLS) method.

The main finding of this study is that brands ranked as valuable significantly increased the brands' companies' intangible assets, return on assets, free cash flow (FCF) and market value.

The present study helps brand and marketing managers show to chief executive officers (CEOs) and shareholders the importance of brand development. In addition, valuable brand companies of an emerging market may represent an interesting opportunity for market investors.

This study contributes to the marketing literature, addressing the fields of marketing and finance, by analyzing the performance of companies separately over a long period, with different metrics, an unconventional model in the marketing area and different rankings of valuable brand names.

This paper aims to explore the nature of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) cluster, to establish and empirically verify in the pilot study the role of clusters in developing the fourth industrial revolution. It aims to find out if the cluster can provide a conducive knowledge environment fostering the advancement of I4.0; simplify the implementation of I4.0 by making it faster, easier, and cheaper and finally be applied as policy tool organising the development of I4.0.

This paper is based on the narrative literature review mapping the cluster’s nature with I4.0 features. It adopts the case study approach and uses simple statistical analysis to explore the basic characteristics of I4.0 clusters combined with a survey technique – short questionnaire organised in three major blocks.

Drawing on German pilot study it can be confirmed that clusters offer conducive environment facilitating the emergence, testing and development of I4.0 specific solutions. They provide favourable knowledge environment, simplify and increase the efficiency of the business processes and organise the policymaking in this area.

The results of presented pilot study rooted in Germany – a country seen as the front-runner in implementing the solutions of the fourth industrial revolution – can add a certain value to the emerging research on unearthed linkages between clusters and I4.0. This paper might be seen as a contribution to the emerging literature on the spatial dimension of I4.0. It expands previous research on cluster channels’ likely impact on I4.0.