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Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

Factors that influence the game attendance and attitudinal loyalty of sports fans have been researched quite extensively in Anglo-American countries, but rather less in Germany. Brand image is held to be an important antecedent of fan loyalty. This study therefore investigates the relationship between these constructs, using a sample of 1,300 fans of German Bundesliga soccer teams. In addition to the verification of this link, causal modelling reveals a relationship between the major facets of a club's brand image, namely attributes and benefits. Non-product-related attributes of the brand are more important to the fans' loyalty than product-related attributes.

Coproduction, as one component of cocreation of value, offers many benefits to customers and management, but also requires customers to invest a considerable amount of effort and time. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the coproduction paradox of benefits and costs.

One experimental study and two cross-sectional field studies across three service industries test the nonlinear relationship between level of coproduction and customer loyalty.

Results show not only the optimum level but also the negative effects of increasing levels of coproduction on customer loyalty and, in turn, monetary expenditures. The negative effect can be partially offset by perceived process enjoyment (PE), such that consumers who enjoy the process exhibit increased loyalty after the optimum coproduction point. Customer self-efficacy (SE), however, further strengthens the inverted u-shaped relationship.

Further research should try to replicate the findings in more complex and less hedonic service settings (e.g. financial investments) because both PE and SE might be even more powerful here.

Service managers need to determine the optimal degree to which customers want to engage in the creation of services and avoid overburdening them. Management should further explore opportunities to elicit feelings of fun and enjoyment through coproduction.

Research usually highlights the potential benefits of coproduction for customers and companies and suggests a positive linear relationship between coproduction and success outcomes. This article instead shows that after an optimum level, the marginal benefits of coproduction for customer loyalty turn negative.

The paper aims to refine existing customer‐based brand equity models for the team sport industry and examine the importance of brand equity in the professional German soccer league Bundesliga.

After assessing brand equity on the basis of actual consumer responses, we relate the brand equity measure on an aggregate level to objective means of economic success. Online sampling with a total database of 1,594 usable questionnaires is utilized for analysis. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (including multi‐group analysis) as well as structural equation modeling and regression analysis are applied.

Results highlight the adequacy of a parsimonious brand equity model in team sport (BETS) model and the importance of the brand in team sport for economic success.

The main limitations of this research are sample constraints; test persons are highly involved in and knowledgeable about the product category under research. Future research should address a more diverse population.

Teams and their management have to realize the relevance of their brand in economic success. They have to recognize the significance of the stadium visit and the individual spectators in the stadium.

First, a parsimonious BETS model is presented. Second, it was found that special attention should be devoted to the brand equity‐component “brand awareness” when researching brand equity. Third, this is one of the few studies that uses actual economic data to show the impact of brand equity based on direct consumer responses on company success.

The purpose of this study is to offer a “brand equity model” that will help football organizations to manage their appeal.

The proposed model utilizes structural equation modelling analysis to test the hypothesized marketing brand equity (MBE) model. The empirical part of the research stems from a large survey of 1,300 Israeli football fans.

As expected, knowledge about the team, the team’s image and its perceived personality significantly predicted positive attitudes toward the team. This in turn predicted commitment, which predicted recommendation, which predicted intentions. The linear regression to extract the seven parameters weights was highly significant (F = 163.5, p < 0.001) and explained 52 per cent (R² = 0.518) of the depended variable “price premium”.

The new MBE model suggested here provides a relative index of brand equity for football club organizations that enables them to competitively compare the marketing equity of their club to that of their rivals. The MBE model also shows that commitment is a central component in the football club’s brand equity model. The current MBE model is the only model that provides a weight for each of the components. Each respective weight represents the internal contribution of each component to the final brand equity index. These weights indicate where an effort should be made to improve the equity of the brand.

Football teams may also need to focus on the constructs underlying the commitment (Shuv-Ami, 2012) of fans to their football club organization, that is, the team performance and satisfaction stemming from the fans’ experience with their team and the feelings of loyalty and involvement that represent the degree of fan engagement with the team. Although football teams do what they can to improve performance, much can be done in marketing to improve the other constructs and, thus, fan commitment. Improving the experience of fans, both on and off the field, regardless of whether the team is winning or losing, builds fan engagement.

The current research suggests two new brand equity models for football club organizations. One is a comprehensive theoretical model that combines and expands current conceptual brand equity models (Keller, 1993, 2008; Aaker, 1991, 1996; Keller and Lehmann, 2006); the other is an empirical model that makes it practical to measure the marketing strength or the brand equity of football clubs. The new empirical MBE suggested here provides a relative index of brand equity for football club organization that enable them to compare competitively the marketing equity of their club to that of their rivals. The MBE model also shows, for the first time, that commitment is a central component in the football club brand equity model. The current MBE is the only model that provides a weight for each of its component.

Energy losses in a timing chain drives are caused by friction in chain-rail contacts. To improve the efficiency, the Chair of Machine Elements and Transmission Technology at the University of Kaiserslautern developed various experimental and simulative analysis tools as a part of the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded 1551 priority program and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre CRC 926. With these tools, various approaches for improving the efficiency were investigated. This paper aims to illustrate the approaches and present the results achieved within the framework of the above-mentioned priority program.

A towed cylinder head test rig is used for efficiency tests on timing chain drives. In addition to the experiments, a multi-body simulation model of the timing drive was developed and used.

It was possible to find positive approaches to reduce friction power by adapting the chain tensioning force as required. This was ensured for both the stationary operating points and the transient operating processes. An efficiency improvement of up to 10 per cent could be detected. Furthermore, a possibility was found to improve the frictional power by a targeted lubrication of the chain-rail contact. Here, the efficiency could be improved by 5-6 per cent. In addition, various structures were examined on a microscopic and macroscopic level. Neutral to negative results were achieved here.

This paper makes a contribution to improve the energy efficiency of timing chain drives. Different approaches have been investigated and evaluated.

The thermal spraying technique of High-Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) coating was used to deposit coatings of an alloy composed of Ni-based substrates on stainless steel AISI 304. The aim of this study was to determine the mechanical properties such as hardness and bond strength that these coatings have when the spray distance is varied, as well as the microstructure and phases formed during the thermal spray process.

The coatings were applied by HVOF and characterized by scanning electron microscopy, image analysis, X-ray diffraction, microhardness and bond strength to analyze the mechanical properties.

The microstructure of the coatings showed low porosity, oxide content and interface contamination in the substrate–coating interface, without the presence of unmolten particles. The microhardness values reached 600 HV for the three spray distances used and the bond strength values reached over 55 MPa.

The use of coatings on aircraft components is growing dramatically owing to the high costs of advanced materials and the growing lifecycle requirements for high-performance systems, which are taken into account because of the variety of coatings and complexity of environmental factors.

The originality of this study lies in the development of new coating materials for the manufacture and protection of various turbine components. The value is based on the development of materials and processes to be used to manufacture them.

Depending on the research approach one uses, the development of particular bodies of knowledge over time is the result of a combination of agency, chance, opportunity, patronage, power, or structure. This particular account of the development of geographies of tourism stresses its place as understood within the context of different approaches, different research behaviors and foci, and its location within the wider research community and society. The chapter charts the development of different epistemological, methodological, and theoretical traditions over time, their rise and fall, and, in some cases, rediscovery. The chapter concludes that the marketization of academic production will have an increasingly important influence on the nature and direction of tourism geographies.

Travel and tourism have had a long history in the Nordic countries, but research on tourism has a relatively short tradition in the region. Recently, academic interest in the Nordic tourism space has grown and diversified especially as a result of increasing numbers of academics and institutions involved with tourism geographies and studies and education in the region. The Nordic context has provided thematic focus areas for empirical studies that characterize tourism geographies in the region, with topics including nature-based tourism, utilization of wilderness areas, second-home and rural developments, impacts in peripheries, and tourism as a tool for regional development. In addition, there are emerging research themes outside of the traditional core topics, such as urban, events, and heritage tourism.