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The aim of this study was to examine whether, when a person reads, there is a boost to all material related to the context in Najdi Arabic (NA) as was found in English in was found in Rodd et al. (2013). The study employs Arabic language features of orthographic style and diglossia to answer the research question.

Forty-two participants were asked to come on two sessions to complete a reading task, a filler task and a word recognition task. The word recognition task included 14 homographs that could mean one thing in Modern Standard Arabic and another in NA.

The findings show that the assumption that all related materials are ready to be used when readers are exposed to the context is not valid for the two Arabic variants.

One limitation of this study was that the participants were all female.

The findings could help writers write better texts to help individuals who struggle with reading comprehension whether it is because of dyslexia, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as when researchers understand how priming works, they might be able to help readers in their reading fluency and comprehension (Rodd et al., 2016). This could be by producing better texts to comprehend or using semantic priming in classroom setups.

We extend Diamond's (1989, 1991) life-cycle hypothesis to posit that, once they reach the stage of bank borrowing, firms begin with prime loans and evolve toward borrowing more cheaply at LIBOR as they grow larger, less risky and less characterized by asymmetric information. We conduct multinomial logit regressions to explain firms’ membership in one of three groups: prime only, prime and LIBOR, and LIBOR. We also examine spreads over prime and LIBOR and find that loans set up to allow borrowing at prime carry higher spreads than those allowing borrowing at LIBOR. Both sets of tests support the life-cycle hypothesis.

Japan has had four periods of public sector reform since World War II. This chapter discusses the leadership for reform during the occupation period, the high economic growth period, the low economic growth period and the search for a ‘new’ Japan under various present difficulties. Reforms reflect the priorities of the time and interests of prime ministers, whose style of functioning also affects how public sector reforms are advanced. During the occupation period, the Administrative Management Agency was established in the Prime Minister’s Office and was responsible for the overall management of national government organizations. It was staffed by civil servants who were experts in their areas. Since the 1980s, furthering privatization, deregulation and reorganization, advisory councils for the prime minister were also used, involving influential business leaders and scholars.

This chapter shows that political leadership, especially that of the prime minister and minister in charge of administrative reform, is important in deciding on highly political issues, to persuade or direct politicians and administrators to follow the leadership, to inspire and get the support of the general public and to ensure the support or acceptance of those concerned. Where prime ministers are not directly involved, leadership is provided by professional administrators under the general support of the prime minister and the minister responsible for administrative reforms. It is also pointed out that reform sustainability occurs through institutionalization, incentives, management and producing meaningful results.

The idea that a significant portion of what consumers do, feel, and think is driven by automatic (or “implicit”) cognitive processes has sparked a wave of interest in the development of assessment tools that (attempt to) capture cognitive processes under automaticity conditions (also known as “implicit measures”). However, as more and more implicit measures are developed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumer scientists and marketing professionals to select the most appropriate tool for a specific research question. We therefore present a systematic overview of the criteria that can be used to evaluate and compare different implicit measures, including their structural characteristics, the extent to which (and the way in which) they qualify as “implicit,” as well as more practical considerations such as ease of implementation and the user experience of the respondents. As an example, we apply these criteria to four implicit measures that are (or have the potential to become) popular in marketing research (i.e., the implicit association test, the evaluative priming task, the affect misattribution procedure, and the propositional evaluation paradigm).

Consumers often use various cues such as health stars and nutrition claims on product packaging to draw inferences regarding healthfulness. However, much less is known regarding the role of brand names in consumer decisions around healthfulness. The purpose of this study is to introduce angelic branding as a brand naming strategy that may act as a supernatural agent benevolence (i.e. loving, kind and merciful) prime that leads consumers to perceive that the brand’s products are healthful.

Study 1 examines the effect of angelic brand names on brand healthfulness perceptions. Study 2 investigates the mediating role of brand virtuousness perceptions on the relationship between angelic branding and brand healthfulness perceptions and the downstream consequences on purchase intention. Study 3 explores the moderating role of authoritarian supernatural agent belief (i.e. angry, vindictive and punishing) on the relationship between angelic branding and brand virtuousness perceptions, and subsequent brand healthfulness perceptions and purchase intention.

The results of this study demonstrate that angelic branding results in healthfulness perceptions for a healthy product (i.e. vitamins; Study 1a), an unhealthy product (i.e. cookies; Study 1b; eliminating perceptual fluency as a potential alternative explanation for the phenomenon) and across different product categories (i.e. surface spray; Study 1c). The results from Study 2 find that angelic brand names prime brand healthfulness perceptions because of the activation of brand virtuousness perceptions (not brand quality perceptions; eliminating a general halo effect as a potential alternative explanation for the phenomenon). The results of Study 3 show that strong belief in authoritarian supernatural agents attenuates the angelic brand name–brand healthfulness priming effect.

This research is limited, as it only considers angelic brand naming and not any other benevolence cues in brand logos, such as halos and angel wings. This research is also limited in that it only considers healthfulness perceptions drawn from English angelic brand name cues and from participants within the USA and the UK.

This study has important implications for brand managers in the development of new brand names. Angelic brand naming is suggested as a strategy for brand managers to prime perceptions of brand virtuousness and brand healthfulness and to influence consumer behavior. However, brand managers are cautioned against the use of this brand naming strategy if it is intended to mislead or deceive consumers, resulting in detrimental effects on their health.

This research makes a unique and novel contribution to the literature in brand names on consumer decision-making. Angelic branding is introduced as a brand naming strategy that can act as a supernatural agent religious prime to influence perceptions of brand virtuousness, brand healthfulness and consumer behavioral intentions (i.e. purchase intention).

This paper aims to study the unexplored possibility that priming firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity in consumers’ minds may impact consumers’ preference for non-firm related consumption and lifestyle choice options with intertemporal trade-offs.

Across four experimental studies, the authors looked at the impact of CSR priming on the preference of participants for later larger versus sooner smaller money (Study 1), saving versus spending (Study 2) and healthy versus unhealthy food choices (Studies 3 and 4). These choice options were not related to the focal firm that practiced CSR. The authors measured the changes in participants’ consideration of future consequences (CFC) as a potential mediator for the results.

The participants in the CSR condition showed a higher CFC and a higher preference for the options with long-term benefits and immediate costs over the ones with long-term costs and immediate benefits, i.e. later larger over sooner smaller money, saving over spending and healthy over unhealthy food. The authors documented a mediation role for CFC.

All the participants in the studies were from the USA. Looking at the cultural differences can enrich the understanding of the impact of CSR on preference for the options with intertemporal trade-offs. Furthermore, this paper builds its theoretical justification based on the assumption of individuals’ acceptance of CSR activities. Nevertheless, consumers may have skepticism about these activities. Future studies may investigate the effect of CSR skepticism of individuals on the proposed effects. Additionally, investigating the moderating roles of individuals’ characteristics like their prosocial concern or their knowledge about choice options might be an avenue for future research.

The findings highlight the benefits of CSR priming on consumers’ welfare and normative behavior. Firms may use the findings to understand and manage the impact of other firms’ CSR communications on the evaluation of their own products.

This research is the first to highlight the impact of CSR priming on consumers’ non-firm-related consumption and lifestyle choices with intertemporal trade-offs. The results showed the positive effect of priming firms’ CSR activities on consumers’ CFC and the mediating role of CFC.

This study seeks to examine how consumers perceive the visually primed disclosure in a pharmaceutical company's advertisement and form their attitudes toward the disclosure, perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and attitudes toward the pharmaceutical company.

An online study with a convenient sampling consisting of college students is used to manipulate the visual communication of a pharmaceutical company's advertising disclosure for the purpose of examining the effects of visually primed advertising disclosure on attitude toward the disclosure, perceived CSR practices, and attitude toward the pharmaceutical company.

The results reveal that a visually primed disclosure affects consumers' attitudes toward the disclosure positively. Visual priming also enhances consumers' perceived CSR practices and attitudes toward the company. This is evident as the impact of attitude toward the disclosure on attitude toward the company is mediated by perceived CSR practices.

Pharmaceutical companies should improve their advertising disclosure practices by enhancing visual communications of their advertising disclosures. Since a mediating relationship between attitude toward the disclosure and attitude toward the pharmaceutical company is materialized by perceived CSR practices, visually primed advertising disclosures perceived as socially responsible practices can facilitate advertising effectiveness and enhance consumers' attitudes toward the pharmaceutical company.

This paper adds value to the existing literature on pharmaceutical marketing and CSR practices, and promotes the effective management of advertising disclosures by reinforcing their communications through visual priming.

Cross-cultural research based on the means-end chain (MEC) theory tends to overestimate the stability of the dominant chains of a cultural group; at the same time, it pays insufficient attention to the influence of the context on an individual’s cultural anchorage. This study aims to adopt the dynamic constructivist approach to culture to show that, for the same product, differences in MEC for consumers from different cultures can be voluntarily reduced under certain conditions and to a certain extent.

The authors adopted an inter-subject experimental design: two cultures (French vs Korean) × three self-construal primings (independent vs interdependent vs control). Participants in the experimental group were randomly assigned to one of the three priming conditions. The no-priming control group made it possible to verify the effect of priming by measuring the difference in responses with respect to the two experimental groups.

The results highlight the effect of self-construal priming that contradicts the culture of origin. Cross-cultural independence and interdependence priming foster convergence between dominant chains of French and Korean participants by considerably reducing the cultural differences that are observed when there is no priming. It appears that a consumer’s cultural anchoring can be shaped by priming a specific dimension of self-construal, which, in turn, illustrates that cultural influence is a discontinuous process.

It is the first attempt to study variation in the dominant chains of a cultural group, rather than adopting the preconceived notion of their permanence or stability in different contexts. The methodological contribution is characterized by the combination of a method to record chains and a priming method applied in different cultural environments.