Search results

The market for luxury products and services plays a significant role in the world economy. The luxury hotel market is a crucial segment within the global market for luxury products and services. Luxury hospitality recorded a 5% growth rate along with demand for luxury cruises recording the growth of 7%, the highest among all luxury segments. The remarkable performance of luxury products and services over a period is attributed to the laudable marketing communication strategies of luxury marketers. In this research, we aimed to analyse how a multi-brand hospitality firm differentiates its luxury brand with other luxury brands in the portfolio, using textual messages aimed to communicate the uniqueness of the brands in its official websites. The case study method and content analysis are adapted to achieve the research objective. The study results show that different luxury brands under the brand portfolio of Marriott International can communicate the differences through the textual contents. Most of the differentiation relies on brand-specific features, traditions, services, location of the hotel and metadata on the Internet, followed by branded differentiators. It may be concluded that Marriott has been successful to an extent in using text contents in the website to differentiate its luxury brands.

The experimental parliamentary subsidy on knights' fees and freehold incomes from lands and rents of 1431 was the only English direct lay tax of the Middle Ages which broke down. As such, this subsidy has a clear historiographical significance, yet previous scholars have tended to overlook it on the grounds that parliament's annulment act of 1432 mandated the destruction of all fiscal administrative evidence. Many county assessments from 1431–1432 do, however, survive and are examined for the first time in this article as part of a detailed assessment of the fiscal and administrative context of the knights' fees and incomes tax. This impost constituted a royal response to excess expenditures associated with Henry VI's “Coronation Expedition” of 1429–1431, the scale of which marked a decisive break from the fiscal-military strategy of the 1420s. Widespread confusion regarding whether taxpayers ought to pay the feudal or the non-feudal component of the 1431 subsidy characterized its botched administration. Industrial scale under-assessment, moreover, emerged as a serious problem. Officials' attempts to provide a measure of fiscal compensation by unlawfully double-assessing many taxpayers served to increase administrative confusion and resulted in parliament's annulment act of 1432. This had serious consequences for the crown's finances, since the regime was saddled with budgetary and debt problems which would ultimately undermine the solvency of the Lancastrian state.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.