<p>Abstract</p><p>The use of celebrity endorsement strategy is nowadays more frequently used by marketers in order to increase their sales and thereby extend their market shares. Many celebrities are used in various marketing campaigns and in most cases; the use of celebrities as endorsers is seen from mainly positive aspects. This made the authors curious whether the negative aspects, that also exists when using celebrities as endorsers, affects consumers in their purchasing decisions when a celebrity gets associated with negative publicity. Another cause of interest is which factors of a certain celebrity are most important and crucial in consumers’ perceptions, in the case of negative publicity.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study which factors consumers find important for a company to consider when a celebrity gets negative publicity, to maintain successful brand recognition.</p><p>Literature review: The use of previous studies within the field of celebrity endorsement clarifies many important aspects when it comes to celebrity endorsement and this chapter is elaborated from 4 different perspectives; Company, Celebrity, Brand and Consumer. Based on previous studies, the authors identified 6 crucial attributes when using celebrities as endorsers and this can also be seen as a pre-study that the research process has been based upon. Furthermore, the 6 attributes are chosen from the three first mentioned perspectives in order to be able to fulfil the purpose. Hence, this thesis is conducted from a consumer’s point of view.</p><p>Method: A quantitative method is used in this thesis since the authors want to base the results on collected data that is expressed in numbers and also to generate a general apprehension in this phenomenon. Moreover, the combinations containing the 6 attributes are used in the conjoint experiment.</p><p>Conclusions: It was proven in this study that consumers do get affected by celebrities as endorser, when the attributes from the literature review are in a combination. But, the consumers’ perception of the attributes differs in different cases. However, the main finding was that there are two crucial attributes, trustworthiness and expertise that companies should take into account when using celebrities in their advertising campaign.</p>

Voluntary environmental labeling or certification programs provide information about the environmental characteristics of one or more aspects of a product’s life cycle to consumers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy were among the first governmental agencies in the world to adopt environmental information programs. This study examines two U.S. programs – Energy Star, an energy efficiency labeling program, and Green Power Partnership (GPP), a green energy purchasing program, and estimates how much consumers are willing to pay for refrigerators that have been awarded these labels and what factors motivate that willingness to pay. The data were obtained from a survey conducted in March and April of 2009 via an online research panel, which was constructed to be representative of the U.S. population. Analysis of the data was conducted using conditional logit regression models with fixed parameters and mixed logit regression models with random parameters. Results revealed that consumers, on average, have a willingness to pay ranging from $237.81 to $350.54 for the Energy Star label and a willingness to pay ranging from $48.52 to $70.95 for the GPP label. The results also indicate that consumer demographics and attitudes influence WTP. In particular, individuals with greater levels of stated concern for the environment or individuals exhibiting strong perceptions on the effectiveness of consumers to affect product design and the ambient environment had a greater likelihood of choosing a labeled alternative, and thus, a greater WTP for both the Energy Star and GPP label. To manufacturers and government regulators, these results suggest that energy labels can play a significant role in a consumer’s decision making process when selecting a new appliance.

Up to date, it is unclear how Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) models perform in terms of forecasting (external) real world aggregate shop data. In this contribution, we measure the performance of a Latent Class CBC model - not with an experimental holdout sample - but with aggregate real world scanning data. We find that the CBC model does not accurately predict real world market shares. In order to improve the forecasting performance, we propose a correction scheme based on external scanner data. Our analysis based on 8 brands shows that the use of the proposed correction vector improves the performance measure considerably. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

The horticultural industry is responsible for approximately half of the invasive plant introductions in North America. To reduce these introductions, voluntary initiatives are preferred over government regulations. This thesis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of two types of voluntary initiatives. At the gardener level, I investigated the effectiveness of alternative species promotion campaigns, called “Grow Me Instead” programs. Adult gardeners visiting the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ontario, as well as customers at two garden centres, participated in a conjoint analysis which measured their preferences for various traits of potential ground cover species. Results showed that gardeners generally prefer plant species having invasive characteristics, suggesting these programs may not be as effective as initially believed. At the retailer level, this study aimed to build upon the work done by Burt and colleagues (2007) to obtain further understanding of the relative strength of internal (ethical motivations) and external (legislation, stakeholder pressures and economic opportunities) factors for motivating participation in voluntary initiatives. Telephone interviews were conducted with 30 industry professionals from southern Ontario to assess their adoption of the St. Louis Voluntary Codes of Conduct. Results found that participation rates of industry professionals in southern Ontario were lower for every specific initiative than those interviewed by Burt et al. (2007). Industry professionals presently experience the most pressure to participate from a sense of personal responsibility and the desire to create a green business image. Pressure was significantly higher from these sources than from pressure from employees. Together these two studies identified several barriers to the efficacy of voluntary initiatives as well as some reasons for optimism. To ensure the success of future voluntary initiatives, efforts must be made to encourage these two groups to work together. Understanding how both retailers and gardeners respond to voluntary initiatives will assist in the development of more effective programs and lead to fewer horticultural invasive species introductions in the future.

Leadership has been an active area of scientific research since the Second World War, with scholars developing different perspectives on antecedents, processes, and outcomes. Since the founding of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) in 1949, the political party has been subjected to many leadership challenges and crises which have many a time threatened its unity and the interests of the party and members. Of interest will be the understanding of the attributes of leadership which the members would prefer. If these preferences of the members can be examined in the context of consumer/voter behaviour or decision in the electoral marketplace based on the contention that the leaders are products and services, we can bring marketing concepts and tools to the study of voter behaviour or decision (in elections) and so take a step towards an understanding of leadership while providing new evidence concerning MCA members' preferences for their President. Consumer behaviour theory can indeed be applied to voter behaviour in the electoral context. / One of the marketing tools available for this purpose is the use of conjoint analysis as a method for predicting choice of leadership, although it is considered exploratory and unprecedented as there are little or no attempts having been made to apply conjoint analysis for such study. Since the mid-1970s, conjoint analysis has been used as a method to realistically simulate consumer decisions in the context of trade-offs among multiple-attribute products and services in the product development and marketing domains. The reliability and validity of this method have been well documented in the literature. The application of conjoint analysis in the Leadership Studies domain will open up a new dimension of its robustness and dynamics as a method for predicting choice. / Consumer behaviour marketing has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary interest in politics and the functioning of the democratic process. This research was carried out in three stages: 1) to explore the leadership attributes model construct in a review of literature; 2) using a focus group study, to develop a final leadership attributes construct considered relevant, applicable and meaningful for the study of the members' preferences for their President; and 3) using web-based Adaptive Conjoint Analysis as a method for predicting choice, to operationalize the leadership attributes construct by subjecting them to voter behaviour (decision-making) during elections in the electoral marketplace. The results from the conjoint study show that Decisiveness, Vision, Openness, Inspirational Motivation, and Relational/Network are the top five attributes for the MCA members' preferences for their President whereas Charismatic (Idealized Influence), Intellectual (Basic Qualification), Communication Language Proficiency, Analytical, and Good Performance Record are the bottom five attributes for the preferences for the leadership. This is important because a significant part of political marketing is candidates and parties spending large amounts of money on targeting voters to influence their decisions as experienced by the MCA in the past especially during the leadership struggles. More importantly, the leadership struggles can be very costly and damaging to the interests of the party and its members if unchecked or moderated. The result of the research is not expected to be the solution to the leadership struggle but the implications for a new evidence of MCA members' preferences for the President as discussed may serve as guidance to the future leadership, as are directions for future research. / Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2005.

ABSTRACT Much is known about the process of sponsorship selection with respect to the key personnel involved in the buying decision and also about the strategic objectives for sponsorship. However, few investigations have focused on how sponsors assess the relative value of different sponsorship activities. This research project examined sponsorship decision-making with reference to the way managers discuss, think, and act when evaluating a sponsorship property for the first time. It focuses in particular on understanding how sponsors make decisions when selecting a new activity; how perceptions of risk influence their choice behaviours; the relative value they attribute to different sponsorship features; and how individual factors influence their choice of sponsorship domain. This research program considered these issues from three dimensions (1) linguistically (i.e. how firms publicly describe and explain their sponsorship selection procedures to others); (2) cognitively (i.e. how sponsorship experts describe and rationalise the decision process); and (3) conatively (i.e. how sponsorship managers report they behave when making sponsorship selection decisions). First, Study 1 explored the linguistic dimension of sponsorship selection through a content analysis of the sponsorship policies and guidelines of 298 global, national and local firms. The content analysis of these documents was conducted using Leximancer text analysis software. The analysis revealed six attributes were particularly important. These were the cost of sponsorship rights fees; the capacity of the sponsorship to achieve brand marketing objectives; the opportunities for brand exposure; the sharing of values between partners; the type/domain of the sponsorship activity; and its geographic reach. Firms avoided activities likely to damage their corporate or brand image by alienating sections of the community or by violating social norms. Next, Study 2 explored the cognitive dimension of sponsorship through a series of in-depth interviews with 16 sponsors and 20 properties. Interviews revealed that while practitioners supported the importance of attributes similar to those identified in Study 1, they placed more emphasis on the duration of the sponsorship agreement, the partner’s reputation and sponsorship management ability, and on the level of involvement, and less emphasis on shared values and geographic reach. Risk assessment was implicit in their due diligence practices. Risk mitigation strategies included risk avoidance, risk reduction, risk retention, and risk transfer. Study 3 examined the conative dimension of the sponsorship selection process using a full-profile choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment completed by 196 sponsorship managers. The respondents evaluated 17 sets of fully-randomised fictitious sponsorship proposals constructed using the attributes identified in the previous two studies. Hierarchical Bayes (HB) analysis showed that the degree of fit with brand objectives, the duration of the sponsorship, and the perceived quality of the partner relationship exerted the strongest influence on sponsor preferences. Specifically, sponsors placed the highest value on sponsorships that offered a very high fit with their brand objectives, a one-year agreement, a good partner relationship, were cause-related, had a State-wide reach, involved a title sponsorship, a combination of cash and in-kind payment, and offered print media exposure. Finally, to examine the influence of individual factors (i.e. gender, the level of decision-making authority, and experience in decision-making) on the choice of sponsorship domain (i.e. sport sponsorship, arts sponsorship, cause-related sponsorship, and celebrity endorsement), three sponsorship simulations were conducted as part of Study 3 using Share of Preference modelling. The results showed that cause-related sponsorship was the most strongly preferred domain in each of the three models, whereas celebrity endorsement was the least preferred. While female managers were indifferent to arts or sport sponsorship, male managers showed a strong preference for sport sponsorship over arts sponsorship. Managers were less interested in sport sponsorship than more senior executives. The preferences of managers with the least experience were consistent with those of highly-experienced sponsors. However, managers with 11-15 years experience showed much less interest in sport sponsorship than others. Conceptually, this program of research allowed for the development of a decision-making model that provides the basis for future investigations of sponsorship value. For the practitioner, the results of this research support previous findings about the significance of sponsorship activities having a good fit with the sponsor’s brand objectives. As well, properties with a good reputation for building high-quality sponsorship relationships will find favour with new sponsors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 446-474).

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, August, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: Branding and brand management have been top management priorities in the hotel industry. Some researchers have concluded that strong branding would be an efficient way for hotels and hotel chains to differentiate themselves from each other. Recent studies have focused on the establishment of a brand equity model and the relevant causal relationships of the model. Most of these studies have used types of desirability scales examining the importance of individual factors in measuring brand equity. However, they ignore the trade-offs that affect and characterize choice. Particularly, the personal decision process implied by the hierarchical brand equity model is absent. This study proposed two alternative measures of brand equity, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and conjoint analysis (CA), to address these limitations. The AHP and the CA were compared using several validity measures to aid in selecting efficient methods. This study examined the validity of AHP and CA under two data collection methods applied to hotel branding: paper-based survey and online survey. Result showed that the AHP data collection methods were easier, as well as with respect to saving time and costs. Results also indicated that the AHP is equivalent to the CA with respect to predictive accuracy. Practical differences for hotel branding in attribute preferences were clearly observed between the AHP and the CA. The AHP results were consistent with previous studies by awarding high importance to perceived quality and brand loyalty and lower importance to brand awareness and brand image. Managerial implications were provided for results. In terms of practicality in data collection, the study results revealed that the data gathered online leads to a slightly lower internal and predictive validity. A limitation of this study was that the two methods were not perfectly comparable. Nevertheless, the validity of both AHP and CA seems satisfactory for both methods. The study results also offer useful perspectives to consider when choosing between the two methods, as well as between AHP and CA. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Community Resources and Development 2014

Emerging markets have generated a lot of interest during the last couple of years; one reason for this is the economic growth potential of emerging markets and the opening up of new, interesting and potentially very lucrative groups of consumers. South Africa has a rich and diverse culture and shows signs of major socio-economic inequalities that are symptomatic of emerging economies. In South-Africa, department stores are significant to the emerging market female consumer market as they provide an extensive assortment of products and services. Department stores also offer a number of product categories and each provide an opportunity for indepth analysis. Work apparel is one such product category where more research is required in order to understand how these consumers evaluate product assortments. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe how the emerging market female consumer market (EFC) evaluates work wear product assortments in major South African department stores. The study makes a contribution to the field of retail, marketing and consumer behaviour in terms of a better understanding of the emerging market. It is also valuable in providing insight in consumers’ decision making processes towards work wear and preferences towards product assortment. The theoretical approach to the study included a literature review on the emerging market female consumer in South Africa, the South African retail environment and department stores, product assortment and product attributes. The cue diagnostic framework was used as a theoretical perspective for the study. This consumer-based approach was considered particularly appropriate for this study, in terms of the prioritization by a female consumer in an emerging market of product attributes when she is shopping for work wear and evaluating retailers’ product assortments. Combined with the literature review the cue diagnostic framework offered a theoretical basis for the study and provided an overall perspective on the specific phenomenon to be studied. An exploratory survey research design was employed together with a conjoint analysis method to provide insights into attribute ranking and level of influence of specific attributes. The sample consisted of 120 (n=120) female consumers living and working in Gauteng between the ages of 20 and 60, currently working with some sort of training, diploma or degree. Non-probability sampling methods were used, including purposive and snowball sampling. Respondents completed an online selfadministered questionnaire. To ensure an appropriate sample, the online questionnaire was also distributed in paper-based format.. An exploratory survey research design was employed together with a conjoint analysis method to provide insights into attribute ranking and level of influence of specific attributes. The sample consisted of 120 (n=120) female consumers living and working in Gauteng between the ages of 20 and 60, currently working with some sort of training, diploma or degree. Non-probability sampling methods were used, including purposive and snowball sampling. Respondents completed an online selfadministered questionnaire. To ensure an appropriate sample, the online questionnaire was also distributed in paper-based format. The results of the study indicated that the emerging market female consumer market has set ideas and preferences which appeal to them when purchasing work wear from department stores in South Africa. Certain product attributes were found to be more important than others while some were used in conjunction with other attributes. This combining of attributes helped to strengthen the importance of these attributes in the decision making process. The study adds value, knowledge and insight to the existing literature on consumer preferences in emerging markets and the apparel attributes that inform these preferences. This research will be useful for researchers as well as marketers who are interested in marketing campaigns, product assortment planning and retail settings. / Dissertation (MConsumer Science)--Universityof Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Consumer Science / unrestricted