abstract: Scholars have written much about home and meaning, yet they have said little about the professionally furnished model home viewed as a cultural artifact. Nor is there literature addressing how the home building industry uses these spaces to promote images of family life to increase sales. This research notes that not only do the structure, design, and layout of the model home formulate cultural identity but also the furnishings and materials within. Together, the model home and carefully selected artifacts placed therein help to express specific chosen lifestyles as that the home builder determines. This thesis considers the model home as constructed as well as builder's publications, descriptions, and advertisements. The research recognizes the many facets of merchandising, consumerism, and commercialism influencing the design and architecture of the suburban home. Historians of visual and cultural studies often investigate these issues as separate components. By contrast, this thesis offers an integrated framework of inquiry, drawing upon such disciplines as cultural history, anthropology, and material culture. The research methodology employs two forms of content analysis - image and text. The study analyzes 36 model homes built in Phoenix, Arizona, during the period 1955-1956. The thesis explores how the builder sends a message, i.e. images, ideals, and aspirations, to the potential home buyer through the design and decoration of the model home. It then speculates how the home buyer responds to those messages. The symbiotic relationship between the sender and receiver, together, tells a story about the Phoenix lifestyle and the domestic ideals of the 1950s. Builders sent messages surrounding convenience, spaciousness, added luxury, and indoor-outdoor living to a growing and discriminating home buying market. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S.D. Design 2013

What role do celebrity endorsements play in determining the success of a sports apparel company brand, such as Nike, Inc. (Nike) and Under Armour? Each year, Nike and Under Armour spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing their athletic apparel, footwear, accessories and gear using paid celebrities and professional athletes. Can marketing videos prominently featuring inspirational athletes increase a company’s profitability and stock price value, and lead to stronger brand recognition that could not only convince its current customers to buy products, but also reach new consumers and expand its revenue? By collecting data on Nike and Under Armour’s YouTube videos from July 2010 to November 2017, this study uses characteristics of the companies’ videos, such as professional athletic presence, gender, purpose, intended audience and number of views, to determine whether a celebrity is consistently positively correlated with stock price changes. Two tests produced conflicting results: Celebrity presence was only statistically significant in positively affecting Under Armour’s daily stock price immediately, but not in either company’s weekly or monthly stock prices. Additionally, lack of celebrity presence was statistically significant in negatively impacting Under Armour’s change in monthly stock price. These mixed results demonstrate the debatable impact a celebrity endorsement has on a company’s stock market valuation. The conclusion discusses potential factors that may have contributed to Under Armour’s stock price fall.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T18:56:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JANDERLE RABAIOLLI.pdf: 1672705 bytes, checksum: c4e3e72c0bebc73becd04f7408274187 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-02-28 / Such dissertation focus on the Malhação soap opera analyse, which is broadcast by Globo TV net, it also will analyse and characterize the tie-in language, a constant practise in such tv programme.The research is developed in three chapters, the first one refers to the language and the ideology, with the approaching of the discourse concepts,expressed, polyphony and speech genders.The second chapter brings the concept of the social communication field, like mass communication, market communication and the tie-in. It is also mentioned the concepts and the characteristics from the market communication formats, with emphasis on tie-in. The last one analyses the tie-in language through the decupage scenes from the programme under analyse, and also on its characterization and features which demonstrate their connection with the consumption society preconcepts related to the condition lived by the brazilian contemporary society and its aesthetics condition, which it is determinated in order to the televisual format of the tie-in succeeds. / Esta dissertação busca, por meio da análise da novela Malhação, exibida pela Rede Globo de Televisão, analisar e caracterizar a linguagem do merchandising editorial, uma prática constante dentro do programa. A pesquisa é desenvolvida em três capítulos. O primeiro refere-se à ideologia e à linguagem, com abordagem dos conceitos de discurso, enunciado, polifonia e gêneros do discurso. O segundo capítulo traz os conceitos do campo da comunicação social, tais como a comunicação de massa, a comunicação mercadológica e o merchandising. São abordados, ainda, os conceitos e características dos formatos de comunicação mercadológica, com ênfase no merchandising editorial. O último capítulo analisa a linguagem do merchandising editorial por meio da decupagem de cenas do programa em análise, na busca por sua caracterização e aspectos que demonstrem sua ligação com os preceitos da sociedade de consumo, em uma relação com a condição vivida pela sociedade contemporânea brasileira e sua condição estética, determinante para que o formato televisual do merchandising editorial tenha sucesso.

Luxury fashion brands seem to contradict sustainability. The values of sustainability are commonly associated with terms such as sharing, collaboration, austerity, and collective thinking. Luxury, however, is associated with excess, self-indulgence, delight and decadence (Kapferer & Bastien, 2012:360). Further paradoxes exist where the apparel of the luxury consumer is often manufactured by labourers in low wage-paying producing countries. High wastage is evident in the seasonality of the fashion industry. However, work opportunities are created by the fickleness of the fashion industry and the constant need to own the most current designs (Black, 2012:8). Owing to the high visibility of luxury fashion and the contractions between one -- on the one hand -- supplying income to families by way of employment and -- on the other hand -- not complying to sustainable international human resource practices, fashion brands are the focus of many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that use the mass media to expose any social wrongdoing in the industry. Luxury fashion brands are constantly in the spotlight, as highlighted in articles posted by the Clean Clothes campaign, a custodian for employees in the global garment industries; Greenpeace; and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). An example of such practices was when Greenpeace reported in 2009 that shoe brands such as Timberland and Clarks were manufactured from leather sourced from the hides of cattle in illegally deforested areas in Brazil. This provided negative publicity for these luxury shoe brands as well as for the Brazilian government that was financing this project (Vurro, Russo & Perrini, 2009:609). The luxury fashion brand industry, as well as the consumers of luxury fashion labels, are accused -- often only for the sake of sensationalism -- of living in the lap of luxury whilst maintaining a supply chain that is riddled with unsustainable practices. The social structure and hierarchy of patrons within a community have, since the Middle Ages, been signalled by the clothes they wore. Social class was a birthright. Today, sporting luxury brands continues to serve as status symbols, but unlike mediaeval times, it is not limited to people with a high social standing at birth as one can work for status, and purchase the items because one deserves them. (Han, Nunes, & Drèze, 2010:15). In 2009, during the International Herald Tribune (IHT) Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor at The Herald, called for “luxury”’ and “fashion” to be separated. Luxury prides itself in its handcrafted garments manufactured by respected tradesmen in the industry. The outcome is that the manufactured goods are made to last a lifetime (Gibson, 2012:23).

Submitted in Partial Compliance with the Requirements for the Masters of Technology: Fashion at the Durban University of Technology, 2006. / The purpose of this study was to investigate the eveningwear preferences of single women (unmarried, divorced, widowed), between the ages of 25 and 40, who live/work in the Durban Metropolitan area. This study aimed to uncover the factors that influence the eveningwear purchase decisions of single women in the hope of proposing practical changes in retail eveningwear design. These influences were investigated in the light of social-psychological factors and centred on the concept of dress as a phenomenon of visual communication. / M

The aim is to analyze and evaluate the space management in selected companies and see how customers perceive the environment Tesco stores.

This project dealt with the teenage market in France and in the United States. Its aim was to provide the readers with an overview of this market and outline distribution and communication strategies that manufacturers and retailers can use to attract this market to make their business grow. Until a few years ago, the fashion industry did not pursue this market. In stores, most brands were dividing their clothing range into three catagories, women, men, and children. As a growing market with over 23 million teens in the U.S. and over 5.4 million in France, teenagers have an incredible spending power with 100 billion dollars spent in 2000 in the United States and 2.54 billion dollars spent in France. Now marketers are recognizing the teenage market as a huge potential for the future of their brands.

The diploma thesis is focused on improving the merchandising of selected company. The first part deals with definition of the theoretical framework, based on which the current situation in the company is evaluated. Through quantitative methods and individual interviews with employees of the selected company, a new store layout is proposed in such a way as to achieve the identified customer requirements, bring new customers to company, strengthen the loyalty of existing customers and at the same time increase sales.

The diploma thesis deals with the identification of the important factors of the shopping environment that influence the consumers during their purchase. In the theoretical part, literature in relation with the retail, merchandising and shop-ping environment is discussed. To obtain the data, an industry analysis in the Czech Republic and a mystery shopping in the selected second hand shops were executed. A quantitative survey was supplemented by a qualitative survey that was processed in a form of controlled interviews. The results from the acquired data were used as recommendations for the second hand shops owners and a concrete plan including changes in a calculation has been developed for Bellitex s.r.o.

The diploma thesis deals with clothes windows displays and their influence on potential customers and their shopping customs and behaviour. Detailed interviews with potential customers (n = 36) and shop managers (n = 21) were used in order to find out opinions about windows displays. Preference tests (n = 30) were used as a complementary method. Thanks to the gained data it was possible to identify mistakes in creating windows displays and subsequently to formulate recommendations for an appropriate presentation of goods in clothes windows displays.