14 research outputs found
Can Upward Brand Extensions be an Opportunity for Marketing Managers During the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond?
Early COVID-19 research has guided current managerial practice by introducing
more products across different product categories as consumers tried to avoid
perceived health risks from food shortages, i.e. horizontal brand extensions. For
example, Leon, a fast-food restaurant in the UK, introduced a new range of ready
meal products. However, when the food supply stabilised, availability may no
longer be a concern for consumers. Instead, job losses could be a driver of higher
perceived financial risks. Meanwhile, it remains unknown whether the perceived
health or financial risks play a more significant role on consumers’ consumptions.
Our preliminary survey shows perceived health risks outperform perceived
financial risks to positively influence purchase intention during COVID-19. We
suggest such a result indicates an opportunity for marketers to consider
introducing premium priced products, i.e. upward brand extensions. The risk-as�feelings and signalling theories were used to explain consumer choice under risk may adopt affective heuristic processing, using minimal cognitive efforts to
evaluate products. Based on this, consumers are likely to be affected by the salient
high-quality and reliable product cue of upward extension signalled by its
premium price level, which may attract consumers to purchase when they have
high perceived health risks associated with COVID-19. Addressing this, a series of
experimental studies confirm that upward brand extensions (versus normal new
product introductions) can positively moderate the positive effect between
perceived health risks associated with COVID-19 and purchase intention. Such an
effect can be mediated by affective heuristic information processing. The results
contribute to emergent COVID-19 literature and managerial practice during the
pandemic but could also inform post-pandemic thinking around vertical brand
extensions
Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns
Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse