The Impact of Informational Package Elements on Consumer Purchase Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Products: The Case of University Students in Masvingo, Zimbabwe.

Most studies on product package design elements have conceptualised the role of visual package elements such as colour, shape, size and picture in influencing consumer buying behaviour of fast moving consumer goods. Limited researches have focused on the impact of informational package elements on the purchase decisions of university students, therefore, this paper sought to examine the impact of informational package elements (brand elements, nutritional information, and food label information) on university students’ purchase decisions of breakfast cereals. A descriptive research design was employed and the random sampling strategy was used to identify and select study participants constituting 100 respondents. The research findings revealed that the brand name, nutritional information on energy and sugar, and use instructions are critical determinants of university students’ purchase decisions. Therefore, the implication for managers is that, the noted variables should be strategically managed as they are vital extrinsic cues that directly trigger consumer interest and shape their purchase decisions.   Key words: packaging, informational elements, consumer purchase behaviour, breakfast cereal

Measures of Brand Loyalty

Though brand loyalty has been studied extensively in the marketing literature, the relationship between brand loyalty and equilibrium pricing strategies is not well understood. Designing sales pricing strategies involves two key decisions: the percentage reduction in price from the existing price point, and the number or frequency of promotions within a category or for a specific product. These decisions, in turn, are critically dependent upon how many consumers can be convinced to switch to a brand by temporarily reducing its price, and how many are instead brand loyal. Theoretical models of how the size and strength of brand loyalty influence optimal promotion strategies have been developed, but there are no rigorous tests of their hypotheses. We test how brand loyalty impacts promotion strategies for a frequently purchased consumer package good category. Our results largely confirm that retailers often promote many brands simultaneously and that depth and breadth can be complementary.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

Pengaruh Atribut Produk Terhadap Keputusan Pembelian Abdul's Group Semarang

In order to achieve company goals better, Abdul's Group. Attributes can determine which ones are appropriate or not appropriate to the needs and desires konsumen.Tipe used explanatory research study with a sample size of 100 respondents was taken using a non probablity sampling with accidental sampling technique. Measurement scale with Likert scale. Data collection by interview using a questionnaire. Analysis of data using simple linear regression and multiple regression test with SPSS 16.0. While testing the hypothesis using the t test, f test, correlation coefficient, and the coefficient of determination. The results showed that prices have an influence on purchasing decisions with 0.618 correlation coefficient and the coefficient of determination of 38.2%, the packaging has an influence on purchasing decisions with 0.533 correlation coefficient and the coefficient of determination 28.4%, the service has an influence on purchasing decisions with a correlation coefficient of 0.823 67.7% and the coefficient of determination, the product quality has an influence on purchasing decisions with a correlation coefficient of 0.644 and a coefficient of determination of 41.5%, and the size has an influence on purchasing decisions with a correlation coefficient of 0.755 and a coefficient of determination of 56.9%, price, packaging , service, product quality, and size together have an influence on purchasing decisions by the equation Y = 1.584 + 0.928 + 4.328 X1 + 3.980 X2 + 1.278 X3 + 1.277 X4 X5. This shows that Abdul's Group has a good service, by having good communication between employees and customers, ketramapilan good The results menunujukan Abdul's Group has a good service in terms of employees' communication skills with customers and employees when describing the product, and has klemahan in terms of packaging, particularly on the security package. Conclusion The study is the product attributes affect purchase decisions. But there are still consumers who stated that the application of pricing, packaging, service, product quality, and size is not good. Advice for Abdul's Group is to maintain the value of the service, and the best Abdul's Group uses packing materials that meet the safety standards for food packaging

The Economics of Local Tourist Systems

In this paper we analyse the Local Tourist System (LTS) as a particular case of Marshallian Industrial District. The LTS allows the identification of more effective policy tools for managing tourism. First, through the concept of LTS, the policy maker can take into account the complexity of tourism, characterised by a strong heterogeneity of goods, services and subjects involved; second, LTS helps promote a stronger co-ordination between the public and the private sector, by identifying a homogeneous territory and recognising its importance in tourists' decisions; third, through the LTS the policymaker can analyze the externalities and promotes the idea of collaborating networks in a context of local development. In the LTS framework, the anticommon problem can be analysed and contrasted. As the tourist has to buy different but intertwined goods which compose the holiday package, the failure in one of the markets can lead to the overall failure of the package. A LTS policy has to: i) co-ordinate the price policy of the different firms supplying “single components” of the tourist product; ii) fix the price of the whole product; iii) impute a price to each component. We demonstrate that, through price policy co-ordination and under general conditions, the LTS can increase the size of tourism and the firms’ profits, thereby reaching a more effective and efficient target in tourism policy. The recent introduction of LTS in the Italian legislation can be seen as a positive attempt of improving co-ordination in a complex sector such as tourism.Local tourist systems, Tourism policy

Supporting 64-bit global indices in Epetra and other Trilinos packages -- Techniques used and lessons learned

The Trilinos Project is an effort to facilitate the design, development, integration and ongoing support of mathematical software libraries within an object-oriented framework. It is intended for large-scale, complex multiphysics engineering and scientific applications. Epetra is one of its basic packages. It provides serial and parallel linear algebra capabilities. Before Trilinos version 11.0, released in 2012, Epetra used the C++ int data-type for storing global and local indices for degrees of freedom (DOFs). Since int is typically 32-bit, this limited the largest problem size to be smaller than approximately two billion DOFs. This was true even if a distributed memory machine could handle larger problems. We have added optional support for C++ long long data-type, which is at least 64-bit wide, for global indices. To save memory, maintain the speed of memory-bound operations, and reduce further changes to the code, the local indices are still 32-bit. We document the changes required to achieve this feature and how the new functionality can be used. We also report on the lessons learned in modifying a mature and popular package from various perspectives -- design goals, backward compatibility, engineering decisions, C++ language features, effects on existing users and other packages, and build integration

Consideration of Easygard Post Design on the Base of Advances Concurrent Engineering Tool

The essence of CE is the integration of product design and process planning into one common activity. Concurrent design helps improve the quality of early design decisions and has a tremendous impact on life-cycle cost of the product. It is important to decide at an early stage in design which type of assembly method is likely to be adopted, based on the method yielding the lowest costs. This section allows the designer to decide, from the values of basic product and company parameters (production volume, number of parts, etc.) which assembly method is likely to be the most economic. The purchase of special-purpose automation equipment (high-speed automatic assembly) would almost certainly provide excellent return on investment. Somewhere between these extremes is a range of annual production volumes for which robot assembly might be the best economic choice if the assembly were appropriately designed. However, changing system is not only the way to reduce the production time and cost. It is also possible to reduce time and cost significantly by using software package and designing or redesigning assembly of product appropriately. Paper below represents design optimization possibilities by DFA approach for Easygard post engineering design produced by one of the UK medium size manufacturing company.

Storing and Indexing Plan Derivations through Explanation-based Analysis of Retrieval Failures

Case-Based Planning (CBP) provides a way of scaling up domain-independent planning to solve large problems in complex domains. It replaces the detailed and lengthy search for a solution with the retrieval and adaptation of previous planning experiences. In general, CBP has been demonstrated to improve performance over generative (from-scratch) planning. However, the performance improvements it provides are dependent on adequate judgements as to problem similarity. In particular, although CBP may substantially reduce planning effort overall, it is subject to a mis-retrieval problem. The success of CBP depends on these retrieval errors being relatively rare. This paper describes the design and implementation of a replay framework for the case-based planner DERSNLP+EBL. DERSNLP+EBL extends current CBP methodology by incorporating explanation-based learning techniques that allow it to explain and learn from the retrieval failures it encounters. These techniques are used to refine judgements about case similarity in response to feedback when a wrong decision has been made. The same failure analysis is used in building the case library, through the addition of repairing cases. Large problems are split and stored as single goal subproblems. Multi-goal problems are stored only when these smaller cases fail to be merged into a full solution. An empirical evaluation of this approach demonstrates the advantage of learning from experienced retrieval failure.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Food as Experience A Design and Evaluation Methodology

This research, conducted for Frito Lay-North America, Inc, demonstrates how new product designs, package designs, concepts, and prototypes can be created based on the social, emotional, cognitive, and sensory information gathered through a combined methodology based on activity theory, Kansei Engineering and the ZMET process. The study examines how activity theory can be used to observe situational settings mediated by products for the purpose of collecting significant social and behavioral data. It also examines how Kansei methods can be used to evaluate sensory experiences and how the ZMET process can be used to gather demographic and marketing data. The outcome of this research concludes that activity theory, Kansei engineering, and ZMET are each useful, however, none of these methods used in isolation are sufficient to inform all aspects of marketing, new product development, and package design decisions. However, as a combined design and evaluation methodology they can provide more useful data for these processes. Keywords: Experience Design, Kansei Assessment, Food, Activity Theory</p