Explaining and predicting the single channel versus multi-channel consumer: the case of an embarrassing product

The fundamental purpose of this thesis was to determine how effective is the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to predict and explain shopping for embarrassing products in single and multi-channel. This is important because multi-channel consumers buy more, the question is why (Neslin, Grewal et al. 2006). The question was answered by comparing consumer behaviour in three different channels: drugstore, internet and multi-channel. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has been successful to predict intentions for a wide variety of products and behaviours. However, little is known about how effective it is when the behaviour under study is influenced by the emotion of embarrassment. Similarly, the TPB is parsimonious and has a good predictive power; nevertheless, this thesis identified that the TPB could be more effective if it considered: (1) the role of positive and negative emotions (2) other determinants of choice like personality and demographics (3) variables that are useful to make marketing decisions like the synergistic effect of brands, retailers and channels (4) variables that explain consumer response like approach and avoidance. To provide a comprehensive theoretical framework that is able to understand single and multi-channel, this thesis integrated the TPB within the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. To evaluate the proposed model, the study used a context and target product that resonated with the theory: the purchase of Regaine (a hair loss product that is embarrassing to buy) in Boots (a well-known UK. multi-channel drugstore). The embarrassing nature of Regaine created differences in the importance that variables play in each channel. The results were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and the three shopping environments were compared using multi-group analysis (MGA). The effectiveness of the TPB was improved. The variance explained (R² to intention) was 73 percent for the drugstore, 67 percent for the internet and 54 percent for multi-channel. However, subjective norm (SN) was the only factor that achieved significance for the three shopping environments. Personality and demographic factors had a low but significant moderating effect on intention. This thesis built on a series of contributions in different areas, such as the TPB, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, embarrassing products, multi-channel, marketing, emotions, personality and demographics. Future research should expand this thesis to other embarrassing products, industries and social media settings

Influencing operational policing strategy by predictive service analytics

Everyday there are growing pressures to ensure that services are delivered efficiently, with high levels of quality and with acceptability of regulatory standards. For the Police Force, their service requirement is to the public, with the police officer presence being the most visible product of this criminal justice provision. Using historical data from over 10 years of operation, this research demonstrates the benefits of using data mining methods for knowledge discovery in regards to the crime and incident related elements which impact on the Police Force service provision. In the UK, a Force operates over a designated region (macro-level), which is further subdivided into Beats (micro-level). This research also demonstrates differences between the outputs of micro-level and macro-level analytics, where the lower level analysis enables adaptation of the operational Policing strategy. The evidence base provided through the analysis supports decisions regarding further investigations into the capability of flexible neighbourhood policing practices; alongside wider operations i.e. optimal officer training times

Maps of Lessons Learnt in Requirements Engineering

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas of RE (and hence RE theories). Such maps would thus be: (a) a driver for research to ``light up” the darker areas of RE and (b) a guide for practice to benefit from the brighter areas. To achieve this goal, we populated the maps with over 200 RE lessons elicited from literature and practice using a systematic literature review and survey. The results show that approximately 80\% of the elicited lessons are implicit and that approximately 70\% of the lessons deal with the elicitation, analysis, and specification RE phases only. The RE Lesson Maps, elicited lessons, and the results from populating the maps provide novel scientific groundings for lessons learnt in RE as this topic has not yet been systematically studied in the field

Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in today’s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering

Using social media to inform supplier selection in new product introduction

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversitySupplier networks today are seeing a complete redirection in their purpose from a decade ago. Supplier networks focused originally on transaction-oriented exchanges for sending purchase orders electronically. However, based on the current increased need to understand business risks, supplier networks are demonstrating a clear shift in emphasis from establishing “transaction-based focus” relationships towards the evolution of network platforms. The Aberdeen Group (2011) demonstrates that 76 per cent of supplier networks increasingly are being used to identify new suppliers and market opportunities. Moreover, with social-networking features similar to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (which are very recent phenomena), supplier networks have become more important in their role of spending management based on the ability to help organisations identify new suppliers while sharing information with other buyer organizations. Therefore, analysing data from supplier networks today has become a necessary strategy for optimizing transaction-focused procurement, in addition to improving supplier relationships. With this in mind, the Social Media Domain Analysis (SoMeDoA) framework has been developed to facilitate the decision-making process for selecting flexible suppliers within the e-procurement-based marketplace and apply it to a real set of data gathered from two social-networking sites (Twitter and LinkedIn). The research contributes a rigorous method that analyses effectively domain concepts and relations between notions from social networks and builds the domain ontology. The effectiveness of the framework, in analysing domain and relations, is evaluated by its application to varying datasets gathered from social networks, including the pharmaceutical domain. This model extrapolates findings from stages in the research and marries elements from various papers and frameworks therein, in order to produce a guideline model for organisations seeking a suitable supplier with whom to work. The results of the evaluation are encouraging, and provide concrete outcomes in an area that is little researched.MATCH programme (UK engineering and physical sciences research council grants numbers GR/S29874/01, EP/F063822/1 and EP/G012393/1)

A critical evaluation of competitive intelligence and insight management practice.

This thesis forms part of a PhD by Publication based on the research and scholarly work of Sheila Wright. It explores her contribution to the field of Competitive Intelligence & Insight Management (CI&IM) made through ten articles published between 2002 and 2010. The research projects that involved the collection of primary data were carried out within a qualitative research methodology using a semi-structured interview or case study method and typically adopting a pragmatic paradigm. Through this work, it has been possible to present a best-practice framework for CI&IM. Similarly, it has been possible to develop an operational framework for CI&IM, which identifies the inter-connectivity of the CI&IM tasks as well as the organisational influencing factors which can aid or hinder successful implementation. As well as engaging in a critical evaluation of current CI&IM practice the thesis indicates how the articles offer solutions which can aid the delivery of improved performance to practitioners as well as academics who teach and research the subject. The thesis also identifies the place of CI&IM in the business discipline and draws attention to the cross-boundary, inter-disciplinary nature of its reach. The development of bibliometric software and citation identification programmes has enabled the inclusion of a citation analysis for each article which also identifies the context within which that citation was made. This is presented as supporting evidence for the contribution to knowledge and value of the body of work. Through this mechanism it has also been possible, not only to identify the frequency with which the articles have been cited, but more importantly, the impact and contribution this has had on scholars who have subsequently used the output and frameworks as a basis for their own research.This is a PhD by Publication. Due to copyright restrictions, copies of the articles have been omitted in this version of the thesis. Full bibliographic details including DOI's and URL's for the articles can be found in Appendix 2

Promotion and Marketing Communications

This edited Promotion and Marketing Communications book is an original volume that presents a collection of chapters authored by various researchers and edited by marketing communication professionals. To survive in the competitive world, companies feel an urge to achieve a competitive advantage by applying accurate marketing communication tactics. Understanding marketing communication is an essential aspect for any field and any country. Hence, in this volume there is the latest research about marketing communication under which marketing strategies are delicately discussed. This book does not only contribute to the marketing and marketing communication intellectuals but also serves different sector company managerial positions and provides a guideline for people who want to attain a career in this field, giving them a chance to acquire the knowledge regarding consumer behavior, public relations, and digital marketing themes

Agnostic content ontology design patterns for a multi-domain ontology

This research project aims to solve the semantic heterogeneity problem. Semantic heterogeneity mimics cancer in that semantic heterogeneity unnecessarily consumes resources from its host, the enterprise, and may even affect lives. A number of authors report that semantic heterogeneity may cost a significant portion of an enterprise’s IT budget. Also, semantic heterogeneity hinders pharmaceutical and medical research by consuming valuable research funds. The RA-EKI architecture model comprises a multi-domain ontology, a cross-industry agnostic construct composed of rich axioms notably for data integration. A multi-domain ontology composed of axiomatized agnostic data model patterns would drive a cognitive data integration application system usable in any industry sector. This project’s objective is to elicit agnostic data model patterns here considered as content ontology design patterns. The first research question of this project pertains to the existence of agnostic patterns and their capacity to solve the semantic heterogeneity problem. Due to the theory-building role of this project, a qualitative research approach constitutes the appropriate manner to conduct its research. Contrary to theory testing quantitative methods that rely on well-established validation techniques to determine the reliability of the outcome of a given study, theorybuilding qualitative methods do not possess standardized techniques to ascertain the reliability of a study. The second research question inquires on a dual method theory-building approach that may demonstrate trustworthiness. The first method, a qualitative Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach induces the sought knowledge from 69 retained publications using a practical screen. The second method, a phenomenological research protocol elicits the agnostic concepts from semi-structured interviews involving 22 senior practitioners with 21 years in average of experience in conceptualization. The SLR retains a set of 89 agnostic concepts from 2009 through 2017. The phenomenological study in turn retains 83 agnostic concepts. During the synthesis stage for both studies, data saturation was calculated for each of the retained concepts at the point where the concepts have been selected for a second time. The quantification of data saturation constitutes an element of the trustworthiness’s transferability criterion. It can be argued that this effort of establishing the trustworthiness, i.e. credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability can be construed as extensive and this research track as promising. Data saturation for both studies has still not been reached. The assessment performed in the course of the establishment of trustworthiness of this project’s dual method qualitative research approach yields very interesting findings. Such findings include two sets of agnostic data model patterns obtained from research protocols using radically different data sources i.e. publications vs. experienced practitioners but with striking similarities. Further work is required using exactly the same protocols for each of the methods, expand the year range for the SLR and to recruit new co-researchers for the phenomenological protocol. This work will continue until these protocols do not elicit new theory material. At this point, new protocols for both methods will be designed and executed with the intent to measure theoretical saturation. For both methods, this entails in formulating new research questions that may, for example, focus on agnostic themes such as finance, infrastructure, relationships, classifications, etc. For this exploration project, the road ahead involves the design of new questionnaires for semi-structured interviews. This project will need to engage in new knowledge elicitation techniques such as focus groups. The project will definitely conduct other qualitative research methods such as research action for eliciting new knowledge and know-how from actual development and operation of an ontology-based cognitive application. Finally, a mixed methods qualitative-quantitative approach would prepare the transition toward theory testing method using hypothetico-deductive techniques