The impact of small and medium sized tourism enterprises on the destination brand

Abstract. This study’s purpose is to build a theoretical model that enhances the understanding of the impact that small-and-medium sized tourism businesses (SME’s) can have on the destination brand. The research will describe the unique nature of destination branding that separates it from regular branding activities across other industries, how they can be developed and what architectures exist to manage the said brand management. Finally, the study describes the role of SME’s in destination branding as well as the methods with which SME’s affect the brand development of destinations. The phenomenon studies not only the processes with which SME’s affect the destination brand but the benefits and reasons why they partake in it, but also impact the said processes have on the destination brand. Through these steps, the study answers the research question: “How can tourism SME’s contribute toward the development of a destination brand?” The gap on the research is clearly defined in this case, with most tourism branding studies focusing on the role of destination management organisations (DMO), tourism networks or consumer-based brand equity (CBBE). This paper contributes to the field of branding by shedding light on the role and impact that individual tourism SME’s have on the destination branding. The study was conducted as a qualitative, semi-structured multiple case study, with three tourism SME’s of the destination, as well as the local DMC for the purpose of data triangulation. This chosen method of study ensured a thorough understanding of the role and impact of tourism SME’s in destination branding, and multiple interviews increased the validity of the study. Abductive method was chosen, which allowed new concepts to arise from the studied data and theoretical background of the research, which allows this study to contribute theoretical material on the field. This research’s key results suggest that SME’s can have significant impact on the development of destination brand. This study presents that due to the natural market orientation of these businesses and scarcity of resources, the SME’s actively connect, network and co-operate together to develop the destinations toward a desired, shared goal, oftentimes with shared values such as sustainability and responsibility acting as the foundation of these shared interests. Further, the SME’s go out their way to take steps not necessarily required by the law to ensure harmony between the locals and the tourism system, and foster personal relationship building between tourists and the entire destination, rather than separating the business and its activities from the rest of the destination. The SME’s take initiative in the absence of others and build and develop new products and services. This research’s results suggest that SME’s main tools to affect destination branding are by affecting within the surrounding brand network as well as through communicating the destination brand forward and building relationships. Further, the SME’s chosen methods benefit them in many ways such as granting them access to knowledge and shared resources

Promoting Wellness to a Rural Area through Recreation Facility and Programming

Wellness can mean many things to many people. Wellness does not just mean that a person is free from illness; wellness is a dynamic and continued process for oneself. Wellness has been defined by the National Wellness Institute as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices towards, a more successful existence (9). Wellness models have been created to try and further explain the dimensions of wellness and their interactions with each other and the impact on quality of life. Wellness models have used dimensions of wellness such as physical, emotional, intellectual or mental, spiritual, environmental or occupational, psychological and social. The dimensions can further be described as a constant continuum for the human body to work towards optimal well-being in each area. Participation in wellness programs has been known to improve the quality of life and overall health of the participant. However, wellness outreach programming in rural areas often lacks the resources and professionals to provide available and quality programming for the people in such small communities. In January 2000, the United States Department of Health and Human Services launched Healthy People 2010, a 10 year goal to improve the health of Americans through health promotion and disease prevention (25). This initiative has brought increased awareness to the overall health of people in this nation. With increased awareness, rural areas are discovering ways to make wellness programs available and affordable to people in these areas. The purpose of this paper is to show how a wellness center and its programming can be initiated in a rural area, reveal the current perceived wellness of its members, and discuss the potential impact on the community to increase overall health and well-being of people in a rural setting. Demonstrating the process of an intervention type program, such as the wellness center and wellness programming in a small community, is significant to understanding the potential of providing wellness programming to other rural areas and the impact it may have on the wellness and overall health of people in the community

Mutually best matches

We study iterated formation of mutually best matches (IMB) in college admissions problems. When IMB produces a non-wasteful matching, the matching has many good properties like Pareto optimality and stability. Moreover, in this case IMB selects the unique core allocation and truth-telling is a Nash equilibrium for students. If preferences satisfy a single peakedness condition, or have a single crossing property, then IMB is guaranteed to produce a non-wasteful matching. These properties guarantee also that the Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA) and the Top Trading Cycles algorithm (TTC) produce the same matching as IMB. We compare these results with some well-known results about when DA is Pareto optimal, or when DA and TTC produce the same matching. </p

Plasmin aktivering i mastitmjölk

Received 22 April 1988 Published 23 January 2021 Issue Date September 1988Peer reviewe

Socioeconomic position, John Henryism, and incidence of acute myocardial infarction in Finnish men

Previous cross-sectional studies examining whether John Henryism (JH), or high-effort coping with socioeconomic adversity, potentiates the inverse association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and cardiovascular health have focused mainly on hypertension in African Americans. We conducted the first longitudinal test of this hypothesis on incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) using data from the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study in Finland (N = 1405 men, 42-60 years). We hypothesized that the expected inverse gradient between SEP and AMI risk would be stronger for men scoring high on JH than for those scoring low. John Henryism was measured by a Finnish version of the JH Scale for Active Coping. Four different measures of SEP were used: childhood SEP, education, income, and occupation. AMI hazard ratios (HR) by SEP and JH were estimated using COX proportional hazard models, before and after adjustment for study covariates. 205 cases of AMI occurred over a median of 14.9 years. Men employed in lower rank (farmer, blue-collar) occupations who scored high on JH had significantly higher age-adjusted risks of AMI than men in higher rank (white-collar) occupations (HR = 3.14, 95% CI: 1.65-5.98 for blue collar; HR = 2.33, 95% Cl: 1.04-5.22 for farmers) who also scored high on JH. No socioeconomic differences in AMI were observed for men who scored low on JH (HR = 136, 95% CI: 0.74 2.47 for blue collar; HR = 0.93, 95% CI: 0.59-1.48 for farmers; p = 0.002 for the SEP x JH interaction). These findings persisted after adjustment for sociodemographic, behavioral, and biological factors. Results for other SEP measures were in the same direction, but did not reach statistical significance. Repetitive high-effort coping with adversity (John Henryism) was independently associated with increased risk for AMI in Finnish men, underscoring the potential relevance of the John Henryism hypothesis to CVD outcomes other than hypertension and to populations other than African Americans. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

Arresting bubble coarsening: A two-bubble experiment to investigate grain growth in presence of surface elasticity

Many two-phase materials suffer from grain-growth due to the energy cost which is associated with the interface that separates both phases. While our understanding of the driving forces and the dynamics of grain growth in different materials is well advanced by now, current research efforts address the question of how this process may be slowed down, or, ideally, arrested. We use a model system of two bubbles to explore how the presence of a finite surface elasticity may interfere with the coarsening process and the final grain size distribution. Combining experiments and modelling in the analysis of the evolution of two bubbles, we show that clear relationships can be predicted between the surface tension, the surface elasticity and the initial/final size ratio of the bubbles. We rationalise these relationships by the introduction of a modified Gibbs criterion. Besides their general interest, the present results have direct implications for our understanding of foam stability