Editorial

Debora Barreiros, Amália Dias DOI: 10.12957/periferia.2013.1542

Unraveling corporate brand equity: A measurement model based on consumer perception of corporate brands

Purpose Consumer perception of corporate brand equity has primarily focused on product brand dimensions, neglecting considerations at the firm analysis level. Assessing corporate brands requires different criteria relevant to the competitiveness of companies, such as their prominence, management and meeting society’s demands. In this sense, this study aims to develop and validate a scale of corporate brand equity founded on consumer perceptions, transcending industry boundaries and comparing its relationship with companies' market share. Design/methodology/approach The authors used an integrative approach to clarify the construct’s domain, building on previous measures. They took several steps to select appropriate items, refine the measure, validate it through reliability tests and convergent and discriminant analyses, test the validity of the second-order formative structure of corporate brand equity and assess associations between first-order factors, the second-order factor and market share. Findings The model identifies three first-order dimensions of corporate brands (presence, outstanding management and responsible) that shape the second-order factor (corporate brand equity). They are directly related, but not proportionally, to market share, contributing to the general and joint assessment of the company’s competitive performance considering the consumer. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive measurement model of corporate brand equity that considers the firm level of analysis, combines metrics from previous research on corporate brand evaluation criteria and includes consumer perceptions of the company’s competitiveness, unifying branding theory with the theory of the marketing firm

Editorial

Debora Barreiros, Amália Dias DOI: 10.12957/periferia.2013.1536

Minimal type-I seesaw model with maximally restricted texture zeros

In the context of Standard Model (SM) extensions, the seesaw mechanism provides the most natural explanation for the smallness of neutrino masses. In this work we consider the most economical type-I seesaw realization in which two right-handed neutrinos are added to the SM field content. For the sake of predictability, we impose the maximum number of texture zeros in the lepton Yukawa and mass matrices. All possible patterns are analyzed in the light of the most recent neutrino oscillation data, and predictions for leptonic CP violation are presented. We conclude that, in the charged-lepton mass basis, eight different texture combinations are compatible with neutrino data at 1 sigma, all of them for an inverted-hierarchical neutrino mass spectrum. Four of these cases predict a CP-violating Dirac phase close to 3 pi/2, which is around the current best-fit value from the global analysis of neutrino oscillation data. If one further reduces the number of free parameters by considering three equal elements in the Dirac neutrino Yukawa coupling matrix, several texture combinations are still compatible with data but only at 3 sigma. For all viable textures, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is computed in the context of thermal leptogenesis, assuming (mildly) hierarchical heavy Majorana neutrino masses M-1,M-2. It is shown that the flavored regime is ruled out, while the unflavored one requires M-1 similar to 10(14) GeV.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio