What is your corporate brand worth? A guide to brand valuation approaches

Brand league tables are becoming very popular as a reflection of the performance of an organisation. Stakeholders also view the ranking of brands as an important yardstick when forming a brand image. This article reviews the available approaches to brand valuation. The research followed a case study methodology. The case site that was used for this study was The South African Gold Coin Exchange. The main objective of this study was to calculate the value of the corporate brand of one company using different methods. The aim was to show that the value of the brand is highly dependent on the method used. In total twelve senior managers and directors were interviewed. It then calculates the value of the South African Gold Coin Exchange Brand using a number of different models. There is a different result under each approach. It has been established that different models are more appropriate than others depending on the manager's valuation objectives. This research is a single case study and therefore future research should have an increased sample size and be a cross industry study. Managers are often confronted with the problem of deciding which valuation method to use as there are many alternative approaches. We provide guidance for managers who want to perform a brand valuation of their organisation

Predicting the effects of deep brain stimulation using a reduced coupled oscillator model

This is the final version. Available on open access from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this recordData Availability: The data analysed in this manuscript is available from MRC BNDU Data Sharing platform at: https://data.mrc.ox.ac.uk/data-set/tremor-data-measured-essential-tremor-patients-subjected-phase-locked-deep-brain DOI: 10.5287/bodleian:xq24eN2KmDeep brain stimulation (DBS) is known to be an effective treatment for a variety of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor (ET). At present, it involves administering a train of pulses with constant frequency via electrodes implanted into the brain. New ‘closed-loop’ approaches involve delivering stimulation according to the ongoing symptoms or brain activity and have the potential to provide improvements in terms of efficiency, efficacy and reduction of side effects. The success of closed-loop DBS depends on being able to devise a stimulation strategy that minimizes oscillations in neural activity associated with symptoms of motor disorders. A useful stepping stone towards this is to construct a mathematical model, which can describe how the brain oscillations should change when stimulation is applied at a particular state of the system. Our work focuses on the use of coupled oscillators to represent neurons in areas generating pathological oscillations. Using a reduced form of the Kuramoto model, we analyse how a patient should respond to stimulation when neural oscillations have a given phase and amplitude, provided a number of conditions are satisfied. For such patients, we predict that the best stimulation strategy should be phase specific but also that stimulation should have a greater effect if applied when the amplitude of brain oscillations is lower. We compare this surprising prediction with data obtained from ET patients. In light of our predictions, we also propose a new hybrid strategy which effectively combines two of the closed-loop strategies found in the literature, namely phase-locked and adaptive DBS

Revising acute care systems and processes to improve breastfeeding and maternal postnatal health: a pre and post intervention study in one English maternity unit

Background Most women in the UK give birth in a hospital labour ward, following which they are transferred to a postnatal ward and discharged home within 24 to 48 hours of the birth. Despite policy and guideline recommendations to support planned, effective postnatal care, national surveys of women’s views of maternity care have consistently found in-patient postnatal care, including support for breastfeeding, is poorly rated. Methods Using a Continuous Quality Improvement approach, routine antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care systems and processes were revised to support implementation of evidence based postnatal practice. To identify if implementation of a multi-faceted QI intervention impacted on outcomes, data on breastfeeding initiation and duration, maternal health and women’s views of care, were collected in a pre and post intervention longitudinal survey. Primary outcomes included initiation, overall duration and duration of exclusive breastfeeding. Secondary outcomes included maternal morbidity, experiences and satisfaction with care. As most outcomes of interest were measured on a nominal scale, these were compared pre and post intervention using logistic regression. Results Data were obtained on 741/1160 (64%) women at 10 days post-birth and 616 (54%) at 3 months post-birth pre-intervention, and 725/1153 (63%) and 575 (50%) respectively postintervention. Post intervention there were statistically significant differences in the initiation (p = 0.050), duration of any breastfeeding (p = 0.020) and duration of exclusive breastfeeding to 10 days (p = 0.038) and duration of any breastfeeding to three months (p = 0.016). Post intervention, women were less likely to report physical morbidity within the first 10 days of birth, and were more positive about their in-patient care. Conclusions It is possible to improve outcomes of routine in-patient care within current resources through continuous quality improvement

Jury deliberation: An observation study.

In this article, the way that the jury works is considered from a group-analytic perspective. Observational fieldwork of simulated jury deliberations is presented. The data was gathered from a joint funded Home Office and Law Commission project at the Socio- Legal Studies Centre, Oxford in 1995. Inferences are drawn from the observations and the unconscious group processes are considered. The efficacy of the jury process is discussed

What is your corporate brand worth? A guide to brand valuation approaches

Brand league tables are becoming very popular as a reflection of the performance of an organisation. Stakeholders also view the ranking of brands as an important yardstick when forming a brand image. This article reviews the available approaches to brand valuation. The research followed a case study methodology. The case site that was used for this study was The South African Gold Coin Exchange. The main objective of this study was to calculate the value of the corporate brand of one company using different methods. The aim was to show that the value of the brand is highly dependent on the method used. In total twelve senior managers and directors were interviewed. It then calculates the value of the South African Gold Coin Exchange Brand using a number of different models. There is a different result under each approach. It has been established that different models are more appropriate than others depending on the manager's valuation objectives. This research is a single case study and therefore future research should have an increased sample size and be a cross industry study. Managers are often confronted with the problem of deciding which valuation method to use as there are many alternative approaches. We provide guidance for managers who want to perform a brand valuation of their organisation

Improving inpatient postnatal services: midwives views and perspectives of engagement in a quality improvement initiative

Background: despite major policy initiatives in the United Kingdom to enhance women's experiences of maternity care, improving in-patient postnatal care remains a low priority, although it is an aspect of care consistently rated as poor by women. As part of a systems and process approach to improving care at one maternity unit in the South of England, the views and perspectives of midwives responsible for implementing change were sought. Methods: a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) approach was adopted to support a systems and process change to in-patient care and care on transfer home in a large district general hospital with around 6000 births a year. The CQI approach included an initial assessment to identify where revisions to routine systems and processes were required, developing, implementing and evaluating revisions to the content and documentation of care in hospital and on transfer home, and training workshops for midwives and other maternity staff responsible for implementing changes. To assess midwifery views of the quality improvement process and their engagement with this, questionnaires were sent to those who had participated at the outset. Results: questionnaires were received from 68 (46%) of the estimated 149 midwives eligible to complete the questionnaire. All midwives were aware of the revisions introduced, and two-thirds felt these were more appropriate to meet the women's physical and emotional health, information and support needs. Some midwives considered that the introduction of new maternal postnatal records increased their workload, mainly as a consequence of colleagues not completing documentation as required. Conclusions: this was the first UK study to undertake a review of in-patient postnatal services. Involvement of midwives at the outset was essential to the success of the initiative. Midwives play a lead role in the planning and organisation of in-patient postnatal care and it was important to obtain their feedback on whether revisions were pragmatic and achieved anticipated improvements in care quality. Their initial involvement ensured priority areas for change were identified and implemented. Their subsequent feedback highlighted further important areas to address as part of CQI to ensure best quality care continues to be implemented. Our findings could support other maternity service organisations to optimise in-patient postnatal services

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the colored Hubbard model

The Hubbard model is reformulated in terms of different ``colored'' fermion species for the electrons or holes at different lattice sites. Antiferromagnetic ordering or d-wave superconductivity can then be described in terms of translationally invariant expectation values for colored composite scalar fields. A suitable mean field approximation for the two dimensional colored Hubbard model shows indeed phases with antiferromagnetic ordering or d-wave superconductivity at low temperature. At low enough temperature the transition to the antiferromagnetic phase is of first order. The present formulation also allows an easy extension to more complicated microscopic interactions.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Neurobiological signatures of L2 proficiency: Evidence from a bi-directional cross-linguistic study

Available online 12 November 2018Recent evidence has shown that convergence of print and speech processing across a network of primarily left-hemisphere regions of the brain is a predictor of future reading skills in children, and a marker of fluent reading ability in adults. The present study extends these findings into the domain of second-language (L2) literacy, through brain imaging data of English and Hebrew L2 learners. Participants received an fMRI brain scan, while performing a semantic judgement task on spoken and written words and pseudowords in both their L1 and L2, alongside a battery of L1 and L2 behavioural measures. Imaging results show, overall, a similar network of activation for reading across the two languages, alongside significant convergence of print and speech processing across a network of left-hemisphere regions in both L1 and L2 and in both cohorts. Importantly, convergence is greater for L1 in occipito-temporal regions tied to automatic skilled reading processes including the visual word-form area, but greater for L2 in frontal regions of the reading network, tied to more effortful, active processing. The main groupwise brain effects tell a similar story, with greater L2 than L1 activation across frontal, temporal and parietal regions, but greater L1 than L2 activation in parieto-occipital regions tied to automatic mapping processes in skilled reading. These results provide evidence for the shifting of the reading networks towards more automatic processing as reading proficiency rises and the mappings and statistics of the new orthography are learned and incorporated into the reading system.This paper was supported by the ERC Advanced grant awarded to Ram Frost (project 692502), the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 217/14 awarded to Ram Frost), and by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health (RO1 HD 067364 awarded to Ken Pugh and Ram Frost, and PO1 HD 01994 awarded to Jay Rueckl)