Consumer beliefs and attitudes toward marketing : an emerging market perspective

The burgeoning consumerism in emerging market economies has significant implications for both multinational corporations and local companies. Based on a survey in four cities in China, this study examines the effect of consumer beliefs and attitudes towards marketing on satisfaction. The results suggest that attitudes towards marketing activities and their beliefs about marketing have significant effect on consumer satisfaction, but these effects are not uniform across marketing mix variables. Implications for future research and marketing operations in Emerging Markets are explored

Entry mode and performance of foreign direct investment : the role of strategic orientation

Multinationals have distinctive strategic orientations toward the host country when investing overseas: to explore the local market or to establish efficient manufacturing for export. Analyses of FDI operations in China suggest that local market oriented firms tend to rely on the joint venture mode while export oriented investors mostly choose to be wholly owned operations. Moreover, there are significant differences between local market oriented and export oriented firms across four different performance measures. Results of the study suggest that researchers should consider the difference in FDI\u27s strategic orientation when attempting to identify success factors and recommending performance-enhancing strategies

Sorry seems to be the hardest word : the effect of self-attribution when apologizing for a brand crisis

When apologizing for a product failure, self-attribution by a business inevitably affects consumer attitude and behavior. This study draws from the dissonance-attribution model and investigates the effect of self-attribution in apologies on consumers\u27 brand attitude. Using a 2x2 experiment, the results show that internal attribution generates significant change in brand attitude in a positive direction, while external attribution leads to negative change in brand attitude. Dispositional attribution leads to significantly more positive brand attitude than situational attribution. Internal/dispositional attribution produces significantly more positive effect on consumer attitude than the other three types of attribution. Moreover, perceived risk is found to mediate the relationship between attributions and brand attitude, and such mediating effect is moderated by consumers\u27 corporate associations. Clearly, how a company apologizes for a product crisis makes a big difference in the effectiveness of recovery strategies to restore consumer confidence

Random Modeling and Control of Nonlinear Active Suspension

For a quarter car with nonlinear active suspension in rough road, the problem of random modeling and control is considered. According to the relative motion principle, the influence of rough road can be seen as that force is disturbed by the noise and a random model is constructed. By an appropriate transform, the model is transformed into a lower triangular system, which can be used as backstepping method. Then a controller is designed such that the mean square of the state converges to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero by tuning design parameters. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Therefore, the active suspension system offers better riding comfort and vehicle handing to the passengers

A Data Driven Approach to Simulate Pedestrian Competitiveness Using the Social Force Model

The research of pedestrian evacuation dynamics is of significance to understanding and preventing human stampedes. Since empirical approach of reproducing true emergency evacuations is impossible due to safety issues. Theoretical approach based on numerical simulation has called the attention from researchers. In the simulation of pedestrian evacuation, a critical problem is how to simulate pedestrian competitiveness to reproduce emergency evacuation. Based on the social force model, researchers have tried to simulate pedestrian competitiveness through adjusting some model parameters. However, in most cases handcrafted values are adopted without calibration, thus unrealistic results might be produced. In this study, we applied a differential evolutionary algorithm to determine the optimal parameter specifications of the social force model by adjustment to empirical data. We conducted pedestrian experiments where five participants including patient and impatient individuals proceeded through a narrow corridor. Taking the distance between simulation results and empirical data as objective function, a minimization problem was generated. A differential evolutionary algorithm was adopted to search for the optimal combination of parameters. We found that though at initialization all the parameter values were randomly determined, the difference between patient and impatient pedestrians could be captured by adjustment to empirical data. This highlights the need to better understand and research pedestrian heterogeneity in terms of competitiveness