Navigating the emergence of brand meaning in service ecosystems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand’s service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding. Design/methodology/approach – Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyer’s (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence. Findings – Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task. Originality/value – Service research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.Jonathan J. Baker, Julia A. Fehrer, Roderick J. Brodi

Actor Engagement in Networks: Defining the Conceptual Domain

Considerable managerial and academic interest has made engagement a key priority in marketing and service research, spurring a rapidly increasing body of literature on this topic. Academic research initially explored customer engagement (CE) and customer engagement behavior within the firm-customer dyad. Recent developments suggest a need to broaden the conceptual domain of CE not only from the focal subject of customers/consumers to a general actor-to-actor perspective but also from the firm-customer dyad to relationships among multiple actors in service ecosystems. Hence, the purpose of this article is to bring a broadened definition to the conceptual domain of actor engagement (AE) in networks. Our theorizing process adopted a propositional conceptual approach that built on CE research and was guided by the general theoretical perspective of service-dominant logic. The critical contribution of the article lies in its systematic development of the conceptual domain of AE and the potential this development has for guiding knowledge development and cross-fertilization in various research fields, including customer, work, citizen, and business engagement. We provide a definition of AE and five fundamental propositions that embody a broader network perspective of engagement and conclude by discussing an agenda for future research that illustrates its managerial relevance

Plasma 1-deoxysphingolipids are early predictors of incident type 2 diabetes mellitus.

1-Deoxysphingolipids (1-deoxySLs) are atypical sphingolipids, which are formed in a side reaction during sphingolipid de-novo synthesis. Recently, we demonstrated that 1-deoxySLs are biomarkers for the prediction of T2DM in obese, non-diabetic patients. Here we investigated the relevance of 1-deoxySLs as long-term predictive biomarkers for the incidence of T2DM in an asymptomatic population. Here, we analyzed the plasma sphingoid base profile in a nested group of non-diabetic individuals (N = 605) selected from a population-based study including 5 year follow-up data (CoLaus study). 1-DeoxySLs at baseline were significantly elevated in individuals who developed T2DM during the follow-up (p<0.001), together with increased glucose (p<5.11E-14), triglycerides (p<0.001) and HOMA-IR indices (p<0.001). 1-Deoxy-sphinganine (1-deoxySA) and 1-deoxy-sphingosine (1-deoxySO) were predictive for T2DM, even after adjusting for fasting glucose levels in the binary regression analyses. The predictive value of the combined markers 1-deoxySA+glucose were superior to glucose alone in normal-weight subjects (p<0.001) but decreased substantially with increasing BMI. Instead, plasma adiponectin and waist-to-hip ratio appeared to be better risk predictors for obese individuals (BMI>30kg/m2). In conclusion, elevated plasma 1-deoxySL levels are strong and independent risk predictors of future T2DM, especially for non-obese individuals in the general population

How to get great research cited

Academic success traditionally has been assessed by publications in highly ranked journals. Other measures of research quality such as citations are now available, and these measures offer a wider perspective of academic contribution beyond simple article counting. Citations now are an important consideration when evaluating research impact and quality. Google Scholar, Scopus, and other programs are readily available to provide citation counts; and other measures such as Hirsch's h-index have also been developed. In this editorial, we discuss the issue of research citation, focusing on strategies that can be used to ensure that one's research output is read by the intended academic and practitioner audiences. We first examine why articles get cited including a consideration of types of articles and types of citations. We then outline how to set up and present research. This includes a discussion of the research's strong contributions to the field; conceptual and theoretical development; compelling findings; and clear conclusions and implications. Third, we provide guidelines to create visibility and understanding of the article's contribution in the offline research community and beyond. Fourth, we examine the critical role of the online environment in creating visibility for an article. Here, after having given an overview of academic search, we discuss keywords; design and structure; graphics; metadata and university research repositories; and interactive social media content. We conclude by cautioning about unethical practices to increase citations.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/indmarman2021-08-01hj2020Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS