Brand Engagement in Self Concept (BESC) among Millennials in the United States

“We are what we have.” This argument was forwarded by Belk (1988) in his exploration of peoples’ use of material objects to form, reflect and reinforce their identities. This concept is one that continues to be explored today. This paper examines Brand Engagement in Self Concept (BESC), consumers’ tendency to include important brands in their self-concept. BESC has potential for furthering our understanding of consumer behavior as it provides even greater psychological insight into why and how consumers relate to brands. This will allow researchers and practitioners alike to better understand and predict consumer behavior in various contexts. This study explores how BESC varies by age and across ethnic groups in a specific generation. It specifically compares BESC levels in millennials versus non-millennials as well as among millennials from different ethnic groups. It also explores BESC among millennials for a very popular product, smartphones Results indicated that millennials displayed higher levels of BESC than non- millennials. It also examined whether the relationships observed for the general measure of BESC would remain the same when examining BESC for a specific product category or brand. It was found that some relationships were consistent but there were also marked differences. In addition, this study compared differences in BESC and BESC for smartphone in millennials across ethnic groups. While findings of study one indicate that minority ethnic groups may display higher levels of BESC than Non-Hispanic Whites, there may be a great deal of similarity in BESC among millennials from these minority groups. Study two suggests that ethnic group differences in BESC may change over time. There were no ethnic group differences in BESC for smartphones

Comparing the Effects of User Generated Video Reviews and Brand Generated Advertisements on Consumer Decisions on YouTube

This empirical study examines the effects of user generated vlogs (UGV) versus brand generated ads (BGA) on consumer decisions on YouTube. UGV refers to any type of review video content about brands or products, created and published by users on YouTube. BGA refers to brand generated advertisements on YouTube. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, this online experimental research involved a 2 (source: UGV versus BGA) X 2 (involvement: high versus low) X 2 (gender: male versus female) between-subjects research design. Results showed that UGV elicited significantly greater effects on consumer brand attitudes and purchase intentions than BGA, when involvement was high. No significant gender differences were observed. In a constantly growing YouTube influencer economy, this study offers important theoretical and managerial implications

‘A Night of Shame’: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Newspaper Narratives of the Mass Molestation Event in Bangalore, India

On December 31, 2016 amidst New Year’s Eve revelry in Bangalore, India, about 700 young women faced a mass molestation. This research analyzed and compared 299 news articles (N=299) between January 1, 2017 and February 1, 2017 from three leading English language newspapers in India through a quantitative content analysis. Results indicated that there were differences in how the regional and national newspapers framed their stories. While national newspapers deployed the episodic frame in their news stories, the local newspaper used both thematic and episodic frames. The episodic frame focuses on individual events, whereas the thematic frame focuses on trends over time. Local newspapers discussed causes and attributions of responsibility more than national newspapers. National newspapers mostly used celebrity and official sources in their coverage, whereas local newspapers covered the testimonies of the victims and eyewitnesses more. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in this paper

COMPARISON OF FOOT MORPHOLOGY AND PREFERRED SHOE FOR IMPROVING RUNNING SHOE FITTING

The purpose of this study was to compare the shoe internal space and foot shapes of different type for increasing sense of shoe fitting. 347 healthy subjects (male=160; female=187) without any pathological conditions of the foot participated in this study. 11 pairs of running shoes have different size (230-280mm) with same material and appearances were prepared and the shapes of shoe last were also measured for these shoes. In order evaluating the sense of shoe fitting, 6 fit indicators were analysed by comparing the shape of shoe last with foot morphology. We could find that people with wider feet tend to wear tighter shoes and narrower feet preferred to wear looser shoes that seems to significantly affect by the experience. And the sense of shoe fitting was significant different from gender and foot type which can be used as important data for recommending shoe size and to make customized shoe

Determining the Influence of Electronic Messages on Consumer Behavior Based on Perceived Source Trust and Credibility

With the growing presence of the internet, it is difficult for consumers to separate valuable information from useless information, and for marketers to determine what information consumers deem valuable. This paper aims to discover which message source - Corporate, Social, or Independent - is most trustworthy in the eyes of consumers. Corporate sources include paid platforms such as the company’s website and social media channels managed by the company, social sources include reviews posted on social media platforms by unpaid users who are not directly associated with the company, and independent sources include reviews from online articles, specialized publications, discussion forums, etc. To test the trustworthiness of these sources we compiled and distributed an online survey that would gather the attitudes and opinions of consumers on each source. Our findings showed that consumers favor independent sources over social sources, but favor both social and independent sources over corporate ones

Using Prime Numbers for Cache Indexing to Eliminate Conflict Misses, HPCA

Using alternative cache indexing/hashing functions is a popular technique to reduce conflict misses by achieving a more uniform cache access distribution across the sets in the cache. Although various alternative hashing functions have been demonstrated to eliminate the worst case conflict behavior, no study has really analyzed the pathological behavior of such hashing functions that often result in performance slowdown. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the pathological behavior of cache hashing functions. Based on the analysis, we propose two new hashing functions: prime modulo and prime displacement that are resistant to pathological behavior and yet are able to eliminate the worst case conflict behavior in the L2 cache. We show that these two schemes can be implemented in fast hardware using a set of narrow add operations, with negligible fragmentation in the L2 cache. We evaluate the schemes on 23 memory intensive applications. For applications that have non-uniform cache accesses, both prime modulo and prime displacement hashing achieve an average speedup of 1.27 compared to traditional hashing, without slowing down any of the 23 benchmarks. We also evaluate using multiple prime displacement hashing functions in conjunction with a skewed associative L2 cache. The skewed associative cache achieves a better average speedup at the cost of some pathological behavior that slows down four applications by up to 7%. 1

Scratchpad memory management in a multitasking environment

This paper presents a dynamic scratchpad memory (SPM) code allocation technique for embedded systems running an operating system with preemptive multitasking. Existing SPM allocation schemes do not support multiple tasks or only a fixed number of processes that are known at compile time. These schemes rely on algorithms that select code depending on the size of the SPM. In contemporary portable devices, however, processes are created and terminated on demand and the SPM is shared among them. We introduce a dynamic scratchpad memory code alloca-tion technique for code that supports dynamically created processes. At runtime, an SPM manager (SPMM) loads code pages of the running applications into the SPM on de-mand. It supports different sharing strategies that deter-mine how the SPM is distributed among the running pro-cesses. We analyze several sharing strategies with regard to several preferable properties of multiprocess SPM allocation schemes. We evaluate the proposed multiprocess SPM allocation techniques and compare them to a fully-cached reference system by running several multiprocess benchmarks. The benchmarks comprise of multiple embedded applications such as H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, and PGP. On average, we achieve a 47 % improvement in throughput and a 32 % re-duction in energy consumption. A comparison with the un-achievable lower bound shows that the best SPM sharing strategy exploits 87 % of the runtime improvements and 89% of the energy savings possible

The Role of Social Identity in Viewer Attitudes and Intentions

The research project aims to identify a relationship between self-identification based on the social identity theory and feelings towards a particular show. Focusing the research on four fictitious shows with similar plot lines, but different casts of the same ethnic group, the research team has created a questionnaire that asked questions relating to the shows and participant social identity. The survey sample consists of 241 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28. The results show that there is a positive predictive relationship between feeling that your social group is represented in a show and attitudes towards that show, as well as intentions to watch the show. Understanding the participant’s viewing attitudes and behaviors relating to their self-identification will provide insight to marketers that will aid in future development of media including television series and film that is more understanding of the new nuances that dictate viewership behavior