Exploring the impact of advertising on brand equity and shareholder value

textThe primary objective of this research was to test whether advertising can contribute directly to brand equity and indirectly to shareholder value and, if it can, determine how much value advertising can deliver to brands and firms. If advertising can play a key role in developing and maintaining brand equity and shareholder value, it should be considered an investment rather than an expense. Mainstream advertising effectiveness research has traditionally focused on the relationship between advertising and market performance measures such as sales volume and market share. Even though this approach has produced interesting findings on how advertising works or should work, its contributions to our knowledge about the role of advertising in a competitive, complicated, and ever-changing market environment has been limited. The present research employed a conceptual framework by Srivastava and his colleagues (1998) in order to address posited relationships between advertising, R&D, brand equity, and shareholder value. Using secondary data from various industry and academic sources during a ten-year time span, simple and multiple regression analyses were performed in conjunction with path analyses to evaluate the posited relationships. The findings of the research showed that advertising can not only work to improve market performance measures but also to develop and maintain brands. R&D was also found to positively affect brand equity by presumably enhancing a firm’s intellectual market-based assets. With regard to the relative effectiveness of advertising and R&D, expenditures on R&D were more effective than expenditures on advertising in contributing to brand equity when measuring absolute effects of expenditures. When measuring changes in brand equity, however, changes in advertising were more effective than changes in R&D. Thus, R&D can be more important than advertising in contributing to the total value of brand equity, but advertising can be more effective than R&D in contributing to the marginal value of brand equity.Advertisin

Training-free Style Transfer Emerges from h-space in Diffusion models

Diffusion models (DMs) synthesize high-quality images in various domains. However, controlling their generative process is still hazy because the intermediate variables in the process are not rigorously studied. Recently, StyleCLIP-like editing of DMs is found in the bottleneck of the U-Net, named $h$-space. In this paper, we discover that DMs inherently have disentangled representations for content and style of the resulting images: $h$-space contains the content and the skip connections convey the style. Furthermore, we introduce a principled way to inject content of one image to another considering progressive nature of the generative process. Briefly, given the original generative process, 1) the feature of the source content should be gradually blended, 2) the blended feature should be normalized to preserve the distribution, 3) the change of skip connections due to content injection should be calibrated. Then, the resulting image has the source content with the style of the original image just like image-to-image translation. Interestingly, injecting contents to styles of unseen domains produces harmonization-like style transfer. To the best of our knowledge, our method introduces the first training-free feed-forward style transfer only with an unconditional pretrained frozen generative network. The code is available at https://curryjung.github.io/DiffStyle/

Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space

Diffusion models achieve outstanding generative performance in various domains. Despite their great success, they lack semantic latent space which is essential for controlling the generative process. To address the problem, we propose asymmetric reverse process (Asyrp) which discovers the semantic latent space in frozen pretrained diffusion models. Our semantic latent space, named h-space, has nice properties for accommodating semantic image manipulation: homogeneity, linearity, robustness, and consistency across timesteps. In addition, we introduce a principled design of the generative process for versatile editing and quality boost ing by quantifiable measures: editing strength of an interval and quality deficiency at a timestep. Our method is applicable to various architectures (DDPM++, iD- DPM, and ADM) and datasets (CelebA-HQ, AFHQ-dog, LSUN-church, LSUN- bedroom, and METFACES). Project page: https://kwonminki.github.io/Asyrp/Comment: ICLR2023 (Notable - Top 25%

Social Exclusion Online: A Literature Review and suggestions for Future Research

Because the belonging need is fundamental, an exclusion experience thwarts this need and causes cognitive, behavioral, and affective consequences for human functioning. This paper aims to integrate the enumerated effects of social exclusion in a real-world setting. Also, as the boundary between the real world and cyberspace is blurred, it became crucial to understand the dynamics of social relationships in an online environment. Thus, this paper also intends to review the influences of social exclusion in the online environment. Based on a review of previous findings, this study provides several suggestions for future research. There are interesting research opportunities to investigate how ostracized people react to being excluded, especially in cyberspace

Market Segmentation Based on Attributes for the Purchase of Fresh Ginseng

This study aims to subdivide consumers by attributes determined mainly by consumers of fresh ginseng. It is to compare and analyze the characteristics by cluster, and to deduce the implications on distribution and marketing. For this study, a survey was conducted targeting 250 consumers of fresh ginseng. The factors were deduced through performing the exploratory factor analysis on the results of the survey, and the consumers of fresh ginseng were classified through cluster analysis. As a result of the study, the attributes considered for the purchase of fresh ginseng were condensed to the three factors: physical characteristic factor, safety factor, and cultivation indication information factor. With these as the standard, the consumers of fresh ginseng were subdivided into the three clusters: safety-oriented consumption type, label-centered consumption type, and high involvement consumption type. It was found that there were differences in demographic characteristics and attributes considered for purchase of fresh ginseng by cluster analysis. This study suggests the implications for revitalization of the fresh ginseng industry by subdividing consumers of fresh ginseng and suggesting the characteristics by cluster.This research was financially supported by the Rural Development Administration (RDA) of Korea (Grant No.PJ008729).OAIID:oai:osos.snu.ac.kr:snu2012-01/102/0000011251/8SEQ:8PERF_CD:SNU2012-01EVAL_ITEM_CD:102USER_ID:0000011251ADJUST_YN:NEMP_ID:A078501DEPT_CD:520CITE_RATE:0FILENAME:첨부된 내역이 없습니다.DEPT_NM:농경제사회학부EMAIL:[email protected]_YN:NCONFIRM:

A Case of Painful Hashimoto Thyroiditis that Mimicked Subacute Thyroiditis

Hashimoto thyroiditis (HT) is an autoimmune thyroid disorder that usually presents as a diffuse, nontender goiter, whereas subacute thyroiditis (SAT) is an uncommon disease that is characterized by tender thyroid enlargement, transient thyrotoxicosis, and an elevated erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR). Very rarely, patients with HT can present with painful, tender goiter or fever, a mimic of SAT. We report a case of painful HT in a 68-year-old woman who presented with pain and tenderness in a chronic goiter. Her ESR was definitely elevated and her thyroid laboratory tests suggested subclinical hypothyroidism of autoimmune origin. 99mTc pertechnetate uptake was markedly decreased. Fine needle aspiration biopsy revealed reactive and polymorphous lymphoid cells and occasional epithelial cells with Hürthle cell changes. Her clinical symptoms showed a dramatic response to glucocorticoid treatment. She became hypothyroid finally and is now on levothyroxine therapy

Tuning orbital-selective phase transitions in a two-dimensional Hund's correlated system

Hund's rule coupling ($\textit{J}$) has attracted much attention recently for its role in the description of the novel quantum phases of multi orbital materials. Depending on the orbital occupancy, $\textit{J}$ can lead to various intriguing phases. However, experimental confirmation of the orbital occupancy dependency has been difficult as controlling the orbital degrees of freedom normally accompanies chemical inhomogeneities. Here, we demonstrate a method to investigate the role of orbital occupancy in $\textit{J}$ related phenomena without inducing inhomogeneities. By growing SrRuO$_3$ monolayers on various substrates with symmetry-preserving interlayers, we gradually tune the crystal field splitting and thus the orbital degeneracy of the Ru \textit{t_2_g$}$ orbitals. It effectively varies the orbital occupancies of two-dimensional (2D) ruthenates. Via in-situ angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we observe a progressive metal-insulator transition (MIT). It is found that the MIT occurs with orbital differentiation: concurrent opening of a band insulating gap in the $\textit{d$_x_y} band and a Mott gap in the \textit{d_x$$_z$$_/$$_y$$_z} bands. Our study provides an effective experimental method for investigation of orbital-selective phenomena in multi-orbital materials