Psychological process of loyalty formation towards professional sport brands : the differences and similarities between domestic and overseas customers

The way consumers perceive professional sport brands and form their loyalty towards the brands has been one of the central interests of researchers and practitioners. Despite growing importance of overseas markets for the brands, those studies have been limited in domestic market context, and the issue has been underresearched in overseas consumer context. This research investigates loyalty formation process towards the brands in both domestic and overseas consumer contexts, particularly focusing on the attitudinal aspect of brand loyalty, and compares the two groups of consumers. It argues that these two types of consumers are likely to be different in the psychological process of forming loyalty towards the brands. A conceptual model which consists of the hypothesised relationships amongst the types of brand associations and brand loyalty is proposed and tested empirically. Data for the empirical test is collected from 537 fans of a professional sport brand (Arsenal FC). Exploratory factor analysis is conducted in order to validate the measurement scale in the two market contexts and the professional sport (football) setting. Confirmatory factor analysis is administered for checking the fit of measurement models and structural equation modelling is used to test the proposed hypotheses empirically. The results show that, at the level of attitudinally loyal fans, domestic consumers and overseas consumers have not only dissimilarity but also similarity in the loyalty formation. The two types of consumers display dissimilarity in terms of the relevance of attributes to their perception of benefits. However, those two types of consumers exhibit similarity in terms of the needs they seek to satisfy in the brand consumption. This research provides useful implications to marketers of the brands by suggesting an insight on consumers with high attitudinal loyalty in the overseas markets. The research also provides limitations of the study and suggestions for future research

Application of hypersonic vehicle flying qualities criteria and computational considerations

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-116).by June Choi.M.S

Comparisons of ELISA and Western blot assays for detection of autophagy flux

We analyzed autophagy/mitophagy flux in vitro (C2C12 myotubes) and in vivo (mouse skeletal muscle) following the treatments of autophagy inducers (starvation, rapamycin) and a mitophagy inducer (carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, CCCP) using two immunodetection methods, ELISA and Western blotting, and compared their working range, accuracy, and reliability. The ELISAs showed a broader working range than that of the LC3 Western blots (Table 1). Table 2 showed that data value distribution was tighter and the average standard error from the ELISA was much smaller than those of the Western blot, directly relating to the accuracy of the assay. Test-retest reliability analysis showed good reliability for three individual ELISAs (interclass correlation, ≥ 0.7), but poor reliability for three individual Western blots (interclass correlation, ≤ 0.4) (Table 3). Keywords: Autophagy, Mitophagy, ELISA, Western blot, Skeletal muscl