The Impact of Advertising Medium on Consumer Brand Preference for beverages in Osun State, Nigeria

The study examined the roles of advertisement on consumers’ brand preference of beverages, using Cadbury Nigeria PLC as a case study. The primary aim of this research was to examine the influence of advertising on consumers’ buying behaviour, evaluate the influence of advertising on the competitiveness of beverage brands, examine the influence of advertising on the sales performance of Cadbury Nigeria PLC brands and to determine the types of advertising commonly used by Cadbury Nigeria PLC in attracting customers’ preference to its brands. The adopted methodology was a descriptive design with a simple random sampling technique. A Structured questionnaire was designed in the data collection from the respondents of the study area. The collected data was analysed using simple percentage and frequencies and the results were presented in tables. The Findings of the study indicated that advertising significant influenced consumers’ buying behaviour of beverage drinks and sales performance of Cadbury Nigeria PLC Brands in Osun State. The radio, television, billboards and internet (online) advertisements are the types of advertising media used by Cadbury in attracting customers to its brands. Conclusively, advertisement is a major element in maintaining consumer brand preference. Therefore, companies are encouraged to research continuously into quality improvement with effective advertising media that attracts consumer’s attention and interest to their products. Keywords: Advertisement, Brand preference, Buying behaviour, and Advertising campaign DOI: 10.7176/JMCR/87-01 Publication date:October 31st 202

Association of C-reactive protein with bacterial and respiratory syncytial virus-associated pneumonia among children aged <5 years in the PERCH study

Background. Lack of a gold standard for identifying bacterial and viral etiologies of pneumonia has limited evaluation of C-reactive protein (CRP) for identifying bacterial pneumonia. We evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of CRP for identifying bacterial vs respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) pneumonia in the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) multicenter case-control study. Methods. We measured serum CRP levels in cases with World Health Organization-defined severe or very severe pneumonia and a subset of community controls. We evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of elevated CRP for "confirmed" bacterial pneumonia (positive blood culture or positive lung aspirate or pleural fluid culture or polymerase chain reaction [PCR]) compared to "RSV pneumonia" (nasopharyngeal/oropharyngeal or induced sputum PCR-positive without confirmed/suspected bacterial pneumonia). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed to assess the performance of elevated CRP in distinguishing these cases. Results. Among 601 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-negative tested controls, 3% had CRP ≥40 mg/L. Among 119 HIVnegative cases with confirmed bacterial pneumonia, 77% had CRP ≥40 mg/L compared with 17% of 556 RSV pneumonia cases. The ROC analysis produced an area under the curve of 0.87, indicating very good discrimination; a cut-point of 37.1 mg/L best discriminated confirmed bacterial pneumonia (sensitivity 77%) from RSV pneumonia (specificity 82%). CRP ≥100 mg/L substantially improved specificity over CRP ≥40 mg/L, though at a loss to sensitivity. Conclusions. Elevated CRP was positively associated with confirmed bacterial pneumonia and negatively associated with RSV pneumonia in PERCH. CRP may be useful for distinguishing bacterial from RSV-associated pneumonia, although its role in discriminating against other respiratory viral-associated pneumonia needs further study