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

FAMILY COMMUNICATION ON HIV / AIDS AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN A NORTHERN STATE OF NIGERIA

Most Adolescents in Nigeria, like many others in Africa, are potentially at risk for contracting HIV through unprotected sexual intercourse. Yet the issue of how to help youth avoid risky sexual behaviour through family communication / education on HIV/AIDS is still of serious arguments within the society. This study examines the practice of family communication on HIV / AIDS among secondary school students. A descriptive study using 420 secondary school students selected by multi-stage random sampling was done. Self administered semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect relevant data. Only 48 (12.1%) reported family as the first source of information. However, most of the students 315 (79.7%) had family communication on HIV/AIDS with their family members. There is a gender difference in practice of family communication. Significantly higher proportion of the female students had family communication more than their male counterparts. The educational status of the parents significantly determined whether or not a student had family communication on HIV/AIDS. There is considerable level of family communication in the study population which should be encouraged further to cut across all members of the family

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

A NEURO-PREDICTIVE MODEL OF AN INDUSTRIAL WASTEWATER TREATMENT PROCESS USING PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS

This paper presents a way of predicting the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) of the output stream of the activated sludge of a food processing industry. A combination of principal components analysis (PCA) and artificial neural networks (ANN) was used to develop the network model structure that contained eight neurons in the hidden layer. PCA was used to preprocess the training data sets comprising of four input variable that have been transformed into four principal components before being fed into a back propagated neural network. A more satisfactory result was obtained from PCA-ANN model with correlation index 0.998 and performance error (MSE) of 0.007 compared with that of ANN model with correlation index 0.82 and performance error (MSE) of 0.056 for the training process. This result shows that preprocessing data will bring about improvement in prediction

A NEURO-PREDICTIVE MODEL OF AN INDUSTRIAL WASTEWATER TREATMENT PROCESS USING PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS

This paper presents a way of predicting the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) of the output stream of the activated sludge of a food processing industry. A combination of principal components analysis (PCA) and artificial neural networks (ANN) was used to develop the network model structure that contained eight neurons in the hidden layer. PCA was used to preprocess the training data sets comprising of four input variable that have been transformed into four principal components before being fed into a back propagated neural network. A more satisfactory result was obtained from PCA-ANN model with correlation index 0.998 and performance error (MSE) of 0.007 compared with that of ANN model with correlation index 0.82 and performance error (MSE) of 0.056 for the training process. This result shows that preprocessing data will bring about improvement in prediction

Data Analytic Solution for Heterogeneous Transportation Management Network System: A Case Study of Kwara State, Nigeria

When the transportation system of any States in Nigeria is effective, it positively contributes to effective economy growth and infrastructural facilities; saves stress and generate revenue to the authorities. This is the desire of every ministry of Transportation for State in Nigeria although a number of constraints usually make it not attainable. The transportation system presently operated by the Ministry of Transportation, Kwara was studied and found to be suffering, cumbersome, exploitative and fall short in all standards of a good transportation network system. Therefore this paper seeks to present the results of the research carried out to Big Data Analytic Solution (BDAS) for the management of the transport companies’ network system within Kwara State. The research adopts a transportation frame work design solution, MySQL for data migration and Php framework ‘codeigniter’ for productive server for the full development. The phase testing is carried out and presents the improved version for the improvement in routes schedules, company’s services and driver’s registration and user booking. The system will serve as open access to heterogeneous communities in Kwara State, Nigeria and make easy booking for passengers, assist communities in management of transportation systems within kwara state, Nigeria

Fuzzy Bigroup from another Viewpoint

In group theory, given two groups G and H, it is possible to construct a new group from the Cartesian product of G and H, G × H. With this as a motivation, we replicate this concept in fuzzy group algebra. In this paper, we take a slight deviation from the familiar definition of fuzzy bigroup by looking at fuzzy bigroup from the idea of Cartesian product of groups. We define Cartesian fuzzy function on groups and give examples. We also define Cartesian fuzzy bigroup and study some of its basic properties. Keywords: Bigroups, Cartesian fuzzy function, Fuzzy bigroups