Characteristics of brands and place branding on the Internet

This study aims to clarify the concepts of brand and branding in the new Internet environment, as complex processes that can be applied anywhere: to a physical good, a service, a store, an organization, an idea or a place. Assuming that brands have deeper meanings for consumers than the basic characteristics of the product or service being offered, the branding process is also defined in the context of places, in an effort to build a relationship with the customer and make emotional connections. Place branding perspectives are discussed, as it does not involve tourism only. It also involves the economic and socio-political sector as well as the historical perspective of the place

A brief history of brands and the evolution of place branding

The present work synthesizes the main proofs related to the fact that the brands and the process of branding are as old as the human civilization, initially through the appearance and use of the “proto-brands” concept ever since the beginning of the human existence, and then, in different forms and different historical periods, brands show a dynamic of their existence. It is highlighted the aspect according to which brands, in different historical periods, have two invariable characteristics related to information transmission to the interested parties: information related to the quality and information which indicates the origin of the product (that sometimes includes differentiated information in order to help the marketing process, such as assortment, storage, transport, etc.)

A website brand analysis of Romanian companies from automotive industry

The present study proposes an innovative analytical approach on branding and cultural concepts, looking at the correlation between them and the way the culture has an important contribution to the brand strategy of an organization. This pilot study has strictly focused on branding in the online environment and the objective of the research consists in applying the content analysis method on the official brand websites of different organizations, having a corpus of 50 companies in automotive industry, with the subsidiaries activating in Romania. The research instrument (i.e., the analysis coding scheme) evolved having as reference the cultural dimensions defined and presented by Geert Hofstede and adapted to the online environment

Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief: Effect of invalid responding on factor structure analysis and scores of schizotypy

International audienceObjectives: We assessed the effect of invalid responding on factor structure and on scores of schizotypy through the factor analysis of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B) in a sample of 580 Romanian students using 3 validity items and 5 social desirability items.Methods: We examined the factor structure of the SPQ-B, we compared the mean SPQ-B scores between reliable and unreliable responders and between high vs. low social desirability responders, and we re-run the factor analysis restricting the sample to the reliable or low social desirability responders.Results: Factor analysis resulted in a 3-factor solution: Cognitive-perceptual, Interpersonal and Disorganized dimensions. Unreliable responders had lower scores of positive, negative and total schizotypy. Subjects with high social desirability scores had lower scores of disorganized schizotypy. Factor analyses in the samples of "good" responders showed minor differences in reliable responders, whereas, after taking into account the effect of social desirability, 2 items correctly loaded on expected dimensions.Conclusions: Random responding and social desirability could influence scores of schizotypy and factor structure. Simple methods could be used to identify invalid responses. The effect of social desirability could be linked to the phrasing of items

Automatic analysis of corporate sustainability reports and intelligent scoring

As more and more corporations and business entities have been publishing corporate sustainability reports, the current manual process of analyzing the reports is becoming obsolete and tedious. Development of an intelligent software tool to perform the report analysis task would be an ideal solution to this long standing problem. In this paper we argue that, given sufficient quality training using a custom corpus, corporate sustainability reports can be analyzed in mass numbers using a supervised learning based text mining software. We also discuss our methodologies of improving the accuracy of our classifier as well as the feature selector in order to gain better performance and more stability. Additionally, the achieved results of executing the developed software on one hundred reports are discussed in order to prove our claims

Influence of organic modifiers on RP-TLC determination of lipophilicity of some polydentate Schiff bases

The lipophilic character of polydentate Schiff bases was investigated by reversed-phase thin-layer chromatography. In order to determine retention parameter as a measure of the lipophilicity of the tested compounds, three different binary solvent systems, composed of water and organic modifier (methanol, acetonitrile, and tetrahydrofuran), were used. Lipophilicity parameters together with 2D molecular descriptors were subjected to the multivariate statistical analysis. Principal component analysis was employed to reveal the most influential factors governing the lipophilicity of the investigated compounds. Finally, the influence of organic modifier on determination of lipophilicity parameters was discussed