What makes a good label? : the effect of wine label design on product evaluation and purchasing behaviour : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Companies spend billions annually on packaging and labelling, yet little is known about how and why specific features of package design influence consumer responses. This thesis identifies, across two projects, what wine label elements or themes should be used, where and when. First, while the use of fantasy themes is increasing across product categories, it is unclear how consumers react to fantasy labels. Across five studies, the results unite seemingly contradicting theories predicting the effects of fantasy labels on product evaluation and purchasing behaviour by uncovering an important boundary condition: product quality signal, in line with the principle of hedonic dominance. The results suggest that for low quality products, fantasy labels backfire (consistent with research on metacognition). For products average in quality, fantasy and non-fantasy labels do not differ in their performance. Yet, in the presence of a high quality signal, fantasy labels impact product evaluation and purchasing behaviour positively. This positive effect is sequentially driven by the evocation of the imaginary and affect, in line with research on mental simulation. Second, it is unclear to what extent elements of wine label design affect sales relative to other marketing mix effects. Specifically, we use wine transactional data for 127 SKUs across two liquor stores in New Zealand, covering 105 weeks. The findings suggest that some specific label elements have strong effects on sales. Specifically, extra text, as a quality cue, has the strongest positive effect. Overall, after price, the combination of image(s) and extra text has the strongest (negative) effect on sales. In line with research on processing fluency, this research also shows whether and when to use simple versus complex elements (typeface, label structure, mode of information). This thesis has important implications for wine companies and retailers

Improving Multiple Object Tracking with Optical Flow and Edge Preprocessing

In this paper, we present a new method for detecting road users in an urban environment which leads to an improvement in multiple object tracking. Our method takes as an input a foreground image and improves the object detection and segmentation. This new image can be used as an input to trackers that use foreground blobs from background subtraction. The first step is to create foreground images for all the frames in an urban video. Then, starting from the original blobs of the foreground image, we merge the blobs that are close to one another and that have similar optical flow. The next step is extracting the edges of the different objects to detect multiple objects that might be very close (and be merged in the same blob) and to adjust the size of the original blobs. At the same time, we use the optical flow to detect occlusion of objects that are moving in opposite directions. Finally, we make a decision on which information we keep in order to construct a new foreground image with blobs that can be used for tracking. The system is validated on four videos of an urban traffic dataset. Our method improves the recall and precision metrics for the object detection task compared to the vanilla background subtraction method and improves the CLEAR MOT metrics in the tracking tasks for most videos

Metastable states of a ferromagnet on random thin graphs

We calculate the mean number of metastable states of an Ising ferromagnet on random thin graphs of fixed connectivity c. We find, as for mean field spin glasses that this mean increases exponentially with the number of sites, and is the same as that calculated for the +/- J spin glass on the same graphs. An annealed calculation of the number of metastable states of energy E is carried out. For small c, an analytic result is obtained. The result is compared with the one obtained for spin glasses in order to discuss the role played by loops on thin graphs and hence the effect of real frustration on the distribution of metastable states.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure