3,740 research outputs found
Turning Trade Marks into Brands: how Advertising Agencies Created Brands in the Global Market Place, 1900-1930
While historians and management students are familiar with the lore of how an internal memo at Procter & Gamble ‘invented’ brand management in 1931 (Fullerton, Low 1994; Dyer et al. 2004), little is known about how advertising agencies conceptualised and practiced branding during the early parts of the twentieth century. This paper presents evidence that by the 1920s advertising agencies drew on shared forms of implicit knowledge about consumer psychology which anticipated post-1950s debates about brand image, brand personality, brand identity, lifestyle brands and the global brand. I argue that large-scale, international advertising agencies discovered the symbolic and emotional capacities of brands in building consumer loyalty and in forming certain consumer identities much earlier than usually acknowledged. American and British agencies developed the field of tacit knowledge about the brand-consumer relationship as a source of competitive advantage in the competition for clients which increasingly sought consumers in overseas markets.brands, marketing, advertising, advertising agencies, business history
The Influence of Interactions and Minor Mergers on the Structure of Galactic Disks: I.Observations and Disk Models
This paper is the first part in our series on the influence of tidal
interactions and minor mergers on the radial and vertical disk structure of
spiral galaxies. We report on the sample selection, our observations, and data
reduction. Surface photometry of the optical and near infrared data of a sample
of 110 highly-inclined/edge-on disk galaxies are presented. This sample
consists of two subsamples of 61 non-interacting galaxies (control sample) and
of 49 interacting galaxies/minor merging candidates. Additionally, 41 of these
galaxies were observed in the near infrared. We show that the distribution of
morphological types of both subsamples is almost indistinguishable, covering
the range between 0 <= T <= 9. An improved, 3-dimensional disk modelling- and
fitting procedure is described in order to analyze and to compare the disk
structure of our sample galaxies by using characteristic parameters. We find
that the vertical brightness profiles of galactic disks respond very sensitive
even to small deviations from the perfect edge-on orientation. Hence,
projection effects of slightly inclined disks may cause substantial changes in
the value of the disk scale height and must therefore be considered in the
subsequent study.Comment: LaTeX, 36 pages, 5 figures, complete series of papers incl. all
figures of higher quality is available at
http://aurora.as.arizona.edu/~schwarz
Properties of tidally-triggered vertical disk perturbations
We present a detailed analysis of the properties of warps and
tidally-triggered perturbations perpendicular to the plane of 47
interacting/merging edge-on spiral galaxies. The derived parameters are
compared with those obtained for a sample of 61 non-interacting edge-on
spirals. The entire optical (R-band) sample used for this study was presented
in two previous papers. We find that the scale height of disks in the
interacting/merging sample is characterized by perturbations on both large
(~disk cut-off radius) and short (~z0) scales, with amplitudes of the order of
280pc and 130pc on average, respectively. The size of these large (short)
-scale instabilities corresponds to 14% (6%) of the mean disk scale height.
This is a factor of 2 (1.5) larger than the value found for non-interacting
galaxies. A hallmark of nearly all tidally distorted disks is a scale height
that increases systematically with radial distance. The frequent occurrence and
the significantly larger size of these gradients indicate that disk asymmetries
on large scales are a common and persistent phenomenon, while local
disturbances and bending instabilities decline on shorter timescales. Nearly
all (93%) of the interacting/merging and 45% of the non-interacting galaxies
studied are noticeably warped. Warps of interacting/merging galaxies are ~2.5
times larger on average than those observed in the non-interacting sample, with
sizes of the order of 340pc and 140pc, respectively. This indicates that tidal
distortions do considerably contribute to the formation and size of warps.
However, they cannot entirely explain the frequent occurrence of warped disks.Comment: LaTeX, 35 pages, 6 figures, all figures and appendix of higher
quality available at http://aurora.as.arizona.edu/~schwarz
An empirical study of the tails of mutual fund size
The mutual fund industry manages about a quarter of the assets in the U.S.
stock market and thus plays an important role in the U.S. economy. The question
of how much control is concentrated in the hands of the largest players is best
quantitatively discussed in terms of the tail behavior of the mutual fund size
distribution. We study the distribution empirically and show that the tail is
much better described by a log-normal than a power law, indicating less
concentration than, for example, personal income. The results are highly
statistically significant and are consistent across fifteen years. This
contradicts a recent theory concerning the origin of the power law tails of the
trading volume distribution. Based on the analysis in a companion paper, the
log-normality is to be expected, and indicates that the distribution of mutual
funds remains perpetually out of equilibrium.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Increased pain sensitivity in low blood pressure.
Abstract. There is broad evidence for a functional interaction between the cardiovascular and pain regulatory systems. One result of this interaction is the reduced sensitivity to acute pain in individuals with elevated blood pressure, which has been established in numerous studies. In contrast to this, possible alterations in pain perception related to the lower range of blood pressure have not yet been investi-gated. In the present study pain sensitivity was assessed in 30 hypotensive women (mean blood pressure 95/56 mmHg) and 30 normo-tensive control persons (mean blood pressure 119/77 mmHg) based on a cold pressor test. Possible effects on pain perception of hypo-tension-related impairment of subjective state were controlled for by including a mood-scale. The hypotensive as compared to the normotensive group displayed lower pain threshold and pain tolerance levels, as well as increased sensory and affective experiences of pain. Moreover, a slight negative correlation was found, both in hypotensive and control persons, between pain sensitivity and the degree of blood pressure increase during the execution of the cold pressor test. In accordance with the previous findings on hypertension-related hypoalgesia, the present results suggest an inverse relationship between blood pressure and pain sensitivity across the total blood pressure spectrum. Different degrees of pain attenuation through afferent input from the arterial baroreceptor system are discussed as a physio-logical mechanism mediating this relationship
Zero-Range Processes with Multiple Condensates: Statics and Dynamics
The steady-state distributions and dynamical behaviour of Zero Range
Processes with hopping rates which are non-monotonic functions of the site
occupation are studied. We consider two classes of non-monotonic hopping rates.
The first results in a condensed phase containing a large (but subextensive)
number of mesocondensates each containing a subextensive number of particles.
The second results in a condensed phase containing a finite number of extensive
condensates. We study the scaling behaviour of the peak in the distribution
function corresponding to the condensates in both cases. In studying the
dynamics of the condensate we identify two timescales: one for creation, the
other for evaporation of condensates at a given site. The scaling behaviour of
these timescales is studied within the Arrhenius law approach and by numerical
simulations.Comment: 25 pages, 18 figure
The cause of universality in growth fluctuations
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms,
money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the
scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar
growth fluctuations. The fluctuations display characteristic features,
including double exponential scaling in the body of the distribution and power
law scaling of the standard deviation as a function of size. To explain this we
propose a remarkably simple additive replication model: At each step each
individual is replaced by a new number of individuals drawn from the same
replication distribution. If the replication distribution is sufficiently heavy
tailed then the growth fluctuations are Levy distributed. We analyze the data
from bird populations, firms, and mutual funds and show that our predictions
match the data well, in several respects: Our theory results in a much better
collapse of the individual distributions onto a single curve and also correctly
predicts the scaling of the standard deviation with size. To illustrate how
this can emerge from a collective microscopic dynamics we propose a model based
on stochastic influence dynamics over a scale-free contact network and show
that it produces results similar to those observed. We also extend the model to
deal with correlations between individual elements. Our main conclusion is that
the universality of growth fluctuations is driven by the additivity of growth
processes and the action of the generalized central limit theorem.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, Supporting information provided with the source
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