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In this article, the purpose is to discuss the Brand Recall Index (BRI) as an easily implementable marketing metric to assess the brand equity for any brand specific to an identified segment.

Two quasi‐experimental timed surveys were conducted to assess the robustness of the Brand Recall Index (BRI).

Findings demonstrate assessment potential of the BRI.

The study demonstrates the viability of BRI as a managerial measure; however, it does not necessarily demonstrate downstream nomological validity. Future research could address the influence of changing mindshare, as uncovered by BRI, on market share for a brand.

Ongoing assessment of BRI will enable brand managers to track a brand's evolving mindshare in identified segments and allow them to take corrective action.

This paper develops an easily implementable index to measure brand value–an intangible yet critical asset for any firm.

The purpose of this study is to examine how corporate communication of their social programs on their websites affects the ratings of those programs by independent rating agencies. Firms expend resources on corporate social programs (CSPs) to promote their corporate social responsibility and sustainability credentials. Stakeholders, however, often respond to such “self-promotion” with skepticism because they believe that there are inconsistencies between corporate claims and actions. This research draws on attribution theory as a framework to examine how the perceived CSP performance of firms by uncontrollable sources are affected when firms disseminate CSP information on firm websites, i.e. a controllable source, where their claims may not be verifiable.

This study uses a two-step, mixed method study for the analysis using data from Fortune 500 companies. A qualitative content analysis process identifies the interfaces of CSP and their communications on firms’ website. The process allows the authors to collect CSP data systematically from firm websites and to identify relevant variables through the patterns that emerge from the analysis. The findings are used in a quantitative analysis to study how the patterns underlying CSP communication on their websites affect the ratings of firms’ CSP by independent rating agencies.

Results show that the location, the manner, the content and the scope of CSP information dissemination on firm websites, as well as perceived commitment to CSP identified on the website are important drivers of perceived CSP performance. A robustness check using an alternative independent rating of CSP also provides results that are supportive of the findings. In addition, the effects are found to differ by sector of operation, firm age and profitability.

This research suggests that communication of CSPs at controllable sources of firm information dissemination can have a significant effect on the evaluation of CSP at uncontrollable sources when such communication facilitates the assessment of other information from a firm to determine the motive underlying a firm’s CSP.

The findings show that firms and managers can influence the perceived ratings, rankings or scores of their CSP by stakeholders when they put the right information at the right place on their corporate websites. One of the findings shows that even moderate levels of CSP commitment demonstrated on firm websites result in positive perceptions of CSP, which has marked practical implications.

The findings show that integrating even a medium level of commitment to CSP increases the positive perceptions of a firm’s CSP. Thus, society benefits from the firm’s action without a substantial impact on the firm’s profits.

This research shows that firm-controlled sources of CSP information dissemination to stakeholders can affect uncontrollable sources of CSP information evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an automatic metadata extraction and retrieval system to extract bibliographical information from digital academic documents in portable document formats (PDFs).

The authors use PDFBox to extract text and font size information, a rule-based method to identify titles, and an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to extract the titles and authors. Finally, the extracted titles and authors (possibly incorrect or incomplete) are sent as query strings to digital libraries (e.g. ACM, IEEE, CiteSeerX, SDOS, and Google Scholar) to retrieve the rest of metadata.

Four experiments are conducted to examine the feasibility of the proposed system. The first experiment compares two different HMM models: multi-state model and one state model (the proposed model). The result shows that one state model can have a comparable performance with multi-state model, but is more suitable to deal with real-world unknown states. The second experiment shows that our proposed model (without the aid of online query) can achieve as good performance as other researcher's model on Cora paper header dataset. In the third experiment the paper examines the performance of our system on a small dataset of 43 real PDF research papers. The result shows that our proposed system (with online query) can perform pretty well on bibliographical data extraction and even outperform the free citation management tool Zotero 3.0. Finally, the paper conducts the fourth experiment with a larger dataset of 103 papers to compare our system with Zotero 4.0. The result shows that our system significantly outperforms Zotero 4.0. The feasibility of the proposed model is thus justified.

For academic implication, the system is unique in two folds: first, the system only uses Cora header set for HMM training, without using other tagged datasets or gazetteers resources, which means the system is light and scalable. Second, the system is workable and can be applied to extracting metadata of real-world PDF files. The extracted bibliographical data can then be imported into citation software such as endnote or refworks to increase researchers’ productivity.

For practical implication, the system can outperform the existing tool, Zotero v4.0. This provides practitioners good chances to develop similar products in real applications; though it might require some knowledge about HMM implementation.

The HMM implementation is not novel. What is innovative is that it actually combines two HMM models. The main model is adapted from Freitag and Mccallum (1999) and the authors add word features of the Nymble HMM (Bikel et al, 1997) to it. The system is workable even without manually tagging the datasets before training the model (the authors just use cora dataset to train and test on real-world PDF papers), as this is significantly different from what other works have done so far. The experimental results have shown sufficient evidence about the feasibility of our proposed method in this aspect.

Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.

This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.

The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union. ¹

Many consumer-focused corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies suggest a positive link between the responsibility demonstrated by a company and consumers’ intention to favor the company in their purchases. Yet an analogous causal effect between corporate social and financial performances is not evident. This chapter conceptualizes how social desirability and cynicism contribute to the discrepancy between consumers’ attitudes and their actual purchase behavior, and analyzes why consumer choices indicated in surveys do not consistently convert into actions.

We develop a conceptual framework based on hybrid choice modeling to estimate the impact of two new variables, Corporate Social Desirability and Corporate Social Cynicism, on CSR research. The model presented synthesizes research findings from the fields of CSR and psychology with a discrete choice methodology that allows inclusion of psychological aspects as latent variables.

The goal of the framework is to bridge the gap between choices stated by consumers in CSR surveys and their actual choices by quantifying and extracting the effects of biases that otherwise threaten the validity of such survey results. As the next step, the practical value of the model must be evaluated through empirical research combining a CSR choice study with social desirability and cynicism measurement.

The framework proposes a novel way of controlling CSR surveys for potential biases created by social desirability and cynicism and enables quantification of this impact, with potential application to other fields where psychological aspects may distort research results. Future empirical evidence based on the framework may also offer new insights into the mechanisms by which the two biases distort findings.

Corporations often benefit from associating their brand(s) with a sports property; in some cases, the property is owned or supported by a not-for-profit organization (NFP) championing a cause. Title sponsorship of such a sport event has received limited research attention but is important to a NFP for raising funds and in-kind contributions to support their cause. The purpose of this paper is to investigate title sponsorship of cause-related sport events.

This research examines the title sponsorship of a cause-related sport event and its effectiveness in relation to the event, the organization, the cause and other sponsors of the NFP. Specifically, this study examines these questions in the context of a specific annual event, Sports Day in Canada organized by ParticipACTION, a national Canadian NFP and whose title sponsor is Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).

Results show that title sponsorship has significant potential value for the sponsor and the cause, perhaps to the detriment of other (lower tier) sponsors of the event and the NFP.

This research has value to sponsors and cause-related sport events alike. In the case of sponsors, it provides insight into the value of title sponsorship vs other categories of sponsorship, for a brand considering sponsorship of cause-related sport property. For cause-related sport events, the research informs about the importance and possible revenue generation opportunity linked to the title sponsor category.

It is not possible for every fan of a sport to watch matches at stadiums because of the capacity and location constraints. Furthermore, although sport fans could not physically attend sporting events during the COVID-19 pandemic, corporations still showed interest in sponsoring such events. To better understand this phenomenon, this study examined the effects of fans' event involvement on event reputation, event commercialization, corporate brand credibility, corporate brand image and purchase intentions of the corporate sponsor brand.

A total of 646 responses were collected from fans of Indian Premier League teams. Confirmatory factor analysis and covariance-based structural equation modelling analyses were conducted on the collected data.

Results showed that fans' involvement in televised sporting events had a positive influence on the events' reputation, which, in turn, had a significant impact on their corporate brand credibility and image. Furthermore, the corporate brand credibility and image had a positive impact on the fans' purchasing decisions.

This study provides valuable implications for marketing managers aiming to enhance their understanding of the impact of event sponsorship on corporate brands. In addition, the findings provide insight into how to support the development of effective sponsorship strategies in the future. The results suggest that sponsoring companies should consider maintaining the credibility and image of their brands to achieve the desired outcomes from sponsoring such sporting events.

The social media have enabled companies to reach out to global markets and provided them with the opportunity to customize their strategies and offerings in an unprecedented way. Given the scant empirical evaluation of social media use in the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) business-to-business (B-to-B) context, this paper aims to offer a comprehensive description of the antecedents and consequences of social media use in international B-to-B SMEs and the way in which this use affects their export performance.

This study uses a sample of 277 British B-to-B SMEs and uses positivist research with a quantitative approach, adopting a survey strategy through questionnaires and structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that the use of social media influences export performance through the quality of international business contacts – understanding customers’ views and preferences, brand awareness and knowledge of the competition in various international markets. This study contributes to the emerging literature on B-to-B SMEs digital marketing by determining the mechanism through which B-to-B SMEs may benefit from using the social media in their efforts to export.

Despite the promising potential of the social media, especially for export-oriented companies, very limited attention has hitherto been paid to the relationship between the use of social media and export performance. This study attempts to fill the gap by investigating the extent to which actual use of social media impacts on the performance of exporting firms.

This contribution aims to evaluate key theoretical bases that were used in previous research, to investigate the use of crowdfunding platforms by small businesses and startups. It presents the findings from a systematic review to better explain the pros and cons of utilizing these disruptive technologies for crowdsourcing and/or crowd-investing purposes.

The researchers adopt the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodical protocol to search, screen, extract and scrutinize seventy-two (72) articles that were indexed in both Scopus and Web of Science. They examine their research questions, describe their methodologies. Afterwards, they synthesize the findings from previous literature, outline implications and discuss about future research avenues.

A thorough review of the relevant literature suggests that there are opportunities as well as challenges for project initiators as well as for crowd-investors, if they are considering equity crowdfunding, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and rewards-based crowdfunding platforms, among others, to raise awareness about their projects and to access finance from crowd-investors.

Further research is required on this timely topic. There are a number of theories relating to technology adoption and/or innovation management, strategic management, accounting and financial reporting, and normative/business ethics, among other research areas, that can be utilized as theoretical bases, to explore this topic.

Crowd-investors are striving in their endeavors to find a trade-off between risks and rewards associated with crowd-financing.

Currently, there are few systematic reviews and conceptual articles focused on the crowdfunding of small businesses and startups. Hence this contribution closes this gap in the academic literature. Moreover, it links the extant theory to practice. It clarifies that the resource-based view theory of the firm, the theory of planned behavior, the diffusion of innovations theory as well as the signaling theory, among other conceptual frameworks, can be used to investigate different facets of crowdsourcing and crowd-investing.

The purpose of this paper is to develop, test, and validate a model in a specialty retail environment to assess the influence of a salesperson’s sales- or customer-orientation and customer characteristics related to buy/no-buy decisions.

Backward stepwise discriminant analysis was used to identify variables that most differentiated buyers from non-buyers. The discriminant model was estimated with survey data provided by a judgment sample of consumers asked to recall details about a recent in-store purchase experience (n=240). One significant discriminant function emerged. The model correctly classified 87.5 percent of buy/no-buy decisions by consumers in a separate validation sample (n=40).

Customers who believe a salesperson is sales oriented (i.e. only interested in closing) are more likely to make a no-buy decision even when retailer-related attributes – such as positive prior experience with the retailer, susceptibility to normative interpersonal influence, and positive attitude toward retailing – suggest otherwise. Surprisingly, neither customer orientation nor susceptibility to interpersonal informational influence relates significantly to making a buy/no-buy decision.

Specialty retailers should avoid a sales-outcome-based orientation. To add value in a competitive marketplace where buyers can avoid salespeople, the focus of a sales interaction should be on identifying customer needs and characteristics.

Adaptations of sales people’s personas and selling efforts – fostered by new managerial training practices – and the need for specialty retailers to adopt behavior-based control systems are suggested. In addition, sales or customer orientation typically is reported by the salesperson. Here, customers’ belief – which is more germane to modeling buy/no-buy decisions – designates the salesperson’s orientation.