In search of fit or authenticity? A product-type consumer decision in celebrity brand extensions

Purpose Celebrity-branded products constitute a brand extension growing phenomenon. Authenticity may explain why some of these offerings are successful despite low perceived fit, a traditional measure for brand extension acceptance. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a framework based on the meaning transfer model that depicts the effects of brand extension authenticity, brand extension fit and idol attachment on the valuation of such offerings. An exploration of both functional and hedonic extensions is provided to control for product-type variables. Design/methodology/approach Scenario-based survey data from a general population (n = 646) was collected and analyzed with ordinary least squares regressions. Findings Brand extension authenticity is a significant antecedent of brand extension success in both product types, and brand extension fit is the most relevant antecedent only in functional extensions. Idol attachment exerts less influence than fit and authenticity in the functional extension. However, its relevance considerably improves in the hedonic extension. Originality/value A better understanding of consumers’ responses to celebrity brand extensions is essential to the branding literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to consider brand extension authenticity as a predictor of celebrity brand extension success and advances our knowledge of consumer behavior in relation to celebrities as brands and their products as brand extensions. The conceptual and empirical relevance of brand extension authenticity is demonstrated, highlighting its predictive power when compared with brand extension fit and idol attachment in a celebrity brand extension model, and a boundary condition related to product typology is uncovered.

Assessing the Information Seeking Behavior of Urban Farmers to Design an Integrated Extension Model

Even though the urbanisation is considered as a development indicator, the tremendous migration from rural areas to urban areas leads to serious environmental, health and economic issues. Due to the space and time constraints, the urban entity used to depend on rural community for their food products. But in the same time, highly priced demand for land and the lesser profit from farming results in withdrawal of rural farmers from farming. And these above mentioned factors contributed to a gap in supply and demand for food. This gap leads to the non-availability of nutritious food and thereby, made difficult for urban dwellers to access it due the high price. And the result was seen as a double burden in the form of malnutrition and obesity among urban dwellers. The concept of Urban Farming can bring back the traditional homestead farming culture and more than that, a nutritionally secured and environmentally sustainable society. As most of the urban dwellers are new to this setup, they need information and assistance for bring it in a successful way. Hence, there is a necessity for understanding their information needs, and the sources currently they are depending. The present study focuses on the information seeking behaviour and its utilisation constraints experienced by the farmers in an urban community. The study was carried out in the period from December 2020 to March 2021 in Ernakulam and Calicut districts which ranks first and third in degree of urbanisation in Kerala respectively. From the findings of the study it is understood that, their information needs varies from the selection of nutritious food crop to marketing of surplus quantity produced. The constraints analysis could give suggestions for improvement and it can narrow down the gap between farmers - extension system. Based on this, an integrated urban farming extension model has been designed for the effective information dissemination to the farmers. This can save time of farmers and efforts of extension agents, and it will motivate them towards potential adoption of more technologies.

Industrial Relations and Institutional Changes in Sweden: a Response to European Integration

<p>Many observers have identified Europeanization as undermining the foundation of national systems of capitalisms. This paper addresses a national level response. The approach taken assesses the positions (for change) by actors within the Swedish Model toward the 'Laval' European Court of Justice ruling (C-341/05). Through the analysis of position documents and semi-structured interviews with representatives from the social partners, this paper identifies key pressures within the Swedish labour market model in response to the Court ruling. The extension model (autonomous collective agreement model) proved to be the preferred option for the Swedish partners. Concurrently, this model results in the least amount of change to Swedish industrial relations. While a substantial degree of support was identified for 'change', specifically the legislated minimum wage option, institutional structures were identified that restricted such positions from reaching official channels of influence. This case provides evidence of institutional continuity and is an example of national industrial relations proving robust against the forces of European integration.</p>

Industrial Relations and Institutional Changes in Sweden: a Response to European Integration

<p>Many observers have identified Europeanization as undermining the foundation of national systems of capitalisms. This paper addresses a national level response. The approach taken assesses the positions (for change) by actors within the Swedish Model toward the 'Laval' European Court of Justice ruling (C-341/05). Through the analysis of position documents and semi-structured interviews with representatives from the social partners, this paper identifies key pressures within the Swedish labour market model in response to the Court ruling. The extension model (autonomous collective agreement model) proved to be the preferred option for the Swedish partners. Concurrently, this model results in the least amount of change to Swedish industrial relations. While a substantial degree of support was identified for 'change', specifically the legislated minimum wage option, institutional structures were identified that restricted such positions from reaching official channels of influence. This case provides evidence of institutional continuity and is an example of national industrial relations proving robust against the forces of European integration.</p>

Variable Weight Matter–Element Extension Model for the Stability Classification of Slope Rock Mass

The slope stability in an open-pit mine is closely related to the production safety and economic benefit of the mine. As a result of the increase in the number and scale of mine slopes, slope instability is frequently encountered in mines. Therefore, it is of scientific and social significance to strengthen the study of the stability of the slope rock mass. To accurately classify the stability of the slope rock mass in an open-pit mine, a new stability evaluation model of the slope rock mass was established based on variable weight and matter–element extension theory. First, based on the main evaluation indexes of geology, the environment, and engineering, the stability evaluation index system of the slope rock mass was constructed using the corresponding classification criteria of the evaluation index. Second, the constant weight of the evaluation index value was calculated using extremum entropy theory, and variable weight theory was used to optimize the constant weight to obtain the variable weight of the evaluation index value. Based on matter–element extension theory, the comprehensive correlation between the upper and lower limit indexes in the classification criteria and each classification was calculated, in addition to the comprehensive correlation between the rock mass indexes and the stability grade of each slope. Finally, the grade variable method was used to calculate the grade variable interval corresponding to the classification criteria of the evaluation index and the grade variable value of each slope rock mass, so as to determine the stability grade of the slope rock. The comparison results showed that the classification results of the proposed model are in line with engineering practice, and more accurate than those of the hierarchical-extension model and the multi-level unascertained measure-set pair analysis model.

Extending OTDR Distance Span by External Front-End Optical Preamplifier

Optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR) is used to characterize fiber optic links by identifying and localizing various refractive and reflective events such as breaks, splices, and connectors, and measuring insertion/return loss and fiber length. Essentially, OTDR inserts a pulsed signal into the fiber, from which a small portion that is commonly referred to as Rayleigh backscatter, is continuously reflected back with appropriate delays of the reflections expressed as the power loss versus distance, by conveniently scaling the time axis. Specifically, for long-distance events visibility and measurement accuracy, the crucial OTDR attribute is dynamic range, which determines how far downstream the fiber can the strongest transmitted optical pulse reach. As many older-generation but still operable OTDR units have insufficient dynamic range to test the far-end of longer fibers, we propose a simple and cost-effective solution to reactivate such an OTDR by inserting a low-noise high-gain optical preamplifier in front of it to lower the noise figure and thereby the noise floor. Accordingly, we developed an appropriate dynamic range and distance span extension model which provided the exemplar prediction values of 30 dB and 75 km, respectively, for the fiber under test at 1550 nm. These values were found to closely match the dynamic range and distance span extensions obtained for the same values of the relevant parameters of interest by the preliminary practical OTDR measurements conducted with the front-end EDFA optical amplifier, relative to the measurements with the OTDR alone. This preliminary verifies that the proposed concept enables a significantly longer distance span than the OTDR alone. We believe that the preliminary results reported here could serve as a hint and a framework for a more comprehensive test strategy in terms of both test diversification and repeating rate, which can be implemented in a network operator environment or professional lab.