Fortune heart healthy oil: when a strong brand strategy hits a cardiac roadblock!

Learning outcomes The case will familiarize students to TEARS model and No TEARS approach for brand endorser selection. It will enable the students to understand the extent of influencer impact on the brand. It will make students to realistically assess the pros and cons of ambassador marketing using celebrities. It will also enable the student to devise brand strategies to mitigate the risk associated with ambassador-based marketing. Case overview/synopsis The case explains the strategic challenge the brand faces in ambassador marketing due to the uncontrollable personal crisis of the celebrity. Brand ambassador is an integral element of the brand persona and is appointed to boost the brand’s unique proposition and sales. The selection of the brand ambassador is a strategic decision with direct implication on the brand equity. A strong celebrity–brand congruence is ideal to establish credibility, but it can backfire if anything negative occurs on either side. This case evaluates the crisis faced by Fortune oil which has been positioned as “the heart healthy oil” when its celebrity ambassador suffers heart attack. In the backdrop of the case, the students can analyse brand strategies with respect to ambassador marketing, TEARS model with No TEARS approach for endorser selection and endorser-related credibility risk management. Complexity academic level MBA BBA PG/Graduation in Marketing/Advertising. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

Dynamics of basic personal beliefs during a pandemic coronavirus

The article examines the question of the impact of the pandemic crisis on the basic beliefs of an individual. The results of a comparative study of the structure of basic beliefs during the period of personal crisis, pandemic and outside the crisis period are presented. Based on the analysis of the results of the study, it is concluded that in a pandemic situation, the severity of the conviction that the world around is beautiful and full of goodness decreases, while the «Image of the Self» remains steadily positive. A person perceives the situation of a pandemic detachedly, as an event not related to his individual life.

Bonding through the mask

The appearance of healthcare professionals and their interaction with patients has always been the scaffolding of the relationship between the caregiver and patient. The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged this with its need for masking and distancing. The duty bound frontline worker in the midst of the personal crisis brought about by this pandemic has undergone hitherto unknown experiences described here.

Mira Kubasińska – Career Development and Evolution of the Artistic Image in the Years 1963–1973

Mira Kubasińska (1944–2005) was one of the most characteristic figures in female pop that appeared in the big beat era on the Polish scene. She was recognised because of her outstanding vocal abilities, natural gift for shaping lyrics, exceptional expression and an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Her artistic creation, completely devoid of stylisation, posing and mannerisms, fully reflected her temperament, philosophy of life and disregard for opportunistic attitudes. The peak of Kubasińska’s stage activity falls within the period of 1966–1973 and encompasses cooperation with bands led by her husband Tadeusz Nalepa – Blackout and Breakout. During that period, she released two solo albums (Mira and Ogień) and climbed to the top. Starting in the mid–1970s, the singer’s career suffered a serious blow, which was a result of Tadeusz Nalepa’s stylistic turn towards blues as well as the end of their marriage and a resulting personal crisis. This artist has not been the subject of scientific scrutiny as of yet, so this text aims to fill this gap. Apart from the biographical thread, the author attempts to analyse the singer’s oeuvre and describe the evolution of her artistic image. The text also presents a broader context of the circumstances on the Polish popular music scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

The COVID-19 Pandemic from the Health Workers’ Perspective: Between Health Emergency and Personal Crisis

Different scholars have emphasised the psychological distress experienced by health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, there are almost no qualitative studies and we know very little about the everyday experience of this group. The present study’s goal was to explore how health workers interpreted the meaning of the pandemic crisis in their life. An online survey was available during the Italian lockdown. Respondents were asked to write a passage about the meaning of living in the time of COVID-19. A total number of 130 questionnaires (M = 42.35; DS = 10.52; women: 56.2%) were collected. The Automated Method for Content Analysis (ACASM) procedure was applied to the collected texts to detect the factorial dimensions underpinning (dis)similarities in the respondents’ narratives. Such factors were interpreted as the markers of latent dimensions of meanings (DS). The two main DS that emerged were characterised by the pertinentisation of two extremely basic issues: what the pandemic represents (health emergency versus personal crisis) and its impact (powerlessness versus discovery of new meanings). On the whole, health workers’ narratives help to highlight the risk of normalising the feelings of fear and impotence experienced when facing the health emergency and the need to recognise that such feelings are strictly intertwined with the limited resources received to “face the battle”; the need to recognize the human vulnerability of the women and men “inside the lab coat” and the human effort to maintain or reconstruct a sense of self and purpose in the face of troubled circumstances.

Introduction: Cripistemologies of Crisis

The increasing recognition of critical disability studies as a generative body of work across disciplines is inseparable from a collective need to make sense of ongoing moments of socio-political crisis, emergency, and exceptionality. Theorizations of crip time emergent from lived experiences of disability are critical to the ongoing work of understanding and surviving a chronically debilitating socio-political context. Our current political moment seems to protract states of crisis to such a degree that the very notions of emergency and crisis shift under the weight of their simultaneous seeming banality and urgent ubiquity. “Cripistemologies of Crisis: Emergent Knowledges for the Present” contends that epistemologies of chronicity, illness, and trauma offer indispensable lenses through which to rethink—and care for—our collective present. The essays within “Cripistemologies of Crisis” reframe our understandings of both social and personal crisis, and to explore how crisis and emergency shape the experiences and knowledges of our bodyminds in time and space. In doing so, the authors collectively offer an epistemological toolkit to theorize and survive everyday states of trauma, madness, and illness as the lived impacts of such quotidian and ongoing violence. “Cripistemologies of Crisis” asks, then, what crip futures can be conjured through a centering of experiential, collective, and speculative ways of knowing with/in/through crisis.

A Morality of Mendacity: The Southern Aristocratic Code of Honor in Tennessee Williams's A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams’s A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof centers Brick Pollitt; he is filled with disgust because he feels that he is a truthful man surrounded by liars and schemers. Each character has a different concept of truth and morality, Brick's being the most rigid in definition, and it is this rigidity that causes Brick’s personal crisis. By exploring Satrean existentialism, the foundations of Brick’s crisis are revealed as rooted in an inability to act in alignment with his preconceived identity. Intersecting this personal crisis is America’s idealized conception of childhood homoeroticism as well as Alfred Kinsey’s study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, both of which inform Brick’s relationship with his late best friend. Brick rejects the social world instead of accepting complication, but is still asked to participate in his family structure. His wife and his father simultaneously uphold and subvert the strict structures of the American South; they find ways to accept complication in their own lives, especially when finding themselves in a socially marginalized position. While Brick’s privilege has protected him from facing the painful yet necessary complexities of being alive, Maggie and Big Daddy accept truth as subjective and make space for human complexity.

The Value of Companion Dogs as a Source of Social Support for Their Owners: Findings From a Pre-pandemic Representative Sample and a Convenience Sample Obtained During the COVID-19 Lockdown in Spain

Dogs are a source of companionship and comfort for their owners, but the degree to which this might translate into real emotional and social support has not been quantified. Emotional and social support are essential to help people to get through personal crises such as bereavement. In this study we characterize the social support owners obtain from their dogs, provide evidence of how widespread this social support is amongst dog-owners, and show how social support from dogs can increase during a crisis (using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example). We collected data from a representative population-based sample of Spanish dog-owners and found that most respondents said that their dogs helped them to get through tough times. They got comfort from physical contact with their dogs, shared activities with them and treated them as confidants in a similar way to friends and family. These are all key aspects of social support, and dogs offer the advantage of being more available than human sources of support. It would be expected that the support that dogs provide would be increased during a time of personal crisis and when we looked at data collected from a convenience sample of Spanish dog-owners during the COVID-19 confinement that is what we found; during the confinement owners engaged in more shared activities with their dogs, hugged them more often and turned to them more as a source of companionship and comfort (p < 0.0001 in all cases). However, although owners did confide more in their dogs (p < 0.0001), the effect was not as great as for other aspects of social support. We suspect that this is because people were able to use telecommunications such as video conferencing to maintain their human confidant relationships. Our findings indicate that dogs can substitute for humans as sources of some kinds of social support when conventional sources are unavailable. Our conclusion is that where a dog is present in a household, it should be regarded as an important resource for social support. This should be considered when designing clinical interventions and when public health decisions are being made.

Koroona-aasta Triinu Merese blogis “Maha äng”

The history of the (we)blog shows that this online genre can be evaluated as an excellent source of data for qualitative research of various problems. Some authors (e.g. Hookway 2008) even consider the blog as a research technique for exploring certain questions which deal with people’s everyday practices. This article presents the results of a case study, which are based on content analysis of a personal blog (diary blog). The study grew out of the premise that the blog owners’ posts and their readers’ comments can shed some light on ground-breaking events and social processes at both the local and global levels, which in turn can influence the bloggers’ behaviour in various ways. The source of the current study was a personal blog titled “Maha äng” (“Down with angst”), the owner of which is poet and writer Triinu Meres a.k.a. väga väga naine (very very woman). The aim was to find out whether and, if yes, then how the corona crisis has changed the blogging behaviour as an integral part of everyday life of one particular blogger. The focus was on posts and comments entered in 2020, often called the year of corona due to the global pandemic. To illuminate possible changes in blogging behaviour, the 2020 posts were analysed in the context of earlier posts archived in 2008–2019. For comparison, the Health Board’s blog was used, which documented the course of the corona crisis chronologically with factual accuracy, as well as dailies in Estonian and English. The results of the study showed that in 2020 the number of posts and the activity of commenters in Triinu Meres’ personal blog did not increase and that the corona crisis did not become the dominant topic in comparison with the blogger’s personal crisis often covered in her blog. The posts revealed some signs that suggest boredom with the corona crisis as a topic of conversation which seemed to be over-exploited by various media channels.