Journal articles on the topic 'Manufacturers Trust Company'

Bio-Caps India manufactures gelatin capsules for pharmaceutical manufacturers in India. The capsules are made in part from animal products, which represents an area of cultural sensitivity and requires the trust of end users and intermediaries who recommend specific drugs. Currently, Nepalese manufacturers deal with a single supplier and there is an opportunity for Bio-Caps to open a branch office in Kathmandu to work with local producers to provide better service. However, Nepal remains a poor country with very limited physical or business infrastructure, and it is far from certain that projected market demand can be met in circumstances of such uncertainty. The case focuses on the specific form and business model selected by the company and considers whether these are suitable for the environment to be explored.

This article examines the marketing practices of the Soviet state trust for cosmetics, TeZhe, in the 1930s. Drawing on company records, industry reports, and popular press, we show that TeZhe used an array of marketing tactics, which were similar to those of the Western manufacturers. However, TeZhe's marketing was aligned with the state's economic and sociocultural initiatives and shaped by the ideological dictates of the Soviet system.

Firms often have to integrate their daily business activities with supply chain partners, to remain competitive in today’s ever changing business environments. Information technology (IT) such as e-procurement has enabled firms to take advantage of the many benefits of integrating these business activities electronically. A review of the literature indicates that there is an apparent lack of research into the effects of trust and dependency on e-procurement adoption decisions, which is the key focus of this study. Through the use of survey questionnaire distributed to 834 manufacturers across different industries in Malaysia, this research seeks to investigate the impact of inter-organization trust and dependency on e-procurement adoption decisions. Findings revealed that dependency, interaction between trust and dependency, and size of company have a strong impact on the adoption decisions while trust has only a modest effect.

Abstract The paper describes operational efficiency research of city buses from two manufacturers during the 6 years of operation under real conditions. The presented operational efficiency assessment model includes unplanned incidental repairs costs, downtime costs, as well as the likelihood of losing customer-passenger’s trust. The results of the efficiency calculations were used to estimate the expected costs of buses’ incapacity risk. It has been demonstrated that the operational efficiency and incapacity risk costs can be a criterion for the optimal period of operation, as well as the criterion of comparison of bus makes in a transport company.

Purpose Food industry players obtain the advantages of profits growth within the halal industry whereby the market is dynamic to generate profit. Hence, this study aims to analyse the perception of food manufacturers towards the adoption of the halal food supply chain (HFSC). Design/methodology/approach For this study, 103 halal food manufacturers in Malaysia were selected as respondents. Perceptions of respondents towards HFSC were recorded using a five-point questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed by authors and adapted from a previous study. The questionnaire was circulated by two experts with proficiency in this filed. Findings By conducting exploratory factor analysis, the study found the perception of food manufacturers, which is expected business benefits play an important role in the adoption of HFSC. Halal integrity becomes the second factor to lead the company to its adoption. Organizational readiness is the third factor that drives the company to adopt HFSC. Research limitations/implications Majority of the sample was responded by Bumiputera companies. The study suggests focussing the study for non-Bumiputera companies to examine their influence towards HFSC. Furthermore, future studies should explore different sectors of halal, such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, travel and tourism, logistics, finance and e-commerce. Moreover, ensuring the status of halal should be more emphasized in food chains; thus, the source of risk in HFSC should be explored to secure the integrity of halal. Practical implications The paper includes implications for the halal food industry, whereby the adoption of HFSC will contribute to the business benefits to create a more competitive advantage to the industry. Moreover, the implications of halal practice can create consumers’ trust on the halal product. Originality/value This paper fulfils an analysed need to study specifically on upstream parties by adopting HFSC.

In the building sector, value for thecustomer, is often regarded as being valuefor money and this, in turn, is achieved bymeans of competitive tendering. However,there are companies that also focus oninnovation as a competitive parameter intheir contribution; hereafter referred to asinnovative companies. Five managingdirectors from innovative companies inSweden were interviewed about howinnovation is dealt with in their respectivecompanies. As well as the importance ofinformation, this study points to twoadditional important factors for innovation,namely cooperation with a carefullychosen partner and the transference ofvalues to the employees. Those innovativecompanies made careful choices and usemeans of information, cooperation, valueand vision to create innovation in order tobuild trust for the company and for itsproducts and services.

Purpose – This paper aims to address the question of how value can be created through social responsibility programs or other means, so that sustainability is achieved through increasing stakeholders' participation in the process of design and selection of such programs, so that transparency is maximised and trust can be built with the lasting benefits of co-creation of value. Design/methodology/approach – This paper studies the relationship between sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and value co-creation based on qualitative research data gathered from two embedded case studies. The first case study in a large mining company operating in New Zealand and the second case study is based on the New Zealand Merino Company. Findings – Findings of this research suggest that sustainability is built with the participation of many interconnected entities, that is, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, or more generally stakeholders whose actions are fostered by social responsibility that fuels the pride, trust, and consistency of the members of the value chain. Value in all forms – functional value, hedonic value, symbolic value and cost value – is a recurrent theme in this research data; however it is value co-creation, working together, living up to the values that their products and services promise that ultimately supports sustainability. Originality/value – This paper shows how the scope of sustainability has broadened from environmental matters to include other topics such as good corporate citizenship, business relationships and the value that is created and shared, not only with shareholders, but also within a wider community of stakeholders.

Although the United States has been one of the leading actors in international trade, limited evidence exists as to individual U.S. company relationships with overseas customers. On the basis of a sample of 201 U.S. exporting manufacturers, the authors draw a comparison between harmonious and problematic foreign business relationships. The findings reveal that, as opposed to problematic cases, firms with harmonious relationships are more experienced, employ more people, and exhibit more active behavior toward conducting their foreign business. Such firms sell to a greater number of export markets, deal with more foreign customers, and obtain more orders. The study also shows that harmonious relationships with overseas customers are distinguished by greater dependence, trust, understanding, commitment, communication, and cooperation but less distance, uncertainty, and conflict between the parties. The article provides export management with a set of guidelines for establishing, developing, and sustaining successful export business relationships.

The Internet of Things provides manufacturing with rich data for increased automation. Beyond company-internal data exploitation, the sharing of product and manufacturing process data along and across supply chains enables more efficient production flows and product lifecycle management. Even more, data-based automation facilitates short-lived ad hoc collaborations, realizing highly dynamic business relationships for sustainable exploitation of production resources and capacities. However, the sharing and use of business data across manufacturers and with end customers add requirements on data accountability, verifiability, and reliability and needs to consider security and privacy demands. While research has already identified blockchain technology as a key technology to address these challenges, current solutions mainly evolve around logistics or focus on established business relationships instead of automated but highly dynamic collaborations that cannot draw upon long-term trust relationships. We identify three open research areas on the road to such a truly accountable and dependable manufacturing enabled by blockchain technology: blockchain-inherent challenges, scenario-driven challenges, and socio-economic challenges. Especially tackling the scenario-driven challenges, we discuss requirements and options for realizing a blockchain-based trustworthy information store and outline its use for automation to achieve a reliable sharing of product information, efficient and dependable collaboration, and dynamic distributed markets without requiring established long-term trust.

The case study of the Mayflower Vehicle Systems PLC supply chain improvement programme offers a window onto a change programme implemented by one supply chain cluster of the UK automotive industry. The discussion details the transformational nature of change agent empowerment, stakeholder engagement, team-working and the dynamics of intra-firm and customer-supplier collaboration between a first tier company and its sub-suppliers. It shows that improvement programmes have a crucial function in helping customer and suppliers to closer collaboration through enabling them to work towards common objectives, to understand each other's positions, and to build on a platform of mutual trust as they strive to improve their individual and collective competitiveness and establish mechanisms to ensure that improvements are sustainable. The study has further value in illuminating the adaptation of a lean production model akin to the Toyota Production System to a specific case supported by the Accelerate Initiative and facilitated by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders' Industry Forum.

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee (CompAC). Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice.

Indonesia is a country that has enormous market potential in terms of the halal food industry. The government has been attracting foreign food manufacturers to venture into the country's market; this includes snacks from Taiwan, one of them being Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks. The public has been highly critical of Shihlin's food products of late due to doubts about its halal status and compliance with halal standards in manufacturing and supply chain activities. The company responded to the public's concern by obtaining the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) halal certification, increasing prices and affecting consumers' willingness to pay. In the form of a case study, this research aims to analyse the factors that influence Muslim consumers' willingness to pay for Taiwanese snacks in Indonesia, specifically Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks. A total of 326 Indonesian Muslims took part in our survey, which data was analysed using SmartPLS. The study results revealed that animal slaughter, halal logos, price consciousness, food quality, and religious commitment positively influence Muslim consumers' willingness to pay for the snacks. The findings can benefit halal food companies in formulating strategies to guarantee consistent compliance of the halal standards in the manufacturing processes. Besides, we urge halal food regulators to provide better clarity in developing the halal and tayyib food criteria to earn better trust and confidence from Muslim consumers.

SummaryAs a result of the wide recognition of the importance of trust as an element related to the cooperation in a variable and hardly predictable environment, the trust was appreciated by management sciences. Thanks to the trust, the organisation can react quickly to changes in a complex and turbulent environment, in which it is necessary to develop new - adequate to the needs - products. In the context of the above, the research was commenced, whose execution was the condition of an attempt to answer the question: is the number of the products implemented by the manufacturer a derivative of trust built between him/her and his/her recipients? In the context of such a question, the main objective of the paper is an attempt to illustrate trust - created by the manufacturer - as an attribute promoting his/her implementation flexibility. The achievement of such an objective is possible thanks to a detailed case analysis of the selected implementation process, which confirms that good relationships between partners - as a result of the increase in production series - may imply a decrease in its unit costs, which leads to significant profits in the long term.

In The Larkin's Technologies of Trust, Zeynep Çelik Alexander uses the card ledger invented by Darwin D. Martin, corporate secretary for the Larkin Company, as a starting point for a new history of a well-known modernist building: the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Founded in 1875 as a soap manufacturer, the Larkin Company had grown dramatically by the beginning of the twentieth century, in large part because of innovative marketing strategies made possible by ingenious information-processing techniques. But it was also thanks to Wright's designs for office equipment—informed by principles of modularity and interchangeability—that armies of “human computers” were able to maintain this information regime. Çelik Alexander argues that the bureaucracy made possible by the Larkin Administration Building's architecture has been a blind spot in historiography; she aims to offer an architecturally oriented account of the history of data as epistemic unit, contending that the Larkin's protodatabase was, first and foremost, a moral technology predicated on managing networks of trust.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to debates about the relationship between trust and control in the governance of inter-organisational relationships. In particular, the authors focus on the question of how the relationship between trust and control shifts over time. Design/methodology/approach An in-depth case study was conducted in a company operating in the aerospace industry. The authors aim to understand this company’s practices and, at the same time, to use the case study to deepen the knowledge of the complex trust/control nexus. The authors follow the changes in the relationship between trust and control as the company restructured its supply chain, and discuss issues which it had to address in the later phases of the supply chain restructuring. Findings The paper illustrates the duality of the trust/control nexus. The authors show how the studied company coped with the complex relationships with its suppliers as collaboration increased. The authors identify particular control mechanisms that the company developed to manage such complexity, such as a supplier strategy and a relationship profile tool. Research limitations/implications The paper studies supply chain restructuring and the changing relationship of trust and control over time only from the perspective of the assembler/manufacturer which “owns”/manages the supply chain. Originality/value The authors observe a move from inter-personal trust to inter-organisational trust. Furthermore, the authors illustrate how managers can intervene to maintain and stabilise trust and ensure that trust and control do not degrade or escalate beyond desirable levels.

The intensification of globalized economic competition is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of companies to determine their true position among their competitors. Food companies are of paramount importance because of their role and weight in the national economy. In Hungary, the food industry plays an important social and economic role and is a world leader in terms of employment and value added. Currently, there are nearly 1100 active food companies in Hungary, so it is worth examining the peculiarities of the role of trust between companies.
 There are often contradictory statements in the literature about the effects of Industry 4.0 technologies and the trust placed in IT tools. Therefore, it is a relevant research question to examine whether the characteristics of the role of trust - e.g. staff, suppliers, IT tools and technologies, etc. as confidence levels can have a direct positive impact on the efficiency, profits, liquidity, etc. of the companies in question. development.
 During the research, I analyzed the level of trust between the food trading companies, in which I discuss the trust within the industry within the company. My aim is to further enrich my previous research knowledge in this field.

The analysis of secondary marketing information shows that the current situation in Ukraine is characterized by dissatisfaction with the needs of the moral and ethical nature of the population, which is one of the factors of the economic crisis (the lack of trust in the relations between consumers and manufacturers and sellers and transparency in the conduct of business processes caused an imbalance of economic balance). Therefore, in the process of strategic planning at enterprises, it is necessary to be guided by the principles of socially responsible business. At the same time, the implementation by domestic enterprises of socially responsible business measures is a necessary component of increasing their competitiveness. The consumer, as a unit of society, satisfies his interest in the growth of the general standard of living. The company, in turn, receives not only a society-favorable opinion for its own functioning but also an increase in the recognition and loyalty of customers and its own employees, which positively affects its financial performance. The work based on the analysis of statistical information analyzes the level of satisfaction of the needs of the population of Ukraine in accordance with the classification of the needs of A. Maslow and the theory of spiral dynamics. It was established that companies, based on the basic provisions of the concept of value marketing, are important to realize their role in the development of society and in the purpose of responsibility, to develop and implement measures for the development of society and its transition to the next stage of meeting the needs of people, implementing them in all areas of their activities. This need is also reinforced by the interest of the younger generation in social problems: his concern about the environmental state of the planet and the degree of environmental pollution, food safety, the desire for inclusiveness, openness, and transparency of society and the economy in particular, etc. Especially clearly evidence of the theory about the need for companies to conduct socially responsible business can be seen in a pandemic because together with the difficulty of meeting the basic needs of people, their moral and ethical needs are obvious and dissatisfied. The paper contains recommended measures of social responsibility of companies according to the pyramid of A. Maslow and the theory of spiral dynamics, which allow them to realize universal human values and needs at higher levels. The measures of social responsibility of business submitted by the authors are further grouped into four groups of social needs, such as ecology, development, security, and assistance.

Company value or Firm value is a certain condition that has been achieved by the company as an illustration of public trust and shareholders towards the company after going through an activity process for several years, since the company was first established until now. This study aims to determine the effect that occurs between Leverage, Asymmetric Information, and Corporate Governance on the Firm Value through Cash Holdings as a mediating variable. The data used in this study are published financial report from 33 manufacturing companies in the Consumer Goods Industry Sector listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2011 - 2017. The conclusion of this study is that cash holdings are only able to mediate the influence of corporate governance with a proxy proportion of the board independence on firm value. Directly cash holding and corporate governance with a proxy proportion of the number of independent commissionersalso influence the firm value while leverage, asymmetric information and corporate governance with a proxy percentage of the number of share ownership by managerial do not directly affect the firm value of the company. So as to increase the value of the company, companies should determine the proportion of the right amount of board independence so it can create good corporate governance that can increase value of the company.

Effective inventory management strategies and their efficient implementation are recognized as important elements in a manufacturer’s business model. The targets are reduction of the level and value of inventory maintained, high speed in transforming them to orders delivered to customers and flexibility in dealing with demand changes. This paper proposes a business model for inventory management in a Hong Kong plastic products manufacturing company with production facilities located in the mainland. It shows how E-business technology applications have opened up the horizon for realization of such a business model. A supply chain strategy based on mutual trust and inventory information visibility is essential in the implementation of such a business model. The model has been found to be valid and feasible. The benefits attainable to parties in the supply chain are evaluated. It is proposed that the model can also be applied successfully for similar benefits in other companies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how service quality, relationship value, relationship quality and customer loyalty play a vital role in the Egyptian business to business market-and to test it empirically in agricultural business customers of chemical manufacturer with respect to their main supplier. The findings of this study show significant positive relationships among the variables under investigation. An international manufacturing company can manage its buyer-seller relationships to gain the trust, commitment, satisfaction, and loyalty of its business customers by offering high service quality. When the goal is to improve corporate marketing performance and increase business with an existing customer, managers should focus on the role of value as a key building block in their relationships. Relationship quality (satisfaction, trust and commitment) appears to be an important antecedent in establishing a sustainable business relationship. The paper adds to the understanding of business relationships in the Egyptian context by studying customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer trust, and customer commitment from the perspective of relationship-value-based dimensions. This approach emphasizes the pivotal role of relationship value as well as relationship quality, which has not been studied before in Egyptian business to business relationship markets.

The experience of the USA as the world leader in agricultural production is generalized. The current regulatory and legal framework for regulating the insurance mechanism in Ukraine is analyzed. The optimal model, which provides for active participation of the state in support of agricultural risk insurance, commodity producers, products, is proposed. A two-level system of agri-insurance is considered. The first level – insurers, which provide agricultural producers with agricultural insurance services. In this case, the insurer must be a member of the insurance bureau, which is created by insurers; additional financial standards and requirements for the formation of provisions for insurance of agricultural products should be established. The second level is the association of agricultural producers involved in the creation of new and improved existing insurance products, the insurance bureau for agricultural products insurance as the sole association of insurers, and the government agency – the agency that implements the state policy to support the insurance of agricultural products. This level provides financial and informational integration for agricultural producers and insurers and promotes the development of voluntary insurance of agricultural products with state support. The model of functioning of the agricultural insurance system in Ukraine will ensure the formation of mutual trust between insurers, producers of agricultural products and the state. The formation of such a system will ensure the development of insurance of agricultural products, stability of agricultural production, food security of the state; optimal solution of state tasks in support of agricultural producers in the face of limited budget funds; new approaches to the state management process at the macro level. The state of the agricultural insurance industry has been studied and evaluated as a crisis due to the poor financial situation of the majority of agricultural producers and the lack of guarantees of timely payment of insurance compensations due to lack of necessary funds from insurance companies. The features, advantages and disadvantages of insurance products are considered. Insurance from one or more risks provides protection from strictly defined risks and is one of the cheapest. Hardship insurance is the most commonly used product in Ukraine and in other countries. This product is offered to manufacturers at a tariff rate of 0.5 to 2,5% depending on the region and the frequency of risk events. It is recommended to sign combined insurance contracts to protect the crop from hail and storm. Insurance of income from crop production in the country is practically not developed due to the lack of effective marketing infrastructure in the agricultural sector. It is expedient to use insurance of expenses for enterprises that grow vegetables, grapes and fruits. They can insure costs at the earliest stages of cultivation. Also, cost insurance is appropriate for enterprises that are laying new vineyards and gardens, when it is necessary to wait 2-4 years before landing at the level of planned productivity. Insurance costs and yields usually cost the same, and the insurer can save their own money by choosing insurance costs or through the levels of franchise or coverage. It is suggested to conclude insurance contracts without a franchise, since coated products are more understandable and simple. It should be noted that products with large deductibles (40 50%) and / or low coverage (50 60%) are cheaper, but they compensate for only a small part of the cost or revenue of the manufacturer. It should be noted that the insurance of vegetables, fruits and vineyards is more expensive than insurance of field crops, as the producer can receive significant losses (in monetary terms) even from a risk event on a small area or for a short period of time (hailstones, frostbites). The advantage of such insurance is the possibility of insurance of product quality, which may be of interest to producers of products consumed in fresh form. Comprehensive insurance usually includes a wide range of risks (from 5 to 15), from which the manufacturer can insure their crops. These insurance products require the insurance of an entire array of crops, but some insurance companies can insure individual fields, subject to compliance with all agrotechnological requirements and the use of high-quality logistical resources. The disadvantage of complex insurance products is a certain difficulty in identifying losses as a result of a risk event. Index agricultural products have not yet become popular among producers, but they are expected to increase their interest as farmers become accustomed to insurance as a way to protect their crops and incomes. Characteristic properties of index products are the objectivity of the process of assessing the damage and the absence of a franchise. We believe that in the current conditions of the index insurance program it is expedient to offer for field crops. Possible products for this type of insurance include: insurance against late spring frosts, insurance against excessive precipitation or insufficient amount of effective temperatures, early autumn frosts, droughts, temperature stresses, etc. Weathered index products can be offered together with insurance from a hail or a set of identified risks. The disadvantage of weather index products is the «risk of the basis» when an agrarian company may not be able to recover if the weather index is recorded within the normal range. In order to establish and ensure the efficient functioning of the agro-insurance system in Ukraine, it is advisable to create conditions for the creation of trust and financial literacy of agrarians, rational choice of insurance products in order to increase access to financing, improve the legal framework and implement a model of an effective agricultural insurance system with state support. Key words: insurance system, insurer, risk, risk management, insurance of agricultural products, insurance products, insurance of expenses, insurance of crop.

Shoe industry development in the era of globalization is currently overgrowing. Therefore, every company should be able to compete strictly with other companies that produce the same products. Quality maintenance is having to be done by the company to survive in business competition. PT. ABC is a manufacturer of sports shoes. The company has a problem with bonding shoes not achieved company standard in the year 2017. This paper is focused on the improvement of bonding shoe quality by using a method of Quality Control Circle which applying quality control tools are like check sheet, Pareto diagram, fishbone diagram, and 5W + 1 H. Based on the research results obtained percentage improvements of quality bonding test of 21.15%. Cement stripping on the midsole is the most significant number of the bonding test failure in Laboratory that is as much as 26.33% or 218 prs from the total collapse of the overall bonding shoes. Based on the background, the purpose of this research is to find out the root causes of the failure of bonding test shoes. The limitations of this research are only improving processes in the department, which makes the bonding shoe quality does not achieve the company standard. After doing the analysis using the quality control tools and making the improvement process in the whole areas that the percentage of the bonding test cement stripping on midsole could be increased to 5.18%. Analysis of the results obtained by applying the method of Quality Control Circle is the improvement of the quality of the bonding shoe. So, the trust customers against the company may be obtained that would eventually increase the number of orders to the company.

Decorner is a company engaged in the service of photography. In the development of its business, Decorner has a vision to provide the best service for customers and earn the trust of customers. To realize this vision, we need a means of web-based information. This facility aims to facilitate customers in making reservations photography services for a particular event. In the process of making a website, the first step is to analyze the system in the company, making the system design, design web menu structure and interface design of the web, after it determined the use of the software. In this application, the software used is Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 interface design to manufacture, MySQL as a database to store data off site and PHP scripts for the programming language. The results obtained in this application is the application of information systems web-based photography services reservation at Decorner. On the website Decorner equipped with photography package offered, the page order, the payment confirmation page and testimonials as well as the administrator to manage the content of the page or web content.

Decorner is a company engaged in the service of photography. In the development of its business, Decorner has a vision to provide the best service for customers and earn the trust of customers. To realize this vision, we need a means of web-based information. This facility aims to facilitate customers in making reservations photography services for a particular event. In the process of making a website, the first step is to analyze the system in the company, making the system design, design web menu structure and interface design of the web, after it determined the use of the software. In this application, the software used is Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 interface design to manufacture, MySQL as a database to store data off site and PHP scripts for the programming language. The results obtained in this application is the application of information systems web-based photography services reservation at Decorner. On the website Decorner equipped with photography package offered, the page order, the payment confirmation page and testimonials as well as the administrator to manage the content of the page or web content.

Using contingency theory (CT) of fit as a foundation for this research, we report the development of the notion of ‘green IT alignment framework' and its determinants. This is followed by an analysis of the relationship between capability areas (i.e., contextual factors) and green IT alignment while the company pursues GREEN. Data were collected from a case study where a car manufacturer is our research setting—considered as suitable for this type of research. The author found that a total of 18 capability areas over three domains of technical, organizational, and environmental are a premise for green IT alignment. Such capability areas are considered as new and interdependent of traditional strategic alignment capabilities. The results of this research demonstrate an appropriate green IT alignment framework that is trust worthy to construct for understanding the factors of IT-business fit while pursing GREEN. Implications are discussed.

A grievance is defined as a wrong or immoral suffered which creates ground for a complaint. In other words, dissatisfaction of customer on a product or service offered by a manufacturer or a service provider. The study focuses on the grievance management in life insurance services by the insurance ombudsman in India. In today’s scenario of insurance market, with the large volume of insurance transactions and huge customer size, it is an accepted fact that there will be growing number of policyholder grievances for every insurance providing company. The study is based on the secondary data collected from IRDA and research papers from various journals. The study concluded that in grievance management role of insurance ombudsman is very important and constant increase in number of complaints received by various Ombudsman all across the India shows that the policy-holders are gaining their confidence and trust in the institution of Insurance Ombudsman.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to examine why a buying firm in a marketing channel may retaliate against its supplier. The objective of this paper is thus to understand the individual and organizational variables that may prompt a buying company to retaliate against its supplier following negative critical incidents (NCI). Design/methodology/approach – Data was collected from 171 retailers associated with one focal manufacturer and analyzed through PLS path modeling procedures. Findings – Results demonstrate that retaliation is the outcome of individual factors related to a buyer's cognitive (causal attributions) and emotional (anger) processes triggered by NCI as well as organizational forces (trust and dependence) related to more stable characteristics of the interfirm relationship. Originality/value – Compared with existing contributions, the proposed model adopts a multilevel approach and considers retaliation as the outcome of individual as well as organizational forces. On the individual level, echoing the rapidly growing idea that emotions, not just cognitions, are a relevant object of study within interorganizational relationships, this paper empirically investigates the effect of one negative emotion (anger) and of causal attributions in buyer-seller partnerships. On the organizational level, this research examines the influence of trust and dependence, two central variables in business-to-business marketing theory, which seem closely related to retaliation.

Every drug whose copyright coverage has expired can be manufactured by a pharmaceutical company other than the one that developed it, giving rise to the market of the so-called generic drugs. It can be distinguished among two types of generic drugs: branded and unbranded, according to the choice of the manufacturer to assign it a fantasy name or to sell it with the name of the active principle, followed by the company’s name. In order to be accepted for marketing, every new drug has to pass the registration procedures of the Italian Ministry of Health, which are simplified for generics, as it’s sufficient to demonstrate the bioequivalence, considered a reliable proxy of therapeutic equivalence, of the new drug with the standard formulations it copies. The bioequivalence of two drugs depends on various parameters, related to the quality of the raw materials employed and the industrial processes they go through. There are several ways of assessing the equivalence between pharmaceutical products, and it is important the registration studies are conducted following strict rules, in order to guarantee the quality of generics, fundamental for achieving the trust of health operators and patients. The reason to be of generic drugs is essentially economic, as they bare no therapeutic innovation, and their introduction is mainly aimed to contain drug expenditures and to facilitate a competitive market, but to do so, they need to be widely accepted by the medical community and the population. In Italy, the market of generic drugs is very young and relatively underdeveloped if compared to what is observed in other industrialized countries such as the USA, Germany or UK, but it has a good expansion potential, as it also represents a chance for quality enhancement for the Italian pharmaceutical industry.

Audit report with modification of going concern indicates that in auditor’s opinion there is a risk that companies could not survive. This study is aimed to investigate the effect of bankruptcy prediction model and auditor reputation on going concern audit opinion. Moreover, this going concern modification is not expected by companies due to decrease public trust of image company. In addition, some of companies received unqualified opinion stop operating and not in accordance with the auditor's assessment. Thus, this study used object includes manufacturer listed on Indonesia Stock Exchange during 2013 -2015 with 134 observations obtained using purposive sampling method. Furthermore, this data are analyzed used logistic regression analysis. The conclusion of this study, the result has showed that the financial condition proxied by bankruptcy prediction model affect going concern auditor opinion positively. The auditors reputation which is proxied by audit firm size do not positively affect the opinion.Keywords: going concern opinion, bankruptcy prediction model, auditor reputation

The object of this research is the financial policy and indicators that characterize it. Financial policy certainly has a significant impact upon the actions of innovation actors along with other important factors: access to scientific and technological information, availability of highly skilled personnel, level of innovation infrastructure, status of development of domestic and foreign target markets, availability of domestic market for foreign investment, protection of the rights of investors, trusts of the manufacturers in national currency, absence of obstacles to starting a business, consumer preferences, etc. Using the method of graphical analysis, the author illustrates the dynamics of innovation behavior of the Belarusian companies in the context of changing the key financial indicators. The management of available resources in the company – accrual, savings, or investment into innovation development – would depend on the economic conditions established in the country. The conducted analysis allows concluding on interdependence between the financial results of the companies and their innovation activity, the amount of borrowings and innovation costs, as well as currency rates on the investment in innovation.

Volkswagen Group’s utilisation of a ‘defeat device’ to produce inaccurate results for vehicle emissions tests in multiple consumer states, leads it to face potentially crippling fines, possible criminal liability, civil suits, and detriment to its own company caused by the loss of trust. However, this article considers a further issue, namely implications of the violations on taxation legislation and pursuant claims for losses as a result of lost tax revenue or recalculated taxes. With vehicles falling outside of the tax band they were purchased within, there is confusion around the world about how this will affect the tax status of the vehicles and those that own them. Vehicles could be re-banded or reassessed for a variety of different tax purposes, increasing the tax liability of the vehicle historically and prospectively to reflect the actual emissions or fuel consumption based on how the charge is designed. Through a comparative study, this article considers varying tax issues in several different countries across the globe for which the manufacturer may be liable for the life of the vehicle. This will seek to establish the scale of the potential liability for Volkswagen (vw) Group that has not yet been explored. Finally it examines how international cooperation could produce more satisfactory settlements for nations and customers.

The energy sector is clearly operating in challenging times with uncertainty due to COVID starting in 2020, global economic collapse and the evolution of acceptability of different energy sources locally and globally. Stuart Taylor, CEO of resilience consulting firm Springfox will discuss the critical role of resilient leadership as a pathway to growth and success for shareholders, leaders and staff in the energy sector. Resilience can be defined as the learned ability to bounce back and also how to bounce forward through courage, connection and creativity. In exploring the concept of resilient leadership, Stuart Taylor will build on the foundation of resilience required by all leaders to be calm, energised, positive, optimistic and spiritually aligned. Taking this further, he will discuss the evidence and benefit of having leaders lead with empathy, trust and compassion as enablers for resilient leadership, and organisational agility and growth. Using global research undertaken by Springfox, and parent company the Resilience Institute, Stuart will provide key benchmarking results for the energy sector from the study of over 21000 staff to demonstrate a tangible return on resilience, as opposed to a return on intensity. As part of this study, a case study from an Australian energy manufacturer will be discussed that undertook to build a resilient culture using the principles outlined in this study.

Chocolate is considered one of the most gratifying confections there is, and this holds as true in New Zealand as elsewhere in the world.
 Evidence of this high interest in chocolate in New Zealand is demonstrated in the arrival of small artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the early 2000s; the voting of Whittaker’s as New Zealand’s single most trusted brand for eight years running (Reader’s Digest New Zealand’s Most Trusted Brand) [1]; the reporting on the economic, social and cultural impacts of the closure of the Cadbury chocolate factory in Dunedin [2]; and the opening of the first fair trade chocolate factory, Sweet Justice Chocolate Factory, in Christchurch by Trade Aid New Zealand [3].
 These examples also demonstrate a clear transformation within New Zealand’s commercial chocolate production, reflecting worldwide changes in multinational confectionery companies but also the emergence of artisanal production that directly addresses issues of sustainability and transparency [4, 5].
 While broader culinary traditions in New Zealand have been well-documented, the food history of chocolate production has not yet been explored. Consequently, this study explored the history of chocolate production in New Zealand, with a specific focus on bean-to-bar products [6].
 The study, based on a narrative history and interviews with current bean-to-bar chocolate makers in New Zealand, traced the history of bean-to-bar chocolate production in New Zealand. This process allowed for a multi-faceted reconstruction and interpretation of historical data to help understand various transformations within New Zealand’s chocolate industry, an industry long dominated by multinational companies such as Cadbury and Nestlé. This domination by overseas companies has recently been challenged by the emergence of small artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate makers and the rise of local chocolate company, Whittaker’s.
 Among the key findings was evidence of the maturing of the local chocolate industry to the point where it is clear that New Zealand-made chocolate is now widely viewed and trusted by local consumers as a high-quality product. This trust extends to both the current strong player in the market, Whittaker’s, and equally to smaller artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate makers, a confidence in product comparable to the New Zealand craft beer industry and the more well-established wine industry.
 The research also finds that the emergence of more artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate makers, and their focus on more transparency around the production of chocolate, reflects similar trends overseas. The findings highlight the fragile structure surrounding growth and sustainability in the chocolate production industry, with the view that closer ties should be formed with New Zealand’s Pacific cacao-growing neighbours.
 The findings point to the need for additional research around the history of food in New Zealand, an area of study often undervalued in academia [7]. The findings of the research are timely as they highlight opportunities for the industry to place current worldwide sustainability concerns in perspective with a view to the future – a future that New Zealand chocolate manufacturers cannot avoid.
 The historical archival data captured together with the contemporary voices of New Zealand’s new generation of chocolate makers combine to tell a story of creativity and competition.
 The original research this article is based on can be accessed here: https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/12970/SturnyA.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y
 Corresponding author
 Arno Sturny can be contacted at: arno.sturny@aut.ac.nz
 References
 (1) Trusted Brands New Zealand 2019. Most Trusted. http://www.trustedbrands.co.nz/default.asp#mostTrusted (accessed Jun 1, 2019).
 (2) Cadbury’s Dunedin Factory Faces Closure, 350 Jobs on the Line. The New Zealand Herald, Feb 16, 2017. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11801779 (accessed Jun 2, 2019).
 (3) Trade Aid. The Sweet Justice Chocolate Factory. https://www.tradeaid.org.nz/trade/the-sweet-justice-chocolate-factory/ (accessed Mar 24, 2019).
 (4) Fountain, A.; Huetz-Adams, F. 2018 Cocoa Barometer; 2018. http://www.cocoabarometer.org/cocoa_barometer/Download_files/2018%20Cocoa%20Barometer%20180420.pdf (accessed Oct 13, 2018).
 (5) Squicciarini, M. P.; Swinnen, J. F. M. The Economics of Chocolate; Oxford University Press: Oxford, U.K., 2016.
 (6) Sturny, A. Raising the Bar: A Story of Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Production in New Zealand; Master’s Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, 2018. https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/12970/SturnyA.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y (accessed Nov 25, 2019).
 (7) Belasco, W. G. Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field. In Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies; Belasco, W., Scranton, P., Eds.; Taylor & Francis: London, 2002, pp 1–22. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239586863 (accessed Jun 15, 2019).

Under-glaze tissue ceramic transfer printing first developed circa 1750 and involved engraved or etched copper plates, from which tissue was printed with cobalt blue oxides. Under-glaze tissue has a very distinctive, subtle quality - it is an integral part of both English ceramic history and the history of copperplate engraving. The process was common in the UK ceramics industry until the1980s. However from the 1950s it began to be supplemented by screen-printing, because underglaze tissue transfer was relatively slow and required skilled artisans to apply the transfers. The authors are collaborating with Burleigh Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, the last remaining company to produce ceramic tableware decorated using the traditional printed under-glaze tissue method. The pottery was recently saved from closure by the HRH Prince Charles Regeneration Trust, who wish to maintain the traditional manufacturing skills for the next 25 years. The Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) in Bristol has been reappraising the use of these traditional 19th Century skills with modern materials and methods for producing engraved plates. The project seeks to demonstrate how those 19th Century methods can be applied by contemporary ceramic artists. The paper will explain the process of ink manufacture, heating the plate for printing, digital methods of making plates and the use of potters tissue.

Advertising in online media is now a modern business phenomenon, along with the growing e-commerce in the era of digital economy. The penetration of social media is so high provides an opportunity for manufacturers to promote products/services through social media. Still not directly drive the purchase intentions of social media users themselves to a product due to some problems that arise, among others, issues of privacy and trus and incomprehension manufacturer of the structure of social media networks make a small promotional impact. The purpose of this study was to determine the structure of social media networks as a strategic way of advertising in the era of digital economy (Instagram of Tokopedia, Traveloka, Lazada, Ayu Ting Ting, Syahrini, Riaricis and Hanggini). This study uses content analysis with qualitative approach that uses the concept of social media structures network category by Shin et al. The results showed that tie srenght, density network, centrality network, and homophile intertwined in the overall studied Instagram account when promoting a product/service. It's just that there are similarities and differences between the accounts of companies and individuals. Seventh this account has the power relationships and network congestion during the promotion process occurs. But the company accounts tend to be less receiving comments. Instead of interactions that occur tend to be higher on account of the company. The entire account owner is also a key man as the main channel of information play an important role in the network sale of product/service. The similarity of characteristics between the account owner and followers are also reflected in the promotion process.Periklanan di media online kini menjadi fenomena bisnis modern, seiring dengan tumbuh pesatnya e-commerce di era ekonomi digital. Penetrasi media sosial yang begitu tinggi juga memberikan peluang bagi produsen untuk mempromosikan produk/jasa melalui medsos. Meski demikian tidak langsung menggerakan niat beli pengguna karena beberapa masalah antara lain soal privasi dan kepercayaan juga ketidakpahaman produsen terhadap struktur jaringan media sosial membuat dampak promosi kecil. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui struktur jaringan media sosial sebagai cara strategis periklanan di era ekonomi digital (iklan di Instagram Tokopedia, Traveloka, Lazada, Ayu Ting Ting, Syahrini, Riaricis dan Hanggini). Penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis isi dengan pendekatan kualitatif dengan konsep kategori struktur jaringan media sosial Shin dkk. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kategori kekuatan hubungankepadatan jaringansentralitas jaringanserta kesamaan karekteristik terjalin dalam keseluruhan akun Instagram yang diteliti saat mempromosikan produk/jasa. Hanya saja ada kesamaan dan perbedaan antara akun perusahaan dan perorangan. Ketujuh akun ini memiliki kekuatan hubungan dan kepadatan jaringan pada saat proses promosi terjadi. Tetapi akun perusahaan cenderung lebih sedikit menerima komen. Sebaliknya interaksi yang terjadi cenderung lebih tinggi pada akun perusahaan. Semua pemilik akun juga merupakan orang kunci sebagai saluran utama informasiyang berperan penting dalam jaringan promosi produk/jasa. Kesamaan karekteristik antara pemilik akun dan followers juga tergambar dalam proses promosi.

Purpose In mature global business-to-business (B2B) product markets, management of external sales channels, governed by contractual relationships, is a key determinant of business performance. However, existing sales channel management literature lacks focus on contractual governance and reseller management success. The purpose of the study is to systematically review different governance theories in relation to sales channel management and to show which factors are the most influential in making or keeping external sales channels effective. Design/methodology/approach A case study on a large B2B information and communication technology (ICT) company is used to reflect on the way the different theoretical governance perspectives explain sales channel management success. Interviews and mini-questionnaires were used to collect data. Findings Expressions of interdependence and equality alongside persevered personal relationships are important in managing daily business activities and in avoiding bad will at the reseller’s grass-root level. Future-oriented planning, long-term-oriented support and jointly set incentive systems are important for reseller management. Degree of professional management sets resellers apart through shifts in power balance. Research limitations/implications A multi-theory governance perspective offers a holistic view over reseller management and provides a comprehensive view over different sales channel management issues and their relative importance. Practical implications The findings highlight the importance of long-term orientation and cooperation in setting up a reseller management system to gain and nurture distributors’ trust and commitment towards the manufacturer. Originality/value The study is the first to comprehensively use governance perspective in studying reseller management.

BackgroundBrincidofovir (BCV) is an antiviral drug currently undergoing stage 2 clinical trials in America. BCV is released only on direct application with subsequent approval from the manufacturer; Chimerix. It is currently available via the Named Patient Program (NPP); an open-label, non-randomised, multi- centre expanded access program that provides access to BCV for patients that are not currently enrolled in a BCV clinical trial. It has previously been approved for use in Adenovirus treatment, with requests for use in other indications being denied.On day +33 post bone marrow transplant (BMT), our patient began suffering from gut graft versus host disease (GVHD). According to Trust protocol, he was started on methylprednisolone intravenously(IV), then budesonide orally (PO). He received subsequent courses of infliximab(IV), basiliximab (IV), and ruxolitinib (PO). During treatment with ruxolitinib the patient was diagnosed with Adenovirus. This is not routinely treated in otherwise well patients, however due to severe immunosuppression following BMT and high dose steroids for GVHD, cidofovir was started. No improvement was seen, and viral load continued to increase (from 7290 copies/mL on day +74 to 9 53 000 copies on D+83) alongside cidofovir related renal toxicity.Pharmacist contributionsAfter a discussion with the MDT since BCV is experimental and unlicensed, the specialist pharmacist (SP) contacted Chimerix to begin the application process alongside the Lead Consultant; providing detailed clinical information for panel approval. The Chief Pharmacist was contacted to ensure correct paperwork was in place, ensuring import of an unlicensed medication from America would be both financially sound and approved for use within the Trust. The SP then contacted the Trust pharmacy purchasing department and created a new line form on the Trust’s dispensing programme ready to receive the product; shipping and delivery arrangements were organised with the company. Finally the SP contacted the pharmacy Quality Assurance/Quality Control department to agree any further verification before use in a patient at the Trust.Treatment began at 2 mg/kg twice weekly on day +90 post transplant. The SP explained the key information in the pharmacy manual and individualised treatment plan for the patient to the MDT, and ensured the product did not interact with current BMT regimen. A major side effect identified during clinical trials was diarrhoea, which due to pre-existing GVHD was difficult to distinguish so the patient was closely monitored with regular stool charts and fluid balance review.OutcomeThe patient significantly improved, with adenovirus load becoming undetectable (<50 copies/mL) after 9 doses of BCV. Two negative blood polymerase chain reaction (PCR) results were received before stopping treatment on day +119.Lessons learnedBCV has been shown to be a useful agent to use to treat Adenovirus in the paediatric bone marrow transplant population, however more experience of its use is needed to ensure efficacy across this patient cohort. Access to BCV is only through the NPP scheme until completion of on-going clinical trials. Close monitoring for severe side effects remains essential.

En este trabajo se analizan los factores más relevantes de la cultura organizacional que aparecen en las Redes Virtuales de Fabricación Global (RVFG). Estas organizaciones están formadas por empresas muy dinámicas que fabrican todo tipo de productos o servicios, las cuales establecen entre sí relaciones de tipo horizontal y vertical, pudiendo incluso ser competidores, donde no es necesario mantener internamente grandes recursos fabriles sino gestionar y compartir eficientemente los recursos de la red. El estudio de la cultura organizacional a nivel de red incluye aspectos como la similitud de las prácticas culturales entre sus actores, la integración social, la transferencia de conocimiento tácito o la importancia de la confianza en la red. Son, en definitiva, los aspectos blandos o "soft factors" de las RVFGs y constituyen uno de los aspectos fundamentales en el funcionamiento eficiente de las mismas. Mediante el modelo teórico propuesto se analizarán todos los factores culturales relevantes en las colaboraciones interempresariales, así como la posible existencia de una cultura organizacional a nivel de red. La presencia, bajo una perspectiva sistémica, de unos valores y prácticas culturales homogéneas en las que se puedan identificar los actores de la red permitiría fortalecer la pertenencia al grupo o establecer una red social que subyaga a la propia RVFG y que facilite e incremente las interacciones entre sus miembros. La factibilidad de este planteamiento facilitaría la formación de nuevas RVFGs al poder establecer, ex ante, un modelo prescriptivo cultural a nivel de red. Finalmente, para validar el modelo propuesto, se aplicará la metodología del caso a un ejemplo de la industria aeronáutica que ha constituido una de las relaciones con más éxito dentro de las RVFGs, la colaboración entre GE y SNECMA para la fabricación del motor CFM 56.<br /><br />This paper analyzes the most relevant factors of organizational culture that appear in the global manufacturing virtual network (GMVN). These organizations are formed by very dynamic companies that manufacture all types of products or services, which establish horizontal and vertical relations among themselves, in some cases between direct competitors, where it is not necessary to maintain large internal manufacturing resources but manage and share these resources efficiently in the network. The study of organizational culture at the network level includes aspects such as cultural similarity among its actors, social embeddedness, tacit knowledge transfer or the importance of trust in the network. They are ultimately the soft factors of GMVNs and represent one of the key aspects for the efficient operation thereof. The proposed theoretical model will permit to analyze all relevant cultural factors in inter-company collaborations, as well as the possible existence of an organizational culture at the network level. The presence, under a systemic perspective, of homogeneous cultural values and practices in which network actors can be identified would strengthen the group membership or would establish a social network that underlies the own GMVN and facilitates interactions among its members. The feasibility of this approach would facilitate the formation of new GMVNs by establishing, ex ante, a cultural prescriptive model at the network level. Finally, to validate the proposed model, the case methodology will be applied to an example within the aeronautical industry that has been one of the most successful relationships within GMVNs, the collaboration between GE and SNECMA for the CFM 56 engine manufacturing.<br /><br />

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the influence of an individual’s attitude towards advertising and country-of-origin (COO) images (brand origin (BO) and country of manufacture (COM)) on brand equity creation; and second, to investigate how brand typicality moderates the effect of BO macro image on perceived quality. Design/methodology/approach The data to test the hypotheses were elicited from a consumer survey in the Greater Lisbon area (305 Portuguese consumers). The product category of smartphones was selected for two main reasons: it has not been extensively analysed in previous studies on the subject of brand equity; it is a device well-known to Portuguese consumers (particularly in the Greater Lisbon area). Three criteria guided the selection of the brands. The first criterion is to select brands which are well-known to consumers. The second is to choose brands with a distinctive BO and a main COM. The third and final criterion is to consider brands in different positions in the brand ranking. In order to estimate structural path coefficients, R2, Q2, and bootstrap techniques, the current study employs the partial least squares approach. Findings The results show that individuals’ attitudes towards advertisements have a positive impact on brand equity creation, whereas those towards the COM do not significantly influence brand equity creation. Attitudes towards BO only have a partial influence. Brand typicality, however, exerts a significant direct effect on brand equity dimensions and, hence, does not have a significant moderating effect. Research limitations/implications The authors suggest analysing the influence of COO on dimensions of brand equity considering consumer segmentation, types of industry and a range of brands, as well as different levels of consumer involvement with the product category. Several brands with the same COO should be analysed in order to understand whether the effects on brand equity depend on the product category. Although the current study is a first attempt to combine the potential effect of individuals’ attitudes towards advertisements and COO on creating brand equity, further research should examine additional potential antecedents of brand equity. Finally, cross-cultural studies are recommended. Practical implications Regarding managerial implications, three main aspects should be taken into consideration. First, creative, original and different advertising strategies are more effective than the COO in creating brand equity and, consequently, in building loyalty among smartphone consumers. Second, consumers do not tend to care about the place, country or region where the smartphone is produced, but the image of the country where the brand originated may be important. Finally, managers should be aware that, at least, in the smartphone sector, the way consumers create favourable associations with the brand and typicality, trust the company and consider it good value for money, are more effective in building brand loyalty than the perceived quality of the product/brand. Social implications Relating to the interrelationship between COO and brand equity, the results of the current study prove that the effects of COO are category specific. Therefore, more studies focussed on other contexts of products and brands are still needed to know in more detail how COO exerts an influence on brand equity dimensions. Even within a product category context, the results can depend on individual brands being analysed. Originality/value To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first to investigate the dual (simultaneous) effect of individuals’ attitudes towards advertisements and COO images on brand equity dimensions. Adding to the originality of the paper, the category of smartphone with respect to brand equity has not been extensively analysed in previous studies.

Introduction The national pharmaceutical industry is pivotal for both the health sector and the national economy. This study aims to identify determinants of national drug products acceptance. The objectives of this study were to quantitatively measure the level of patient and community pharmacist acceptance of national drug products available in community pharmacies and to qualitatively explore the barriers facing national pharmaceutical companies and investigate the suggested solutions. Methods This cross-sectional study used an explanatory mixed method design. It was conducted in Baghdad, Iraq from July through October 2018. The study included two surveys (one for pharmacy customers and another for pharmacists) and thereafter semi-structured interviews of national pharmaceutical company owners/managers. The interview guide was developed based on preliminary quantitative results. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview findings. Results We received 123 patient surveys and 125 usable pharmacist surveys. We conducted seven interviews and stopped when we reached saturation. Integrated qualitative and quantitative findings showed that the main determinants of national drug product acceptance are product characteristics (namely price, packaging, brand, and availability), healthcare providers effect on product promotion and perceived effectiveness, and regulations enforced by authorities mainly the Ministry of Health. Conclusions Product price was the number one modulating factor in patient decision-making when purchasing a drug product. It appears that physicians and pharmacists are playing negative or at least neutral role in promoting national drug products and sustaining patients trust in national drug products. Current policies appeared to slow national drug industry growth and limit manufacturers’ ability to expand their share in the market. Manufacturer marketing efforts can help in gaining physicians and pharmacists support of the national drug product. Reforms to current drug policy and regulations were proposed by manufacturers.

This case depicts a managerial problem faced by Tradition and Trust, a traditional sweet and snack manufacturer, which is 100-year old family business manufacturing, retailing and exporting sweets, snacks and other confectionery products. Like other traditional sweet and snack manufactures, the company is facing the challenge of consumers' shift towards ‘healthy snacking’. Moreover, brands like Haldiram's and Bikanerwala are posing a tough competition to the traditional sweet manufacturing brands. In recent years, the brand has witnessed a decline in sales. In view of the challenges posed to brand, the Chief Marketing Officer, wants to understand the various factors influencing decline of sales and find ways to redesign the strategy for sustaining its current position in the market. The case is written to illustrate how six fundamental steps of conducting a marketing research can be used to address a given managerial problem.

PurposeIn the present study, the authors have explored the research questions, “How do companies in the engineering and automobile manufacturing sector in India determine the coordination strategy with their suppliers?” and “Can we develop a framework which helps the company adopt a particular coordination strategy?” The authors also aimed for developing a generalizable theory of supply chain coordination (SCC) strategy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have studied upstream SCC practices at eight Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the Indian engineering manufacturing and automobile sector and identified 11 types of SCC in three categories of suppliers, namely large, medium and small. Each SCC is characterized by the category of items as the authors found the OEMs follow different strategies for different types of items. Initially, the authors started the study with the objective of strategy discovery, and later on, they prescribed a strategic framework based on the consolidated knowledge that they gathered at the discovery phase. The authors propose a SCC strategy framework consisting of four dimensions, i.e. time horizon, the formality of engagement, price and volume for the upstream supply chain. With the framework, the authors have identified the driving factors for choosing a particular strategy. The authors have found both OEMs and suppliers in India prefer to have a long-term relationship for building trust, which helps both the OEMs and the suppliers to go the extra mile when needed. Apart from large suppliers supplying technology and proprietary items, OEMs prefer to have an informal relationship so that they enjoy flexibility and attain agility. The price and volume dimensions are dependent on who enjoys more bargaining power.FindingsThe authors propose a SCC strategy framework consisting of four dimensions, i.e. time horizon, formality of engagement, price and volume for the upstream supply chain. With the framework, the authors have identified the driving factors for choosing a particular strategy. The authors have found that both OEMs and suppliers in India prefer to have a long-term relationship for building trust, which helps both the OEMs and the suppliers to go the extra mile when needed. Apart from large suppliers supplying technology and proprietary items, OEMs prefer to have an informal relationship so that they enjoy flexibility and attain agility. The price and volume dimensions are dependent on who enjoys more bargaining power.Originality/valueThis study made a substantial contribution to the literature by presenting a SCC strategy framework, ISCM (Indian Supply Chain Coordination Model). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in the literature, there was no concrete framework for analyzing the coordination strategy specific to the Indian situation. The framework proposed has been derived based on empirical findings; hence, it is not a conceptual one. The authors also developed a supply chain typology. This study made a substantial contribution to the literature by presenting a SCC strategy framework, ISCM. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in the literature, there was no concrete framework for analyzing the coordination strategy specific to the Indian situation. The framework proposed has been derived based on empirical findings; hence, it is not a conceptual one. The authors also developed a supply chain typology.

With About One Third Of The Long Span Wood Trusses In Place For A 60 By 100 Building Being Constructed As A Convenience Store, The Trusses Already Erected Fell Over Like Dominos Injuring Three Laborers.He Three Workers Sued A Number Of Parties Involved In The Project Including The Crane Rental Companynd The Manufacturer And Supplier Of The Trusses, Claiming That They Shared Responsibility For The Accidentnd That They Should Have Taken Action To Prevent The Collapse. The Author Was Retained As An Expert Witnessor The Crane Rental Company. Investigation And Analysis Of Available Facts Established That The Craneental Company Was Not Responsible And Should Have Had No Liability.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report the first practical applications of FCAUP (Framework for Conformity Assessment inspired by the Uncertainty Principle) carried out using a pilot implementation in a boat trailer manufacturer company in Maryville, Tennessee, USA and a practical application in a metrology company in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil.Design/methodology/approachField studies have been conducted in two different companies: a pilot implementation during the preparation activities of the acceptance inspection of finished products and a practical application during the internal audit related to the quality management system.Findings(1) partial double inspection is advantageous in conformity assessment; (2) a structured procedure tends to reduce the risks arising from the use of partial double inspection; (3) the recommended amount of double inspections is directly proportional to the uncertainty involved in the process and it is inversely proportional to the degree of trust in a presumed conformity status.Research limitations/implicationsThis novel framework is for practitioners in manufacturing industries and test laboratories.Practical implicationsThe results of these practical applications suggest that FCAUP is a consistent approach to be used in several categories of conformity assessment in manufacturing industries and test laboratories due to the balance between result and time (cost).Originality/valueThis new framework, named FCAUP, for planning and executing conformity assessment activities has been introduced in a theoretical study published by Moraes and Silva (2018) and it is based on an analogy with the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics.

The purposes of this research were to understand the profitability performance and its influencing factors based on DuPont Analysis and the effect toward the value of the firm. As a causality research, the sample data involved were 20 non-banking and finance companies as listed on LQ-45 of Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX) years of 2014-2018, which could be classified into two types of industry; manufacture and non-manufacture sectors. The research’s quantitative design as a systematic approach of the relation among the variables focusing on the hypothesis testing done by data analysis tools using GLS Regression test of panel data. Profitability determinants of net profit margin, total assets turnover and financial leverage multiplier showed the result of positive and significant effect toward ROE (return on equity), while growth sales ratio showed the negative and significant effect. In terms of the relationship toward value of firm, the ROE and industry types were proven to have significant positive contributions. This implied that the management must be more efficient and effective in managing the company operational activities and minimizing the operational costs and other costs, both in the assets and debt usage to have maximal product results, to increase sales, net income, profit rate and return of equity where they will affect the increasing of investors’ and the market’s trust toward the firms since the increasing of return on equity for the owners and the shareholders. The different characteristics, traits and features of the industry’s types resulted in the different use of strategies in managing the firms’ operational activities. These all affected the increasing value of the firm.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

If love is a many-splendoured thing, then many of its splendours can be seen on toy shelves occupied by recent playthings such as Luv Buds, Love and Kisses, First Love, My Puppy Loves Me and Love-A-Lot Bear. As the meaning of childhood has changed, particularly over the last 150 years (Postman), toys have become a major means of demonstrating and defining love between generations, between genders and between humans and commodities. The widespread availability of commodities, all increasingly finetuned in their prescribed meanings under a regime of rampant advertising, has been a key factor in this development, which reached an apex in the final quarter of the last century. Major toy companies grew dramatically (Stern and Schoenhaus), details of toy-play became more intricately spelt out for children (Kline), and advertising leapt into bold new fronts, not the least being 30-minute toy advertisements masquerading as children’s television programs (Kunkel). Hand in hand with these developments came more sensual elaboration of characters and themes (Kline and Pentecost), in line with general moves towards “commodity aesthetics” (Haug). Selling not just toys but warm fuzzy feelings, toy companies took up slogans such as those surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids: “A special kind of love” and “Come open your arms to a Cabbage Patch Kid” (Blyskal; Jacob, Rodenhauser and Markert). Care Bears made similar claims, each in the set distinguished by heightened sensuality and segmenting the tasks previously performed by the simpler teddy bear. Thus, while semanticists and sociologists grapple with the meaning of the word “love” and the shifting nature of the concept, modern-day toy manufacturers have utilised a number of pertinent notions to underpin their marketing efforts. Such is the importance of marketing that even the basic design of toys can be a marketer’s initiative, giving rise to toys structured specifically around love themes. This is significant because mass marketed toys act as powerful media, transmitting messages, offering interpretations and interacting with other toys and commodities, particularly in terms of communicating the appeals and joys of consumerism on which their existence so heavily relies. Modern toys are not only surrounded by massive advertising and other related texts which leave little to the child’s imagination but, due to their “collaboration” with other commodities in cross-marketing ventures, are prominently positioned to advertise themselves and each other. Messages promoting mass marketed toys are interwoven into the presentation of each toy, its advertising package and other promotional media, including books, films, mall appearances and miniaturisation in children’s packaged fast-food meals. Such schemes highlight the sensuality and appeals of the toys and their themes. Of course children – and their parents – may create oppositional meanings from those intended. The messages are not closed and not always accepted wholesale or unquestioningly, but toys, like other media, often privilege particular readings favourable to the marketplace, as Ann du Cille has pointed out in relation to race and I have noted in relation to gender. Love fits snugly into the repertoire of appeals and joys, taking several different forms, determined mostly by each toy’s target audience and marketing profile. Four of the main variations on the love theme in toys are: Representational love Substitutional love Obligatory love Romantic love I will focus on closely linked representational and substitutional love. A toy that draws on straightforward representational love for its appeal to a parent or carer is typically marketed to suggest that toys are material proof of love, important links in a chain of bonding. At its most crass, the suggestion is that one can prove one’s love for a child by showering her or him with toys, though usually claims are more sophisticated, implying issues of quality and toy genre. In 1993 toy company Mattel was marketing its Disney toys as coming with the special offer of a book. An advertisement in the Australian women’s magazine New Idea spoke of the “magic” of Disney toys and how they would “enchant your child” but made even grander claims of the accompanying book: “It’s valued at $9.95…but you can’t put a price on the bond between you and your child when you read one of these Disney classic tales together.” The pressures of modern-day life are such that parents sometimes feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time with their children or do not know how to play with them or have little interest in doing so, in which case substitutional love can be a strong marketing claim to parents by toys. Among the major features of modern toys and their part in the relationship between parents and children, Brian Sutton-Smith pinpointed a contradiction (115, 127). Parents give their children toys to bond with them but also to simultaneously facilitate separation: “I give you this toy for you to play with…but now go away and play with it by yourself.” Toys not only serve the contradiction but also may offer reconciliation, pitching at a niche seeking substitutional love. Mattel was explicit about this with its promotion of the Heart Family, a set of dolls that on one hand stressed the importance of the traditional nuclear family while, on the other, offered carers a chance to opt out of the burdens of such rigid family organization (Langer). In a booklet entitled “Dear Mum and Dad, will you give me five minutes of your time?” distributed in Australia, Mattel claimed that major research had found that parents did not spend enough time with children and that children felt sad and angry about this. But there was a solution at hand: the purchase of the Heart Family, which incidentally came with an enormous range of accessories, each capable of chipping away at parental guilt though perhaps never quite assuaging it, for there always seemed to be one more accessory on the way. Most notable of these was the large, elegant, two-storeyed dollhouse, Loving Home. The dolls, their dollhouse, musical nursery, playground and umpteen other accessories were, it was insinuated by the Mattel booklet, a way of purchasing “values we all believe in. Sharing. Caring. Loving. Togetherness”. It seemed that the range of commodities could stand in for parents. More recently, Fisher-Price, now part of the Mattel group, has brought out a similar toy line, Loving Family, which hints even more strongly at links between family security and material possessions. Among Loving Family’s accessories are a multi-room family house with attached stable, a beach house, country home, townhouse, beauty salon and much more. While we cannot be sure that these suggested links and parental guilt in the absence of multiple toy gifts take root, toy companies, market analysts, toy advertising agencies and psychiatrists have noted trends that suggest they generally do. They have noted the impact on toy sales thought to be associated with “the high number of children with guilt-ridden working mothers, or from broken homes where parents are trying to buy their offspring’s affections” (McKee). Sometimes parents are keen to ensure the love and affection of playmates for their children. Toy companies also offer this type of substitutional love. Knickerbocker says of its wares: “Toys that love you back,” while among Galoob’s dolls is Mandi, My Favorite Friend. But what a gloomy picture of human companionship is painted by Phebe Bears’ slogan: “When there’s no one else to trust.” Space permits only the briefest comments on either obligatory love or romantic love; the key factor here is that both are strongly gendered. Boys need not concern themselves with either variety but girls’ toys abound which play a socialising role in respect to each. Toys contributing to a concept of love as obligation train girls for a motherhood role that ensures they will be emotionally as well as physically equipped. Kenner doll Baby Needs Me is only one of many such toys. The box of Baby Chris gift set claims the doll “needs your love and care” while Hush Little Baby “responds to your loving care” and “loves to be fed”. Matchbox’s Chubbles is claimed to “live on love”. If the weight of these obligations seems daunting to a girl, the Barbie doll genre offers her a carrot, suggesting that girls grow into women who are the recipients of love from men. A closer look reveals narcissism is surely the strongest type of love promoted by Barbie, but that is not explicit. Barbies such as Dream Date Barbie, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the numerous Barbie brides – even though Barbie is claimed to have never married – promote a straightforward and romanticised view of heterosexual relationships. In conclusion, each toy makes its own grab for attention, often promising love or one of its components, but usually working within a framework of short-term gratification, infatuation, obsession, the yearn to possess and elicitation of guilt – mostly unhealthy ingredients for relationships. While it may be hard to decide what love is, most would agree that, if it ideally has some sense of community responsibility and reciprocity about it, then the definitions offered by these toys fall short of the mark. Works Cited Blyskal, Jeff and Marie. “Media Doll – Born in a Cabbage Patch and Reared by a PR Man” The Quill, 73, November 1985: 32. du Cille, Ann. “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference” Differences 6(1) Spring 1994: 46-68. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics: Ideology and Culture. New York: International General, 1987. Jacob, James E., Paul Rodenhauser and Ronald J. Markert. “The Benign Exploitation of Human Emotions: Adult Women and the Marketing of Cabbage Patch Kids” Journal of American Culture 10, Fall 1987: 61-71. Kline, Stephen, and Debra Pentecost, “The Characterization of Play: Marketing Children’s Toys” Play and Culture, 3(3), 1990: 235-255. Kline, Stephen, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. London: Verso, 1993. Kunkel, Dale. “From a Raised Eyebrow to a Turned Back: The FCC and Children’s Product-Related Programming” Journal of Communication 38(4) Autumn 1988: 90-108. Langer, Beryl. “Commoditoys: Marketing Childhood” Arena no. 87, 1989: 29-37. McKee, Victoria. “All Stressed Out and Ready to Play” The Times (London), 19 December 1990: 17. Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Dell, 1982. Stern, Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schoenhaus. Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990. Sutton-Smith, Brian. Toys As Culture. New York: Garden Press, 1986. Varney, Wendy. “The Briar Around the Strawberry Patch: Toys, Women and Food” Women’s Studies International Forum no. 19, June 1996: 267-276. Varney, Wendy. “Of Men and Machines: Images of Masculinity in the Toybox” Feminist Studies 28(1) Spring 2002: 153-174. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Love in Toytown" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/loveintotytown.php>. APA Style Varney, W., (2002, Nov 20). Love in Toytown. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/loveintotytown.html

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>