Marketing avatars revisited: A commentary on facial recognition and embodied representations in consumer profiling

In this Executive Digest, we review and extend our original Business Horizons article (May 2013) addressing marketing avatars (i.e., mavatars ¹): digital embodied, biometric profiles. In the original article we offered our marketing avatar framework, which classified existing and predicted types of mavatar applications according to data collection and application domains. However, because of the quick pace of change in this domain, we must review newly introduced mavatar applications that complete the original framework. These new applications—as well as industry and regulatory actions—paint a picture of where and how mavatars will be used, and where opportunities exist for application development. For that reason, we discuss current applications and additional predictions for future use.     

Appealing to the imagination: Effective and ethical marketing of religion

This paper defines and develops the concept of ‘appealing to the imagination,’ a type of marketing communication designed to engage the imagination of the target audience, which presents aesthetic, poetic, and truthful characteristics. The paper proposes ‘appealing to the imagination’ as an effective and ethical technique for marketing religion, arguing that appeals to the imagination persuade audiences effectively and communicate religious claims with authenticity and tolerance. The case of the Focolare, a rapidly growing religious movement that uses appeals to the imagination extensively and successfully, illustrates these propositions.     

Meeting the Challenges for Franchising in Developing Countries: The Vietnamese Experience

While business format franchising is the industry standard for developed countries, it remains an aspiration for many developing countries. Despite the attraction for developing countries of systems, training, and support and despite the economic and regulatory infrastructure being in place for the development of business format franchising, a range of commercial and socio-cultural factors may conspire to prevent its full expression. This paper addresses franchising development in Vietnam, a developing country. It considers strategies to bridge the gap between Vietnamese franchise practice and franchising best practice. It proposes that in Vietnam's current state of development, the product and trade name model may be the appropriate starting point with a move to the business format model only when, and in places where, the socio-cultural, commercial, and economic factors and the legal environment can accommodate more sophisticated business format franchise arrangements.     

The Impact of Perceived Organizational Support on Self-Directed Learning in Sales Training

Perceived organizational support has a positive influence on the willingness of salespeople to use self-directed learning (SDL) projects. These SDL projects can be tailored to fit a salesperson's distinct learning needs, to increase performance, and to achieve the overarching goals of collaborative members of a marketing channel. Hence, it is beneficial for channel members to create a supportive learning culture that promotes the use of SDL projects by salespeople. Salespeople within the insurance industry play an essential role inside their marketing channel. Data collected from 392 insurance salespeople in over 170 firms is used to empirically test how perceived organizational support influences the use of two types of SDL projects. Salespeople encouraged to use elective SDL projects reported higher levels of performance than those required to use compulsory SDL projects.     

Independent component analysis for realized volatility: Analysis of the stock market crash of 2008

This paper investigates the factors that drove the U.S. equity market returns from 2007 to early 2010. The period was highlighted by volatile energy and commodity prices, the collapse of insurance and banking firms, extreme implied volatility and a subsequent rally in the overall market. To extract the driving factors, we decompose the returns of the S&P500 sector ETFs into statistically independent signals using independent component analysis. We find that the generated factors have interesting financial interpretations and are consistent with the major economic themes of the period. We find that there are two sets of general market betas during the period along with a dominant factor for energy and materials sector. In addition, we find that the EGARCH model which accommodates asymmetric responses between returns and volatility can plausibly fit the high levels of variance during the crash. Finally, estimated correlations dropped when commodity prices moved higher, but then spiked when the S&P500 crashed in late 2008.     

CONSTRUCTING AN ENVIRONMENTALLY-EXTENDED MULTI-REGIONAL INPUT–OUTPUT TABLE USING THE GTAP DATABASE

The use of Multi-Regional Input–Output Analysis (MRIOA) for understanding global environmental problems is growing rapidly. Renewed interest in MRIOA has led to several large research projects focused on constructing detailed and accurate MRIOTs. However, very few researchers have made use of the already available and regularly updated database produced by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP). We demonstrate and discuss how the GTAP database can be converted into an MRIOT without the need for additional balancing. An illustrative example uses the GTAP-MRIO to reallocate carbon dioxide emissions from producing to consuming countries. We suggest that an MRIOT that treats international transport exogenously is adequate until more reliable data on international transport margins and emissions are available. To focus resources and refine methods, a concerted research effort is needed to compare the results of the GTAP-MRIO model with the new MRIO datasets under development.     

The Interface of Work to Family Conflict and Racioethnic Identification: An Analysis of Hispanic Business Professionals

This article examines work to family conflict for Hispanic Business Professionals with varied levels of Hispanic identity. Based on this study of 971 Hispanics from across the United States, results show that level of Hispanic identity moderates the relationship between work to family conflict and job satisfaction. The authors posit that identification with a culture of collectivism may attenuate the negative impact of work to family conflict on job satisfaction, enabling Hispanic professionals to view work as a way of supporting the family and contributing to the greater good of the groups to which they belong.     

Bringing Ecosystem Services into the Real World: An Operational Framework for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Losing Wild Nature

Policy action to halt the global loss of biodiversity and ecosystems is hindered by the perception that it would be so costly as to compromise economic development, yet this assumption needs testing. Inspired by the recent Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the leaders of the G8+5 nations commissioned a similar assessment of the economics of losing biodiversity, under the Potsdam Initiative on Biodiversity. Here, we propose a conceptual framework for such a global assessment which emphasizes several critical insights from the environmental economics and valuation literature: contrasting counterfactual scenarios which differ solely in whether they include specific conservation policies; identifying non-overlapping benefits; modeling the production, flow, use and value of benefits in a spatially-explicit way; and incorporating the likely costs as well as possible benefits of policy interventions. Tackling these challenges, we argue, will significantly enhance our ability to quantify how the loss of benefits derived from ecosystems and biodiversity compares with the costs incurred in retaining them. We also summarise a review of the current state of knowledge, in order to assess how quickly this framework could be operationalized for some key ecosystem services.     

Adapting auctions for the provision of ecosystem services at the landscape scale

Auctions, or competitive tenders, can overcome information asymmetries to efficiently allocate limited funding for ecosystem services. Most auctions focus on ecosystem services on individual properties to maximise the total amount provided. However, for many services it is not just the total quantity but their location in the landscape relative to other sites that matters. For example, biodiversity conservation may be much more effective if conserved sites are connected. Adapting auctions to address ecosystem services at the landscape scale requires an auction mechanism which can promote coordination while maintaining competition. Multi-round auctions, in which bidding is spread over a number of rounds with information provided between rounds on the location of other bids in the landscape, offer an approach to cost effectively deliver landscape-scale ecosystem services. Experimental economic testing shows these auctions deliver the most cost effective environmental outcomes when the number of rounds is unknown in advance, which minimises rent-seeking behaviour. It also shows that a form of bid-improvement rule facilitates coordination and reduces rent seeking. Where the biophysical science is well developed, such auctions should be relatively straightforward to implement and participate in, and have the potential to provide significantly better outcomes than standard ‘one-shot’ tenders.     

Modelling intervention options to reduce GHG emissions in housing stock — A diffusion approach

The building sector is regarded as having one of the highest benefit-cost ratios from greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction strategies. However, because of uncertainties around household behaviour patterns, it is very difficult to assess and compare the GHG reduction impacts of different intervention schemes for whole housing stock. Intervention schemes include policy instruments such as incentives or rebates for energy efficient appliances or renewable energy, and regulatory building code requirements for energy efficiency. This paper presents a decision support tool based on mathematical diffusion that evaluates the adoption levels of different schemes or pathways towards reducing GHG emissions in housing stock. It is an extension of the Bass diffusion model that accommodates financial and non-financial benefits, ceilings of adoption and interactions between intervention options. The model capability was tested using a case study of seven suburbs in Brisbane, Australia, comprising of 25,000 houses and units. Estimates of GHG emission reductions to 2019 of a household rebate scheme for solar panels and a rebate scheme for solar hot water compared to a base case of no rebates were presented and analysed. Modelling also allowed identification of important characteristics of adoption trends that could assist policy makers and industry to substantially improve the design of effective intervention options.