More Isn't Always Better: Exploring the Influence of Familiarity When Using Multiple Celebrity Endorsers

Marketers continually employ celebrity endorsers as a promotional tactic to enhance brand awareness and increase sales. Frequently, companies will use multiple celebrities to endorse the same product, but feature them individually across a series of concurrent advertisements. While this tactic is often used in practice, its effectiveness has not been thoroughly examined within the academic literature. Our research investigates the value of using multiple concurrent endorsers and the moderating role that celebrity familiarity has on attitudes toward the brand and purchase intentions. Results suggest that using multiple endorsers concurrently is not always the best approach.     

刍议名人效应对旅游地开发的影响、问题及思考

唐代诗人刘禹锡《陋室铭》中有“山不在高,有仙则名;水不在深,有龙则灵”,形象而深刻地阐明了“名人效应”的原理。仅从旅游景观审美角度,不秀之山,不灵之水,本无开发价值,但与历史名人结缘,便引人瞩目。旅游地宜充分发挥“名人效应”,利用其深厚文化内涵,开展丰富的旅游活动,使旅游地的旅游业可持续发展。     

Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City': Implications for Research and Theory

While voices in the comparative urbanism literature call for researchers to approach comparison with more experimental and critical methodologies, there remains no consensus on how to design and realize these studies. This essay examines the implications of comparative urbanism for researching the ‘Asian City'. Given the critique of existing modes of comparison embedded in recent calls for a new comparative urbanism, researchers are faced with a number of pressing questions: How do we approach this ‘regional' topic in a way that both resists categorizing the ‘Asian City' as an exotic ‘other', elevating it onto a mythical pedestal, yet appreciates its differences, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular' (Clifford, 1997; Werbner and Modood, 1997)? This essay thus highlights the multiple challenges of applying the comparative lens to the ‘Asian City', arguing that broader conceptualizations of the ‘Asian City' help to address the dangers in isolating Asian research into its own canon of parochial urban theory and offering a greater diversity of possibilities for justifying case selection in comparative approaches. In doing so, we hope that this essay responds to the comparative turn by illuminating to some extent its inherent complexity and methodological challenges.     

‘I'm like you,and I like what you like’ sustainable food purchase influenced by vloggers: A moderated serial-mediation model

Internationally, researchers have shown an increased interest in customer decision-making regarding sustainable food choices that could be changed through tailored interventions. This study examines how vloggers influence customer purchase intention toward sustainable food. Based on the similarity-attraction theory, we undertook a serial mediation model in which health-related Homophily between vloggers and viewers was related to higher purchase intention of sustainable food via audience participation and parasocial interaction (P.S.I.). In addition, we tested whether these potential relationships were more substantial for young people from higher product-vlogger congruence and lower advertising recognition in the celebrity endorsement context. A statistical analysis of 382 youth questionnaire data from the steaming media platform was tested through the partial least squares structural equation model. The results show that (1) health-related homophily was related to greater audience participation and P.S.I., which, in turn, were related to higher purchase intention of sustainable food; (2) the positive indirect effects of health-related Homophily on purchase intention through audience participation and P.S.I. decrease as the advertising recognition increase, while increase as the product-vlogger congruence increase. These findings highlight the effectiveness of digital celebrity endorsement in young people's choices for sustainable food.     

考虑引流作用与定价权的网红直播带货定价策略分析

构建一个由制造商与零售商组成的二级双渠道供应链,其中制造商一方面为零售商供货,另一方面通过直播渠道销售产品。考虑到网红直播能够为线下零售引流,分别讨论网红主播有直播渠道定价权与制造商有直播渠道定价权两种情况下供应链成员最优决策问题。研究发现：在制造商拥有直播渠道定价权时,零售价格与直播渠道价格均高于网红主播拥有直播渠道定价权时的情景,制造商与网红主播谁拥有直播渠道定价权谁就在直播带货中更有利可图。当制造商拥有渠道定价权且选择头部主播进行带货时,零售商存在着“搭便车”的现象。     

The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

This article investigates the relationship between verticality and home. It develops the idea of ‘verticality as practice'. This appreciates verticality not as something that takes place in three‐dimensional landscapes, but as the outcome of everyday practical activity. Examining a modernist high‐rise estate, the Aylesbury Estate in London, the article identifies and examines a range of vertical practices, illustrating how they are intertwined with home. Vertical practices, such as those associated with the view, help to make a unique and special home, becoming intensely meaningful to residents. However, they also unmake dimensions of home when they interact with the estate's marginality.     

Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria

The proliferation of religious spaces is a relatively recent development in Nigeria. Nowadays there are more than a hundred religious camps belonging to different religious groups in the country. The most popular of these camps, the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is located 42 kilometres outside of Lagos and measures several thousand acres. Although initially not designed as such, developments in and around Lagos have compelled the managers of the Redemption Camp to present it as an urban alternative to the city of Lagos, which is generally deemed chaotic. The prestige of this camp and its activities have led to expansive urban development that involves the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to beyond the Redemption Camp. Based on a recent ethnographic study of the Redemption Camp, this article argues that the process of urban expansion in and around Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest. This article thus illustrates how church‐driven, religio‐urban developments follow a different logic of city making than often presumed by theorists of African cities, who generally neglect the religious forces that inform urban transformations in Africa.     

Performance deviations and acquisition premiums: The impact of CEO celebrity on managerial risk‐taking

Research summary: This article draws on identity control theory and a study of acquisition premiums to explore how CEO celebrity status and financial performance relative to aspirations affect firm risk behavior. The study finds that celebrity CEOs tend to pay smaller premiums for target firms, but these tendencies change when prior firm performance deviates from the industry average returns, thereby leading these CEOs to pay higher premiums. The study also finds that the premiums tend to be even larger when celebrity CEOs have more recently attained celebrity status. Taken together, these findings contribute to identity control theory and CEO celebrity literatures by suggesting that celebrity status is a double‐edged sword and that the internalization of celebrity status by CEOs strongly influences the decision‐making of CEOs. Managerial summary: The purpose of this article is to examine how CEO celebrity status and financial performance relative to aspirations affect the size of acquisition premiums. The study finds that celebrity CEOs tend to pay smaller premiums for target firms. However, when celebrity CEOs' prior firm performance is either better or worse than the industry average, these CEOs pay higher premiums. This situation is exacerbated when the CEO has only recently been crowned a celebrity. In effect, these CEOs feel great pressure to match the inflated performance expectations that come with celebrity status. These findings suggest that being a celebrity is a double‐edged sword. The implication here is that CEOs who have recently been crowned a celebrity should be aware of these pressures and cope accordingly. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City

City governments are embracing data-driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data-driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, they can depoliticize planning decisions. I argue that this shift calls urban studies scholars to investigate geographies of algorithmic violence—a repetitive and standardized form of violence that contributes to the racialization of space and spatialization of poverty. This article examines this broader phenomenon through the case of a proprietary market value assessment that is being used to guide development in cities across the United States. The assessment employs an algorithm that helps city officials make critical decisions about which neighborhoods to target for investment, disinvestment and public service upgrades or disconnections. I argue that the racial, infrastructural, and epistemological violence associated with this evaluation can potentially lead to a new kind of municipal redlining. The article brings insights from critical race theory into conversation with critical scholarship on algorithms by analyzing how algorithmic violence works through data-driven planning technologies to depoliticize and leverage power while further entrenching racism and inequality.