Article
An empirical study of consumer-based city brand equity from signalling theory perspective
The concept of city brand equity has caught attention of many marketing scholars, but because of complex nature of cities it remains one of the difficult concepts to quantify. In this article, we develop an approach to measuring city brand equity by evaluating city quality. According to signalling theory, city branding is the signal for consumers that communicates the city quality. The signal credibility creates city brand equity. This cannot be measured directly but can be evaluated through the city quality, which, in turn, represents the ability to fulfil residents’ needs. This study uses the conjoint analysis technique to measure city quality as a driver of consumer-based city brand equity. The approach is applied to the case of city branding campaign in Perm, Russia, to examine the roots of the city’s brand failure and propose the ways to strengthen consumer-based city brand equity.
By analogy with contemporary business practices, nowadays, city managers need to become “residents’ – centric”, as competition for residents and resources increases. The ultimate goal of such an approach is to boost the level of satisfaction with the city. Several researches raised the problem of city satisfaction conceptualization and measurement. To contribute to this discussion, we develop an assessment method, which takes into consideration subjective and situational nature of satisfaction. To test the method we have carried out an empirical research, employing the representative sample of the residents for a large Russian city, Perm. The results allow for the illustration of the cumulative and hierarchical nature of city satisfaction, and, hopefully, contribute both to the theoretical aspects and practicalities of place management.
The article is devoted to the problem of communicative features of the constructive structure of the font identity in the city branding sphere. This problem is considered in the framework of the nonlinearity of visual communication based on typology, comparative and structural analysis of the font identity of the world's cities. The article analyzes the brand identity of the city of Murmansk (2015) with the use of qualitative research methods: an expert interview with the designer of Murmansk identity.
One of the most important indicators of company's success is the increase of its value. The article investigates traditional methods of company's value assessment and the evidence that the application of these methods is incorrect in the new stage of economy. So it is necessary to create a new method of valuation based on the new main sources of company's success that is its intellectual capital.
Real estate housing market in former USSR was highly regulated and standardized in terms of product offering. Transition economy slightly changes this situation – consumers start to demand the new quality of housing while developers begin to implement the advanced building technologies and change the product attributes. The structure of consumers’ preferences forms product utility, which could be measured by using decompositional methods. We implement hierarchical information integration approach that let us represent the real estate housing object utility as a sum of part-worth utilities of various attributes. Using special research design we estimate the utility of current market offer. The results highlight that the reason of poor sales performance could underlie in the gap between consumers’ preferences and real estate housing items configuration.
Smoking is a problem, bringing signifi cant social and economic costs to Russiansociety. However, ratifi cation of the World health organization Framework conventionon tobacco control makes it possible to improve Russian legislation accordingto the international standards. So, I describe some measures that should be taken bythe Russian authorities in the nearest future, and I examine their effi ciency. By studyingthe international evidence I analyze the impact of the smoke-free areas, advertisementand sponsorship bans, tax increases, etc. on the prevalence of smoking, cigaretteconsumption and some other indicators. I also investigate the obstacles confrontingthe Russian authorities when they introduce new policy measures and the public attitudetowards these measures. I conclude that there is a number of easy-to-implementanti-smoking activities that need no fi nancial resources but only a political will.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.