Gabriella Spinelli

Effects of brand love, personality and image on word of mouth

Purpose – Fashion brand love is a central concept in the consumer‐brand relationship domain. Brand managers tend to create more lovable brands, e.g. McDonalds “I’m lovin it”. However, the importance of this concept is not frequently discussed in marketing literature. Furthermore, the impact of brand personality and brand image on brand love has not been investigated in any empirical research. This paper aims to address this gap by developing a causal model incorporating brand love, brand personality, brand image and word of mouth (WOM) to investigate the relationships among them.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected using a survey method and usable questionnaires were completed by 250 undergraduate students. Path analysis was used to test the hypotheses using AMOS 16.0.Findings – Results revealed that only brand image is considered as a determinant of brand love that affects WOM along with brand personality.Practical implications – Results provide detailed implications and a platform on which...

Understanding complex cognitive systems: the role of space in the organisation of collaborative work

This paper aims to provide some insights about the role of space as computational resource in collaborative practices. Focusing on collaborative design activity within a consulting firm in the UK, this research employs ethnographically inspired methods to investigate collaborative work. The paper is organised in seven main sections: introduction, previous work, theoretical framework, research methodology, findings, discussion and technological implications. The introduction provides an illustration of the area tackled in this work highlighting the relevance of context in human behaviour. Considering a collaborative activity as a socio-technical unit of analysis, the literature review presents alternative approaches to information processing. Extended cognition is then introduced as theoretical tool. The methodological section illustrates the ethnographically oriented methods for the data collection. The findings are then discussed according to a twofold structure summarising the features that space has in collaboration: (1) conversational support and creation of narratives and (2) cognitive scaffolding. The discussion raises issues that transcend the observations of design activity and extend the debate to the analysis of collaboration. These considerations then contribute to a reflection on the design of new technology for group support.

Multi-agent collaboration based on enhanced cognitive awareness: an architecture for agents' profiling on the semantic web

This paper applies cognitive models, inspired by cognitive science, with the aim to propose architectural and knowledge-based requirements to structure ontological models for the cognitive profiling of agents. The proposed architecture aims to address the lack of flexibility that most agent-based collaborations are affected by. The resulting agents, equipped with advanced cognitive profiling, have an increased cognitive awareness of themselves and are more capable of interacting with other agents in a multi-agents based environment. In this research, cognitive awareness identifies the ability of the web agents to diagnose their processing limitations and to establish interactions with the external environment. The outcome is the enhanced flexibility, reusability and predictability of the agent behaviour; thus contributing towards minimizing human cognitive demands. The concept of cognitive profiling presented in this paper considers the semantic web as an action mediating space, where ontological models provide affordances for improving cognitive awareness through shared knowledge-base. The conceptual model for the cognitive profile architecture is developed with Protege Ontology editor to generate OWL Ontology and evaluated through a proof of concept. The results show that agents equipped with cognitive awareness can undertake complex tasks more dynamically.

Intelligence management and complexities: a case study approach

Intelligence management is critical to organisations operating in non-routine and unpredictable environments such as the United Kingdom (UK) Police service. The increased number of artefacts used for the representation, access and communication of intelligence are creating complexities in intelligence management owing to the multidirectional and simultaneous information and intelligence flows. This results in a lack of coordination between, and acknowledgement of, the social and technical components participating in intelligence management. This paper considers the critical issues related to intelligence management and the complex set of information sources that partake in this activity. Multiple case studies were undertaken with 15 UK Police intelligence units to understand the people, processes and technologies participating in intelligence management and cognitive ergonomic methods led to a system analysis of its activities and artefacts. The research offers a socio-technical approach to explicitly account for the combined role and impact of awareness and artefacts on managing intelligence.