Hans Ouwersloot

Consumer Evaluations of Service Brand Extensions

Branding decisions are becoming increasingly important in services, but little service-specific research has focused on this domain so far. This is surprising, as the service industry accounts for an ever-growing share of the global economy, whereas service aspects have become increasingly important for all goods. Marketing managers may want to capitalize on previously acquired brand equity by extending a reputable brand to a new category. Little is known, however, about the extent to which consumerbased brand equity transfers to unrelated categories in a services context. The authors have replicated Aaker and Keller’s (1990) study and extended it to the services domain. Our data set provides evidence that in a services context, consumers use complementarity to the original category as a major cue to evaluate extensions. As a consequence, brand extension strategies could probably be used most successfully in cases where a significant similarity in service delivery processes exists.

Service Intensiveness and Brand Extension Evaluations

The authors have performed an experimental study to assess whether an extension with relatively low service intensiveness compared to the parent product is evaluated differently from an extension with higher service intensiveness. The empirical evidence from this article indicates that the quality of an extension product will be evaluated more favorably when it involves lower service intensiveness than higher service intensiveness. Furthermore, the results reveal that the difference in extension evaluations, due to the varying levels of service intensiveness involved in the extension products, is positively affected by the perceived similarity between an extension and its parent product. Finally, it is also found that consumers have different postevaluations on the parent brand due to different degrees of service intensiveness involved in the extension products. Meanwhile, the perceived similarity will reinforce this difference in consumers’postevaluations.

The geography of R&D: tobit analysis and a Bayesian approach to mapping R&D activities in the Netherlands

Regions vary strongly according to the participation of firms in R&D activity. By linking data on R&D activity at the firm level with GIS-based data on economic and other location features of regions, we are able to investigate the impact of local factors on R&D involvement for various types of firms. The relative importance of local factors as determinants of the R&D involvement of firms is estimated by means of a tobit model. Rather strong differences are found between zones in the same urban region. For example, modern manufacturing firms located in the centre of large cities have relatively low levels of R&D, and the opposite holds for rings of zones at certain distances from the cities. Bayesian methods are used for map presentations of the survey data.

Sustainable urban transport systems. An expert-based strategic scenario approach

Current trends in transport indicate that the system is moving away from sustainability and that major changes are necessary to make the transport system more compatible with environmental sustainability. Main problems may occur in urban transport, where not many promising solutions are expected, while the problems are severe. In view of the great number of uncertainties, we will in our paper resort to the use of scenarios. We will address in particular expert scenarios, concerned with a sustainable transport system, by applying the recently developed spider model. Based on a set of distinct characteristics, represented in eight axes in the spatial, institutional, economic and social-psychological field, an evaluation framework is constructed which visualises the driving forces that largely influence the future of the urban transport system. Next, expected and desired scenarios are constructed on the basis of information obtained from a survey among Dutch transport experts (both average scenarios and scenarios reflecting segments of respondents). The expected scenarios show that many current trends will continue, while the transport system is largely the same as the current one. The desired scenarios on the other hand, suggest the emergence and the need for a more collective system, in which also many new modes are operating. In the paper the resulting urban transport systems are also discussed. By calculating the CO2 emissions in the average expected and desired scenario, we can test the fulfilment of environmental quality norms. It appears that the expected scenario does not lead to a significant reduction of those emissions; the desired scenario however, may lead to a large scale reduction of the emissions. The conclusion is that the differences in expert opinion are small and that a sustainable (urban) transport system is still far away in the future, although the compact city concept may perhaps offer a promising perspective.

Multidimensional Sustainability Analysis: the Flag Model

This chapter presents a new approach to the analysis of spatial sustainability, with a particular view on agriculture. After a methodological introduction, a new tool, the so-called Flag model, is introduced in order to assess the degree of sustainability of various policy alternatives. The model is illustrated by means of a case study for the island of Lesvos, Greece.

QUALITATIVE DATA AND ERROR MEASUREMENT IN INPUT-OUTPUT-ANALYSIS

This paper is a contribution to the rapidly emerging field of qualitative data analysis in economics. Ordinal data techniques and error measurement in input-output analysis are here combined in order to test the reliability of a low level of measurement and precision of data by means of a stochastic method for transforming ordinal into cardinal data by using a minimum number of assumptions. The method is flexible enough to deal with various kinds of ordinal data, allowing a great degree of freedom in the formulation of the qualitative information. The validity of the method is tested by applying it to an existing regional input-output table for the Netherlands. It is concluded that the ordinal data method developed here gives a fairly reliable replication of the underlying quantitative input-output data.