Joseph Vella

Organizational commitment and users’ perception of ease of use: a study among bank managers

– The purpose of this paper is to look at the issue of perceived ease of use of a web‐based customer relationship management system and consider the role of organizational commitment as a possible antecedent., – Data for this study were collected from among managers of a major player in the community banking sector within the EU. A total of 274 valid responses were obtained from 398 managers., – Results have been mixed and partially conditioned by service providers’ willingness to leverage the possibilities that the technology can provide., – The study was limited to a single organization and consequently the results should be generalized with caution. Replication studies with improved measures, in other countries and contexts are desirable., – The results can be useful for management, since Web‐based customer relationship management systems have been adopted by many service providers in their quest to offer better one‐to‐one marketing possibilities to their customers., – This paper demonstrates the importance of fostering a sense of organizational commitment amongst key service providers, as this in turn seems to enable them to overcome many impediments pertaining to technology use.

The relationship between adult playfulness and viewers’ response to advert execution: an initial exploration

Adult Playfulness with advertising can be described as the way individuals derive enjoyment during their interaction process with advertising. It is an area that has received little attention in the literature. The study adopts an interactionist approach to playfulness that recognises the role of both trait and state theory. It investigates the correlations among the dimensions of adult playfulness and those on the Viewer Response Profile and considers whether the level of adult playfulness impacts on viewer response to different advertisement execution. Findings indicate that advertisement executions are not equally effective at reaching individuals with higher levels of playfulness. Implications for theory and management are discussed, limitations are noted and directions for future research indicated.

Exploring emotions on wine websites : finding joy

ABSTRACT There is little research on the emotions expressed by wine estate websites and whether the emotions conveyed are related to or can significantly predict the positive or negative sentiment articulated by these websites. In order to examine the emotions and sentiment of wine estate websites, content from the websites of 10 wine estates from 5 countries well known for their diverse and high-quality wines (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, the USA) were selected and analyzed using IBM’s Watson. IBM’s Watson assessed the emotions and sentiment expressed on each website, and an output was then used in a multiple regression analysis with emotions predicting sentiment. The findings show that emotions are not related significantly to the overall sentiment on the winery websites. Finally, this research shows how wine estates and wine marketers can test whether the content of their websites mirrors the emotions that they desire to express to consumers and visitors, which can assure that appropriate expectations are set for the consumption experience.

Thespis: Actor-Based Causal Consistency

Thespis is a middleware that innovatively leverages the Actor model to implement causal consistency over an industry-standard database, whilst abstracting complexities for application developers behind a REST open-protocol interface. Our evaluation considers correctness, performance and scalability aspects. We also run empirical experiments using YCSB to show the efficacy of the approach for a variety of workloads.

ThespisDIIP: Distributed Integrity Invariant Preservation

Thespis is a distributed database middleware that leverages the Actor model to implement causal consistency over an industry-standard DBMS, whilst abstracting complexities for application developers behind a REST open-protocol interface. ThespisDIIP is an extension that treats the concept of integrity invariance preservation for the class of problems where value changes must be satisfied according to a Linear Arithmetic Inequality constraint. An example of this constraint is a system enforcing a constraint that a transaction is only accepted if there are sufficient funds in a bank account. Our evaluation considers correctness, performance and scalability aspects of ThespisDIIP. We also run empirical experiments using YCSB to show the efficacy of the approach for a variety of workloads and a number of conditions, determining that integrity invariants are preserved in a causally-consistent distributed database, whilst minimising latency in the user’s critical path.

The Taste of Ageing, a 26-Year Analysis of Publications in the International Journal of Wine Business Research : An Abstract

This study analyses the content of the International Journal of Wine Business Research (IJWBR) and gives editors, reviewers, authors and practitioners an overview over the journal’s development ove ...

Mapping Country Wine Brand Personalities, Examples from Five Nations: An Abstract

This paper presents a study of wine estate websites in five different countries and regions designed to explore which dimensions of brand personality wine estates exhibit online, to determine whether wine estates in different countries portray different dimensions of brand personality. The study uses text content from wine estate websites and analyzes it using the text analysis software Diction. Typical applications of the BPS include comparisons of brand personalities within an offering category utilizing questionnaires in which respondents indicate the extent to which the brands being compared possess dimensions of brand personality, namely, sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

Where to visit, what to drink? A cross-national perspective on wine estate brand personalities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how brand personality and its dimensions can be applied to wine tourism, and how a content analysis of the text taken from a wine estate’s website can be used to derive a snapshot of how brand personality is communicated. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses the text analysis software DICTION to identify the extent to which each estate’s website communicates the brand personality dimensions of excitement, competence, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication, and then agglomerates the scores of individual estates within a region to overall scores for the country or wine region in which they are located. Findings Major findings are that the southern hemisphere producers, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, communicate all five brand personality dimensions to a greater extent than do the northern hemisphere regions of Bordeaux and Napa. Furthermore, while the levels of brand personality communication may differ, all countries and regions seem to follow the same pattern, or stated differently, emphasize the same brand personalities as their international counterparts. Excitement is the main dimension communicated, and then sincerity. Ruggedness and competence are communicated to a lesser extent and sophistication is hardly communicated at all. Research limitations/implications The countries/regions selected for the study are among the most popular tourist destination wineries within five of the world’s prominent wine producing countries and regions. However, this selection is arbitrary and were also carefully chosen merely by the simplicity and convenience afforded by a Google search. The results are also an aggregation of the wineries within a region and does not give any indication of the brand personality of a single website for a winery with in a region, which might be very different from the aggregation. Practical implications Wine tourism is a big business for many wine estates as well as regional and national economies, generating huge potential for economic growth and job creation above and beyond the production and sale of wine. The paper offers a practical insight for wineries that want to portray themselves to the world and especially to their target customers. At a general level, the approach illustrated here provides a way for those who manage wine tourism at the national, regional and estate levels to gauge whether the personality of their brand is being communicated online as they intend it to be. Social implications Wine tourism is very social in nature, and the findings in this study offers a unique understanding of how customers could perceive their destination especially where they are looking to experience the wine estate among similar minded people. A wine estate marketer might wish to be conveying a personality of sophistication and competence, and then be informed by a study like this that the brand is instead being communicated as exciting and sincere. Originality/value The paper illustrates the use of powerful content analysis software, DICTION, to determine the extent to which this text specifically communicates dimensions of brand personality, and in broader terms gives a feel for the tone of text. Regular use of the technique helps wine marketing decision makers to track their own brand’s personality as well those of competitors over time.

Using an aesthetics and ontology framework to investigate consumers’ attitudes toward luxury wine brands as a product category: Evidence from two countries

Purpose This paper aims to classify and investigate customer attitudes toward luxury wine brands in the USA (a developed market) and South Africa (a developing market) by using an aesthetic and ontological framework. Design/methodology/approach Using recognized scales, consumers’ ontological and aesthetic orientation and attitudes toward luxury wine brands as part of a product category are measured. Data for the USA sample were collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, whereas the South African sample data were collected from a sample of Generation Y consumers. Using the two orientation scores, it was possible to create a 2 × 2 matrix with low and high scores for the two countries investigated. To determine the relationship between the resultant groups and attitude toward wine, ANOVA was performed. Differences among the groups were identified via a comparison of means. Findings The results suggest that the use of aesthetics and ontological orientations enables the identification of different luxury wine consumer modes in the two countries studied. In addition, these demonstrate significantly different attitudes toward luxury wine brands as part of a product category. Research limitations/implications The samples for both countries were collected using a non-probability sampling method, and any generalization to the greater populations must be undertaken with caution. Practical implications The findings demonstrate a unique approach that provides an alternative form of segmentation for luxury wine brands. Recommendations to target the different identified modes and how these impact attitudes toward luxury wine brands as a product category in the two countries are made. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature by providing a unique and alternative method of market segmentation and shows how this affect attitudes toward luxury wine brands as a product category.

A conflict resolution abstraction layer for eventually consistent databases

When dealing with eventually consistent systems, application developers are often required to write their own conflict resolution algorithms. The aim of this work is to provide an abstraction layer for an eventually consistent database, namely CouchDB, and its client side implementation, PouchDB in a manner which makes it easier for software developers to use. This is achieved through a JavaScript framework which provides a higher level of abstraction on top of PouchDB, while focusing on improving an application developers experience with regards to conflict resolution mechanisms within the eventually consistent NoSQL database. This is done by giving the developer a choice of pre-set algorithms which handle any arising conflicts between data documents or alternatively, the choice of using custom designed algorithms.