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Designers must recognise the significance of a brand logo’s visual elements as they convey various meanings. While studies have attempted to collate visual elements, efforts have often been limited to specific types of visual elements (e.g. typefaces) or restricted to certain product categories. This study aims to conceptualise a comprehensive list of visual elements used in brand logos and to validate it based on the top 500 global brand logos across eight product categories.

A comprehensive list was conceptualised through a combination of literature review, interviews with experts and observations of real brand logos. Using this exhaustive compilation, content analysis of the top 500 global brand logos was conducted to discern the prevalent trends of the visual elements in logos across various product categories.

The content analysis results highlighted an extensive preference for use of wordmark, no outline and horizontal proportion in brand logos. Overall, 42.6% and 31% of brands preferred using cool and neutral colours, respectively. Moreover, the preference for colour categories (warm/cool/neutral), font types (organic/geometric) and stacking of elements (horizontal/vertical/diagonal) varied across product categories.

This study contributes to the literature by creating a comprehensive guidebook of visual elements of logos. It also offers guidance to in-house and third-party designers of companies for logo design to better understand the nuances of intellectual property related to logo elements and assists managers in comparing their brands’ visual identity with those of their competitors.

Managers prefer semantic imbeds in brand names, but extant literature has primarily studied fictitious names for their sound-symbolic perceptions. This paper aims to explore sound-symbolic perceptions of products with blended brand names (BBNs), formed with at least one semantic and one nonsemantic component. Unlike most extant literature, this study not only estimates the effect of vowels and consonants individually on product perceptions but also of their combinations. The boundary condition for this effect is examined by classifying products by their categorization and attributes by their abstractness.

Through a within-subject experiment, this paper tested perceptions of products with BBNs having high-/low-frequency sounds. A mixed-design experiment followed with sound frequency, product-level categorization and attributes’ abstractness as predictor variables.

For BBNs, vowel sounds convey brand meaning better than the combinations of vowel and consonant sounds – and these convey brand meaning better than consonant sounds. Differences in consumers’ perceptions of products with BBNs occur when the degree of attributes’ abstractness matches product-level categorization, such as when concrete attributes match subordinate-level categorization.

Brand managers/strategists can communicate product positioning (attribute-based) through BBNs created specifically for product categories and product types.

This research presents a comparative analysis across vowels, consonants and their combinations on consumers’ perceptions of products with BBNs. Manipulation of names’ length and position of the sound-symbolic imbed in the BBN proffered additional contributions. Another novelty is the interaction effect of product categorization levels and attributes’ abstractness on sound-symbolic perception.

This study aims to investigate the influence of Big Five Personality traits (i.e. openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) on young consumers’ intentions to share branded viral video advertisements. Further, this study also demonstrates that the advertising appeal (informational versus emotional) used in the viral advertisement moderates the effects of specific personality traits on the sharing of viral ads.

A conceptual framework is proposed based on the Five-Factor Model of Personality (McCrae and John, 1992) and advertising effectiveness literature. Using experiments, responses from young consumers were collected and hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression and ANOVA.

Results reveal that the two personality traits, extraversion and openness to experiences, are positively associated with consumers’ viral ad sharing intentions, whereas conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism are not. Moreover, individuals scoring high on openness and extraversion prefer sharing branded viral ads containing informational appeal vis-ã-vis those containing emotional appeals.

Studies decoding the factors behind the success of viral advertisements have more often focussed on the ad content rather than on personality dimensions of the ad sharers. This study bridges this gap by investigating the influence of Big Five Personality traits on young consumers’ intention to forward viral ads, in interaction with ad appeal. Young consumers represent key audience segments consuming and sharing viral content online, and hence, it is important to have a deeper understanding of this market segment.

Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising.

This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India.

By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons.

Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly.

This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the sustainability of current accounts for five major South Asian economies, namely, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, for the period 1985–2016.

The study employs the intertemporal solvency model of Hakkio and Rush (1991) and Husted (1992). Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds test, Gregory and Hansen’s test and Carrion-i-Silvestre and Sanso’s test are used to assess the cointegration between current account inflows and outflows. The coefficients of long-run relationship are obtained using dynamic ordinary least squares. Besides the econometric investigation, the study also examines some other indicators such as the composition of current account, size of external debt, etc., to shed further light on the sustainability of current accounts.

The study finds support for the long-run relationship between the current account outflows and inflows for all the countries. The estimates of slope coefficient indicate strong sustainability in case of India, Bangladesh and Nepal, whereas weak sustainability holds for Sri Lanka and Pakistan underscoring the need for policy interventions. In a comparative perspective, the current accounts in India, Nepal and Bangladesh conform more to a sustainable behavior in terms of the size of deficits, external debt stock and compliance to the intertemporal budget constraint.

The study employs econometric techniques allowing for structural breaks in the assessment of current account sustainability. Besides using the intertemporal model, the study also examines factors such as composition of current accounts, size of external debts, etc., to evaluate sustainability.

Need for preventive health care: To comprehend the contribution of preventive health care in improving the health quotient. Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital (SSSSH) and its initiative is an apt example of the wonder which preventive care can bring in the context of rural health. Community participation: The case can be instrumental in showing the pathway to encourage community involvement in mainstream health by promoting the holistic model of SSSSH that understands mothers and children's health profile and needs, especially in the unreached rural segments of an emerging economy like India. Importance of healthy childhood: World Health Organization (WHO) promotes the school health programme to prevent health risks among children by inculcating healthy behaviours during childhood. The successful SSSSH model proves that it is implementable by integrating comprehensive health education modules in the existing institutions for medical care.

The challenge of a healthy childhood is inadequate availability and accessibility of quality care. Non-awareness of the parents is also a significant reason for the children who miss the benefit of a happy childhood. While much is planned by the Government and some part of it being executed, this case highlights the effectiveness of the maternal and child health programme executed by the Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital (SSSSH). This initiative fulfills the dire need of ensuring the preventive healthcare component leading to safe motherhood and safe birth of healthy children. Further, the case is also the culmination of pin-pointed innovative awareness activities such as school health screening and the Divine Mother and Child Health Program (DMCHP). It opens up the discussion on the current model of health care followed by SSSSH, Raipur, and its impact in the local areas to decide on its expansion across the country for nationwide implementation.

Bachelors in Business Administration, MBA, Executive MBA, Post Graduate Diploma in Healthcare Management

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