No abstract

Abstract'Branding' is well known for consumer products. Power has shifted from manufacturers' brands towards retailers'. Branding may become more important for shopping centres. The authors firstly investigated qualitatively. Shoppers described centres in 'personality' terms. One in-town centre was 'dull, boring and old-fashioned … not exciting, just OK'. A larger regional centre was 'trendy, prestigious … strong, vibrant, big and colourful'. Secondly, the authors evaluated quantitatively. Their method was applied to six UK shopping centres, via a questionnaire survey of 287 shoppers. The 'strong and vibrant' centre scored significantly higher than the 'dull and boring' one. 'Pro-active marketing' is central to UK shopping centres. Despite 'branding' being little used, active brand management of shopping centres can pay rewards in customer numbers, sales turnover and rental income.

No abstract

No abstract

PURPOSE Guidelines encourage primary care clinicians to document smoking status when obtaining patients' blood pressure, temperature, and pulse rate (vital signs), but whether this practice promotes cessation counseling is unclear. We examined whether the vital sign intervention infl uences patient-reported frequency and intensity of tobacco cessation counseling. METHODSThis study was a cluster-randomized, controlled trial conducted in the Virginia Ambulatory Care Outcomes Research Network (ACORN). At intervention practices, nurses and medical assistants were instructed to assess the tobacco use status of every adult patient and record it with the traditional vital signs. Control practices did not use any systematic tobacco screening or identifi cation system. Outcomes were the proportion of smokers reporting clinician counseling of any kind and the frequency of 2 counseling subcomponents: simple quit advice and more intensive discussion.RESULTS A total of 6,729 adult patients (1,149 smokers) at 18 primary care practices completed exit questionnaires during a 6-month comparison period. Among 561 smokers at intervention practices, 61.9% reported receiving any counseling, compared with 53.4% of the 588 smokers at control practices, for a difference of 8.6% (P = .04). The effect was largely restricted to simple advice, which was reported by 59.9% of intervention patients and 51.5% of control patients (P = .04). There was no signifi cant increase in more extensive discussion, with 32.5% and 29.3% of patients at intervention and control practices, respectively, reporting this type of counseling (P = .18). CONCLUSIONSThe vital sign intervention promotes tobacco counseling at primary care practices through a modest increase in simple advice to quit. When implemented as a stand-alone intervention, it does not appear to increase intensive counseling.