The Effect of Product Category on Consumer Brand Relationships Purpose: This paper investigates the effect of product category onto consumer brand relationships. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a total of 800 consumers, respondents evaluated their relationship with their favorite brand in one of the four product categories studied (soft drink, mobile phone, shoes, cars). EFA, subsequent CFA, SEM and ANOVA were used to assess these relationships and the product category effect. Findings: We find that brand love positively influences brand loyalty and both, influence positively WOM and purchase intention. Looking at the directionality of these relationships, our results show no product category differences. However, we found significant differences in terms of their intensity and their effect on the explanation power of the brand outcome variables WOM and purchase intention. Research limitations/implications: The survey was conducted in Brazil and future research should assess the same product categories in other cultural settings as well as consider other product categories to assess the external validity of our results. Practical implications: This paper demonstrates that consumer brand relationships are not product category specific. However, certain product categories tend to have more intense relationships than others. Originality/value: Despite the importance of the product category effect in the branding literature, our study shows that consumer brand relationship theory can be applied to different product categories. This suggests, the product category is less important in the study design than the unit of analysis which requires to be the consumer's favorite brands.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to present a new instrument for measuring cultural intelligence in the business context (BCIQ). Design/methodology/approach-The paper describes the process of the conceptualization of the model and the development of the instrument, the sample, as well as the validation of the instrument. Directions on the use of the instrument and future research are discussed. Findings-The instrument shows good psychometric properties and good predictive power and outperforms other publicly available CQ measures on a number of dimensions. Originality/value-The unique features and advantages of the present instrument are as follows: first, a refined factor structure compared to existing CQ instruments; second, use of objective cultural knowledge measures; third, applicability in the business and workplace contexts, thus rendering the instrument suitable for assessing cultural intelligence among expatriates, employees, and global virtual team members; and fourth, improved reliability and validity as compared to other Cultural Intelligence Quotient measures.

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Cultural intelligence ( CI ) has often been linked to performance at the individual, team, and fi rm levels as a key factor in international business

The premise of this study was to take a valid population sampling of handwriting and handprinting and assess how many times each of the predetermined characteristic is found in the samples. Approximately 1500 handwriting specimens were collected from across the United States and pared to obtain a representative sample of the U.S. adult population according to selected demographics based on age, sex, ethnicity, handedness, education level, and location of lower-grade school education. This study has been able to support a quantitative assessment of extrinsic and intrinsic effects in handwriting and handprinting for the six subgroups. Additional results include analyses of the interdependence of characteristics. This study found that 98.55% of handprinted characteristics and 97.39% of cursive characteristics had an independence correlation of under 0.2. The conclusions support use of the product rule in general, but with noted caveats. Finally, this study provides frequency occurrence proportions for 776 handwriting and handprinting characteristics.