If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Brands can imbue unique meaning to consumers, and such meaning and personal experience with a brand can create an emotional connection and relationship between the consumer and the brand. Just as many service providers have adopted branding strategies, marketers are branding the health care service experience. Health care is an intimate service experience and emotions play an integral role in health care decision making. The purpose of this paper is to examine how emotional or affect-based consumer brand relationships are developed for health care organizations. Design/methodology/approach -Empirical evidence from both depth interviews and data garnered from 322 surveys were integrated into a conceptual model. The model was tested using structural equation modeling. Findings -Results indicate that trust, referent influence and corporate social responsibility are key variables in establishing affective commitment in consumer brand relationships in a health care context. Once affective commitment is achieved, consumers may come to identify with the health care provider's brand and a self-brand connection is formed. When such a phenomenon takes place, consumers can serve as advocates for the brand by actively promoting it via word-of-mouth. Practical implications -The findings provide insight for marketing managers in developing successful branding strategies for health care organizations. Originality/value -This research examines the advantages of cultivating meaningful brand connections and relationships with consumers in a health care context.

Firms have at their disposal an increasing amount of personal information about consumers gathered through various means. Studies find that personalizing online interactions improves customer relationships and increases desirable behaviors, such as positive word-of-mouth and increased purchase intent. However, other research suggests that the use of personal information stimulates privacy concern, which has a negative effect on behavior. This study examines potential moderators of the negative effects of privacy concern on behavioral intentions in the context of personalized online interactions. Results show that increasing perceived information control reduces the negative effect of privacy concern on intentions to engage in positive behaviors. In contrast, the offer of compensation has no effect on the relationship between privacy concern and these behavioral intentions. However, compensation increases the salience of trust to privacy concern.

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The trend among students to advocate their professors online continues to generate interest within marketing academia. Brand advocacy in products and services has played a vital role in marketing. However, no known research to date has embraced the idea of brand advocacy in marketing education. This research builds on the recent human brand relationship literature and examines the mediating effects of attachment strength and relationship factors on professor brand advocacy. Survey data gathered from 228 marketing students and the empirical findings suggest that when professors are responsive to their students' innate needs of relatedness and competence, students form strong attachments to the professors. Furthermore, strong students' attachments to professors influence students' trust and satisfaction in their professors. These trusting and satisfying relationships determine the willingness of the students to advocate the professor brands. The authors discuss the implications for marketing educators.

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In Plasmodium, protein kinases govern key biological processes of the parasite life cycle involved in the establishment of infection, dissemination and sexual reproduction. The rodent malaria model Plasmodium berghei encodes for 66 putative eukaryotic protein kinases (ePKs) as identified through modelling domain signatures and are highly conserved in Plasmodium falciparum. We report here the functional characterisation of a putative serine-threonine kinase PBANKA_0311400 identified in this kinome analysis and designate it as Pbstk2. To elucidate its role, we knocked out Pbstk2 locus and performed a detailed phenotypic analysis at different life cycle stages. The Pbstk2 knockout (KO) was not compromised in asexual blood stage propagation, transmission and development in the mosquito vector. The Pbstk2 KO produced viable salivary gland sporozoites that successfully transformed into exo-erythrocytic forms (EEFs) and were morphologically indistinguishable from wild-type GFP (WT GFP) with regard to size and shape until 48 h. An intravenous dose of 1×103 Pbstk2 KO sporozoites in C57BL/6 mice failed to establish blood stage infection and a higher dose of 5X103 showed a 2–3 day delay in prepatency as compared to WT GFP parasites. Consistent with such an observation, analysis of in vitro EEF development at 62 h revealed that the hepatic merozoite numbers were reduced to nearly 40% as compared to WT GFP and showed meagre expression of MSP1. Our studies provide evidence for the role of PbSTK2 in late liver stage development and for the successful establishment of a timely blood stage infection.

Firms outsource to achieve a marketplace position of competitive advantage. The trend to outsource has permeated into the health care industry because of skyrocketing health care costs. Concerned by the rising costs of health care and the growing number of underinsured and uninsured Americans, President Obama signed into law a sweeping health care reform known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Most experts agree that ACA has created uncertain times for global marketers of medical outsourcing. However, when faced with demand and market uncertainties, organizations form strategic global alliances to reduce such market uncertainties. Yet, the extant marketing and management literature reflects little effort to develop a framework for understanding medical outsourcing alliance success. This research draws from the explanatory power of resource advantage theory, alliance theory, and relationship marketing to develop a conceptual framework of medical outsourcing alliance success. Furthermore, the authors provide normative prescriptions for global marketers of medical outsourcing.

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