This personification of brands has now reached a new phase with the introduction of a discourse based on relationships (ApTria 2001; Blackston 1993; Fournier 1998; Palmer 1996). In her seminal article, Fournier introduced relationship theory to consumer research and demonstrated its usefulness for understanding the roles brands have in the life of the consumer. The article has already been characterized as a modern classic , and subsequent research on consumers and brands that builds on the relationship idea is emerging (Ji 2002; Kates 2000; Olsen 1999). With regard to Fournier's brand relationship framework, however, there is an extensive discussion that seeks to qualify brands as a relationship partner.
The analysis is based on a conceptual examination complemented by illustrations of consumers' interpretations of relationship constructs. These empirical illustrations are not presented in order to show the invalidity of current conceptualizations but are included to show that there may be a discursive problem with the current terminology. The empirical data was gathered as part of a larger study on the role of brands in the life of the consumer and involved in depth interviews with consumers living in a large city in the Western United States.
In the next section follows a conceptual discussion regarding a brand's ability to serve as an active relationship partner. This discussion points to the need to examine the brand relationship quality constructs that were proposed by Fournier . In the final section of the article, the feasibility of adequately representing consumers through relationship constructs is discussed.
The influence of slope gradient on erosion rate differs for rill and interrill conditions. Rill erosion increases substantially more with increasing slope gradient than interrill erosion. This study investigated the change in interrill erosion rate with slope gradient and examined its relationship to runoff velocity. A sandy loam was packed in 100×40×10 cm3 soil trays and subjected to simulated rainfall for a period of 75 min.
Rain-impacted flow erosion and downslope splash were monitored, and runoff velocity measurements were made at three positions within the flume. Downslope splash erosion never accounted for more than 20% of the total erosion. Rain-impacted flow erosion peaked early in the simulation then decreased to a constant rate; erosion rate was therefore probably detachment-limited. For a constant runoff rate, rain-impacted flow erosion increased roughly with the square root of slope gradient, as did the runoff velocity. Soil loss was correlated (0.81) with runoff velocity under the experimental conditions. A cornerstone in Fournier's argument that seeks to legitimize the brand as a relationship partner is the conceptual acceptance of the behavioral significance of marketing actions.
Through the marketer's everyday marketing mix decisions, the consumer perceives the brand as a behavioral entity. By accepting this translation of brand behavior to trait language, Fournier argues that the brand passes the personification qualification and can therefore become an active partner in a relationship dyad. A brand is an inanimate object and cannot think or feel; thus it is likely to respond to consumers in a highly standardized manner.
With reference to Levy among others, Fournier argues that consumers have no problem with thinking about brands as if they were human characters. The words as if are very important here because they assume a hypothetical condition that will never occur in reality. The construction of a brand as a person is just a metaphor for having consumers think about brands in terms of human characteristics. But to think of brands in terms of personalities is something different from having human-like relationships with them. Thus, according to Fournier, consumers seek and maintain those relationships that add meanings to their lives. Thus it is reasonable to argue that brand relationships, by the way she characterizes them, should be understood as pure relationships.
But the question is then how relevant interpersonal relationship theory is to the brand relationship framework. Our study confirms that sequence comparison often provides good suggestions for gene functions or related functions. These suggestions serve as useful hypotheses for further experimental work to confirm, refine or refute the predictions.
Such a process can substantially increase the speed of biological knowledge discovery. On the other hand, when assigning function based purely on similarity to proteins of known function , it is important to be aware of incomplete or wrong annotations. Our study also provides a numerical benchmark for the extent to which one can trust computational annotation. It is possible that a confidence score can be derived from our study for any annotation based on sequence similarity.
With this score in the annotation file, the user can have a better insight about the quality of the annotations. Relationship marketing was introduced as an alternative to the exchange paradigm and sought initially to explain inter-organizational behavior and service situations (O'Malley and Tynan 2000). As such, relationship marketing exists primarily as a discourse , and it is through this discourse we understand interactions between actors in the marketing system.
So there is nothing "real" in relationships beyond the metaphor that seeks to create an understanding for interactions in the marketplace. So the question is whether relationship thinking accurately represents consumers and their behavior in the marketing system. Fitchett and McDonagh have critiqued relationship marketing for not being able to rebalance the inequalities and underrepresentation of consumers in market exchanges. They contend that current conceptualizations reduce consumers to prisoners under the hegemony of organizations. It is obvious that these two consumers are unwilling to accept that they would have relationship with their brands.
Even though the two consumers express a reluctance to accept the relational discourse, this does not mean that conceptually, consumers cannot have brand relationships. Yet the fact that there are consumers who discursively reject relationship thinking with regard to brands is interesting enough and should be taken into consideration. I will argue that the relationships consumers have with brands are different in several ways from relationships that they initiate with other people. People are human beings that think and interact with each other while brands only can "behave" on behalf of the manager. For instance, a brand cannot respond in an individual manner to a request from a consumer and therefore lacks an important attribute that characterizes human relationships. Soil erosion of sloped lands is one of the important sources of substantive sediments in watersheds.
The results showed that the sediment concentration in runoff was closely correlated with rainfall intensity. The sediment concentration in runoff gradually rose to a peak with time, and then gradually declined and approach a steady rate during simulation rainfall events. The particle size distribution of surface soils before the rainfall was different from that after the rainfall. Soil erosion mainly resulted in the loss of fine particles of surface soil through runoff, and the fine particles of soil were enriched in sediments. Soil erosion rates were gradually increased with the slope gradient when the slope gradient was less than 10°, and significantly increased when the slope gradient was more than 10°.
The slope factor of yellow soil could be fitted well to that calculated by the formula of Universal Soil Loss Equation . The trend of the slope factor of purple soil was similar to that of the slope factor that was derived from USLE. Therefore, the effect of slope gradients on soil erosion need to be further researched when USLE was applied to predict erosion in purple soil area.
This phenomenon buttresses the idea that redefining love as a feeling that is similar to but different from interpersonal love can be productive to research. In so doing, brand relationship quality constructs can represent relationships to brands in other cultural settings, where the concept of love has a more restricted usage. The ambiguousness of the concept of love is also found in Fournier's own empirical material where one of her informants mentions "I don't want to bring the "L" word into things" (Fournier 1998, p. 364). This statement illustrates that the feelings consumers assign to their favorite brands can be different from the feelings they have for human beings. Figure 3 shows the result of function similarity with respect to sequence identity as identified by the BLAST for GO Biological Process annotations.
It shows that probability of functional conservation increases with increasing sequence conservation. A similar trend is observed in different GO Index levels as in Figure 2. Such per index probability may sometimes result in higher probability for higher index levels and lead to the cross-over between curves from various index levels.
Interestingly, high sequence identity is a better indicator of function similarity than significant E-value as used in Figure 2. If two proteins have sequence identity more than 70%, they have about 90% probability or more to share the same biological process for GO index levels 1–8. On the other hand, E-value depends on many factors, in particular the lengths of the two proteins. Figures 4 and 5 show similar results as Figure 3 for GO Molecular Function and GO Cellular Component Annotations, respectively. The result is similar to that observed by Pawlowski et al. in their studies on enzymes based on the E. Coli genome and by Wilson et al who use FLY+ENZYME classification SCOP domains, MIPS and GenProtEC to study sequence and functional conservation.
A number of studies in sequence-function relationship have been carried out. Shah et al. showed that many EC classes could not be perfectly discriminated by sequence similarity at any threshold. Pawlowski et al. have studied the relation between sequence similarity and functional similarities based on the EC classification for the E. However, this study is limited only to within genome comparisons and lacks any analysis based on inter-genome comparisons. Devos et al. have studied the complexity in transferring function between similar sequences.
Their study shows that binding site, keywords, and functional class annotations are less conserved than EC numbers, and all of them in turn are less conserved than protein structure. Wilson et al. showed that percent identity in sequence alignment is more effective at quantifying functional conservation of their simple classification of SCOP domains than modern probabilistic scores . However, all these studies did not use a broad definition of functions for a systematic large-scale analysis.
Despite the central role that sequence comparison programs play in functional annotation, a thorough analysis of the quality of methods based on a large-scale dataset has not been performed. An estimate of the expectation value of an alignment provides a good assessment for whether the two aligned proteins are homologous . In particular, when two proteins are distantly related, there is no good indicator to reliably assess whether they are homologous or not. Figure 1 shows the number of unique orthologous pairs between the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Arabidopsis thaliana acquired from the Website of Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins .
The COG pairs distribute in a broad range of sequence identity and expectation value. It is clear that neither percentage of sequence identity nor expectation value can give a complete insight into the relationship between the two proteins. Towards this we wish to study the detailed quantitative relationship in terms of functions and relate it with sequence identity and expectation value intervals. Relationship discourse should be understood in the light of a broader movement where companies seek to personify themselves. Through concepts such as corporate identity and brand identity, marketing research has given companies a human dimension by pointing at the similarities these concepts have with human identity. Although it might be appealing to humanize companies in this way, concepts of corporate identity has been criticized for its questionable parallels to human identity .
It is without doubt that the relational discourse fits well with managerial goals, where maintaining long-term relationships with existing customers is considered more profitable than short-term exchanges. Whether the relationship discourse is equally valuable to serve in the interest of consumers needs further analysis. It is now a readily accepted fact that consumers think of brands in terms of personalities, and it appears that the relationship thinking has been received positively by consumer researchers as well.
However, we have to be aware that the acceptance among consumers to think of brand in terms of personalities did not emerged randomly. It is the result of a marketing discourse that saturates the market with ideas built on relationship principles. With the introduction of relationship thinking in the context of consumers and brands, the anthropomorphization of brands has been taken to its logical conclusion. While the idea of brand relationships has enriched our understanding for the role of brands in the life of the consumer, there is a considerable concern regarding the parallelism to human relationship theory. This paper examines the limitations with the relationship metaphor and interpersonal relationship theory in the context of consumers and brands. ABSTRACT - With the introduction of relationship thinking in the context of consumers and brands, the anthropomorphization of brands has been taken to its logical conclusion.
Non-linear relationship between slope and erosion was established although other report presented an indirect influence of this variable on soil rates. It was disclosed that soil erosion was best correlated with runoff velocity, a factor that is strongly dependent to slope gradient . Fournier illustrated the usefulness of relationship thinking by relating three women's brand stories to the concept of relationship quality. But when consumers are confronted with the constructs, it appears that there is a reluctance to accept the discourse.
The fact that there are consumers who discursively reject concepts related to relationship theory points to the need for discussing its significance in the context of consumer research. The vocabulary that is used to describe brand relationship quality is therefore not necessarily compatible with the vocabulary that is used to describe human relationship quality. I do not suggest that the brand relationship quality constructs should be replaced with other constructs. The issue here is to supplement the vocabulary so that the constructs also account for consumers who do discursively not consider their brands as active relationship partners.
Your guardian angels expect you to bear positive energy in your intuition and care for your personal growth. Number 2 in numerology resembles endurance, success, and fertility. Seeing it greatly is a powerful command from the divine authorities. If you want your life to get better, decode this angelic signal and put it into practice. Biochar is an important material for the development of the circular economy. Accordingly, a model has been developed to estimate the total erosion rate and total water flow rate as a function of the above conditions.
The model was developed based on available data from flume experiments. Based on ANN modelling results, it was observed that slope length was the most important factor in determining total erosion rate, followed by slope gradient, DoC, and percentage of biochar amendment. The percentage of biochar amendment was a leading factor in the total water flow rate determination as compared to other factors.
It was also found that the reduction in erosion is relatively minimal during an increase in slope length up to 1.55 m, reducing sharply beyond that. At a slope length of 2 m, erosion is found to be reduced by 33% (i.e., 2.6 to 1.75), whereas the total flow rate decreases linearly from 1250 mL/m2/min to 790 mL/m2/min. The ANN model developed shows that soil biochar composite with 5% biochar amendment gave the best results in reducing soil erosion. This study can be a helpful tool in providing preliminary guidelines for using biochar in erosion control.
Though soulmates and twin souls are both related to deep, soul connections between two people, the relationships themselves are actually fairly different. The connection between soulmates is powerful and often comes easily. Soulmates deeply understand each other and are able to balance out each other because of their strong connection. Soulmates often end up together because they are very compatible. Twin flame relationships often serve to teach and inspire you to grow.
Many people misunderstand the concept of twin flames, and believe that the individuals are only whole when they are together. But in reality, twin flame relationships help you grow into your full potential. The mirroring effect of twin flame relationships can inspire emotional growth that makes you more yourself. I lost who i believe to be my twin flame as well in October.
