Brand

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and store value as brand equity for the object identified, to the benefit of the brand's customers, its owners and shareholders. Brand names are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands. The practice of branding - in the original literal sense of marking by burning - is thought to have begun with the ancient Egyptians, who are known to have engaged in livestock branding as early as 2,700 BCE. Branding was used to differentiate one person's cattle from another's by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal's skin with a hot branding iron. If a person stole any of the cattle, anyone else who saw the symbol could deduce the actual owner. The term has been extended to mean a strategic personality for a product or company, so tha

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems and their metabolism adequately. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they tend to demand less infrastructure, consume less fuel for transportation and less energy for cooling/heating in per capita terms. This hypothesis is also called Brand’s Law. However, as cities get bigger, denser and more resource-efficient, they also get richer, and richer inhabitants consume more, potentially increasing resource demand and associated environmental impacts. In this paper, we propose a method based on scaling theory to assess Brand’s Law taking into account greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from both direct (energy and fuels locally consumed) and indirect (embedded in goods and services) sources, measured as carbon footprint (CF). We aim at understanding whether Brand’s Law can be confirmed once we adopt a consumption-based approach to urban emissions. By analyzing the balance between direct and indirect emissions in a theoretical urban system, we develop a scaling theory relating carbon footprint and city size. Facing the lack of empirical data on consumption-based emissions for cities, we developed a model to derive emission estimations using well-established urban metrics (city size, density, infrastructure, wealth). Our results show that, once consumption-based CF is considered, Brand’s Law falls apart, as bigger cities have greater purchase power, leading to greater consumption of goods and higher associated GHG. Findings also suggest that a shift in consumption patterns is of utmost importance, given that, according to the model, each new monetary unit added to the gross domestic product (GDP) or to other income variables results in a more than proportional increase in GHG emissions. This work contributes to a broader assessment of the causes of emissions and the paradigm shift regarding the assumption of efficiency in the relationship of city size and emissions, adding consumption behavior as a critical variable, beyond Brand’s Law.

2021

Market Sharing Dynamics Between Two Service Providers

Olivier Gallay, Max-Olivier Hongler

We study the market partition between two distinct firms that deliver services to waiting-time sensitive customers. In our model, the incoming customers select a firm on the basis of its posted price, the expected waiting time and its brand. More specifically, we quantify by a cost any departure from the ideal brand expected by each incoming customer. Considering that the two underlying queueing processes operate under high traffic regimes, we analyze the market sharing dynamics by using a diffusion process. As a function of control parameters, such as the waiting and brand departure costs or the incoming traffic intensity, we are able to analytically characterize a transition between an Hotelling-like regime (dominated by brand considerations) and a deadline type regime (dominated by waiting time considerations). The market sharing dynamics is described by the time evolution of a boundary point, which time evolution belongs to the class of noise-induced phase transitions, so far widely discussed in physics, chemistry and biology.

Elsevier2008

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

2021

More from Less? Environmental Rebound Effects of City Size

Market Sharing Dynamics Between Two Service Providers

Market Sharing Dynamics Between Two Service Providers

More from Less? Environmental Rebound Effects of City Size