A Case Study On Brand Equity Marketing Essay

A Case Study On Brand Equity Marketing Essay Brand equity can be viewed both as an intangible or tangible asset and or liability. The tangible being the monetary value of a brand and best viewed as the amount of additional income expected from a branded product over and above what might be expected from an identical, but unbranded product. To best illustrate this point would be a supermarket, they frequently sell unbranded versions of name brand products. The branded and unbranded products are produced by the same companies, but they carry a generic brand or store brand label like No Name or Home brand. Store brands sell for significantly less than their name brand counterparts, even when the contents are identical. This price difference is the monetary value of the brand name. However, according to (Aaker,1996) the most important assets of any business are intangible: its company name, brand, symbols, and slogans, and their underlying associations, perceived quality, name awareness, customer base, and proprietary resources su ch as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships. The intangible value associated with a product that can not be accounted for by price or features is illustrated by globally renowned company Nike. I has created many intangible benefits for their athletic products by associating them with star athletes. Children and adults want to wear Nike’s products to feel some association with these star athletes (â€Å"be like Mike.† ) The marketing image that has been created for Nike is the driving force of the demand for the products rather than the physical features. Buyers are willing to pay extremely high price premiums over lesser known brands which may offer the same, or better, product quality and features. Ideally brand equity is a set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers.(Aaker,1996) These assets, which comprise brand equity, are a primary source of competitive advantage and future earnings. (Aaker, 1996) The overall description of Brand Equity incorporates the ability to provide added value to company’s products and services. This added value can be an advantage to charge price premiums, lower marketing costs and offer greater opportunities for customer purchase The assets/ advantages of brand equity: Allows you to charge a price premium compared to competitors with less brand equity. Strong brand names simplify the decision process for low-cost and non-essential products. Brand name can give comfort to buyers unsure of their decision by reducing their perceived risk. Maintain higher awareness of your products. Use as leverage when introducing new products. Often interpreted as an indicator of quality. High Brand Equity makes sure your products are included in most consumers consideration set. Your brand can be linked to a quality image that buyers want to be associated with. Offer a strong defense against new products and new competitors. Can lead to higher rates of product trial and repeat purchasing due to buyers’ awareness of your brand, approval of its image/reputation and trust in its quality.

Methods of Identifying and Preventing SQL Attacks Research Paper

Methods of Identifying and Preventing SQL Attacks - Research Paper Example The other sections cover the preventive methods, where the methods are also discussed with an illustration using diagrams. Keywords: SQLIA, WebSSARI, WAVE, AMNESIA, SQL DOM, tautology Introduction There are numerous web applications used by various companies and organizations in order to provide services to users, such as online banking and shopping, hence establishing a need to develop a database. These web applications contain confidential information such as the customer’s financial records, thus making these applications frequent targets for attackers. The attack to the SQL is referred to as the SQL injection, which gives attackers unauthorized access to the databases of underlying Web applications (Huang, Yu, Hang, and Tsai 148). Therefore, these attackers are able to leak, modify and delete information which is stored on these databases, thus resulting in problems for the organization. In this case, the paper will discuss issues related to detection and prevention of SQL attacks. Commercial and governmental institutions are the common victims of SQL injection attacks (SQLIAs) due to insufficiency in the input validation. In fact, these cases occur when Web application receives a user input, thus using it for building a database query without ample validation, hence creating a chance for an attacker to utilize the vulnerability. The vulnerability of the databases to SQL injections has been regarded as the most serious threat for a Web application (Wassermann and Su, 78). This creates a form of vulnerability to SQL injection, thus allowing the attacker to have accessibility to the underlying databases, and it results in security violations since the information in these databases is sensitive. The implications of SQL injections are issues such as loss of credentials, theft, and fraud, and in other cases, the attackers are able to use the vulnerability to acquire control and corrupt the system hosting the Web application. The diagram illustrates an SQ L injection, whereby an attacker uses a client through the firewall into the web application where access to SQL server is achieved and sensitive application data is disclosed. Methods of Identifying SQL Attacks Numerous methods can be applied in detecting SQL injection attacks, and one of them is the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which is based on a machine learning technique and application of a set of distinctive application queries. Moreover, this technique relates to a model of distinctive queries and a function of monitoring application at runtime in order to identify the queries that are not matching the model (Pietraszek and Vanden 2). Therefore, this makes the system have the ability to detect attacks effectively, though there are basic demerits of learning based techniques since they do not offer a guarantee concerning the detection abilities. In fact, the detection abilities are dependent on the quality of the training set applied; thus, a poor training set can result in the generation of large numbers of false positive and negative by the learning technique (Valeur, Mutz, and Vigna 40). The diagram shows the locations of the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), whereby there are two sensors located at both sides of the firewall in order to detect any intrusion from the Internet before and after penetrating the firewall.  

Inovation In Tourism In Response To Global Concerns Essay

Inovation In Tourism In Response To Global Concerns - Essay Example Natural resources such as water are being strained by the need to use the resources to generate energy for use in the tourism areas. Forests are being torn down to pave the way for the construction of hotels and resorts to be used by tourists, hence devastating entire landscapes. Political instability in a country or adverse natural disasters such as floods, famine and tsunami are also seen to adversely affect the global tourism industry (Conrady, Buck, Viehl, & Tittel, 2011, p. 157). The effects of political instability were clearly seen in Russia in 1991 when the country’s tourism declined by approximately 10 times as a result of the cessation of subsidies given to the industry by the union (Renard et al., 1997, p. 138). â€Å"In some countries, the industry is experiencing a huge backlash as a result of the repercussions of the global economic slowdown that affected the entire world. Some major markets such as Greece and Spain are still suffering from the 2009 global slowdown. The backlash was more pronounced in countries that rely on mainly Europe and America as their main traditional markets as these were the hardest hit by the recession† (African Development Bank, 2009, p. 437). The recent terrorism activities have caused heightened security and safety concerns in the tourism industry. A reduction in tourism spending within a country due to security concerns generally leads to weakened local economies which might have the effect of placing the affected government under a lot of stress. This can have the effect of causing the country to experience general destabilization throughout all its sectors and, hence, help in the attainment of terrorism’s main agenda of destabilization (Henderson, 2012). The increased fuel costs have caused the cost of travel to greatly increase to levels where most ordinary people are