The pioneering study by Bowman [1980) reawakened interest in risk and return relations in the strategic management literature. We do not examine this literature here because we have elsewhere reviewed it in detail 1 and because, for the most part, these studies have been confined to ex post data. Discussions of the strategies which subjects used to direct their ex ante evaluations of risks and returns have either been omitted or else have been only indirectly inferred from ex post data. In addition, with few exceptions, this literature does not attempt to ascertain the meanings that might have been assigned by subjects to terms like "risk" and/or the "returns" with which they have been concerned. Even fewer of these studies have attempted to ascertain how the subjects implemented their definitions en of prospective strategies. Thus, tius literature may route to arriving at evaluations best be regarded as bearing only indirect relations to the present study which is concerned not only with the meanings assigned to terms like "risk" and "return" but also with how these terms are used in arriving at risk and return evaluations of proposed strategies as well as how they are measured and used, on an ex ante basis en route to seeing how these evaluations match with ex post performance. In a sense, one part of this study--i. e.

In today's time there is no more dynamic and fascinating field to either practise or study than branding, promotion and advertising. But in today's growing environment this field is undergoing dramatic changes that are changing advertising and promotion forever. The changes are coming from all sides-clients demanding better results from their advertising and promotional money; lean but highly creative smaller advertising agencies; sales promotion and direct-marketing firms, as well as interactive agencies, which want a larger share of the billions of dollars companies spend each year promoting their brands and services; consumers who no longer respond to traditional forms of advertising; and new methods that may reinvent the very process of advertising. This book is an attempt to include all these and many more similar topics related to branding and advertising in a pragmatic and simple way.

​In four empirical studies, this cumulative work provides valuable insights for marketing executives of statutory health insurance funds and social media responsible. Paper I and II provide evidence about the importance and interplay of price and corporate reputation on the market of statutory health insurance. The second part changes perspective to corporate communication issues in the social media environment. By introducing the “social media brand value chain” paper III conducts a literature review of state of the art social media research. By means of a field experiment on Facebook, paper IV shows that brands do not necessarily have to communicate via their brand fan pages in a highly interactive and vivid way to positively influence attitudinal measures among their fan base.