Consumers nowadays have a broad range of products and services to choose from. The purchase decisions of most consumers do not only focus on the functionality, but also in its design. Therefore, most firms strive to produce new designs and connect with the intellectual property right (IPR) together to comprise a monopoly power for firms’ sustainable growth. As a result, industrial design is one of the chosen IPRs in order to protect the designs and it is crucial as it will lead to the success of the designs. This study will analyze the impact of industrial design protection on the financial performance at the Malaysian firm level. Penrosean Views will be employed as the theoretical underpinning of the study. It is theorized that the sources of profits take place when the firm possess the function of complementary resource or IP assets. It is expected that there is a significant impact between industrial design protection and financial performance that leads to the firms’ sustainable growth. Due to competitive market condition, it is expected that the impact is small and the signs of the coefficients are mixed.

The objective of this study is to assess the implementation of supply chain risk identification and its relevant techniques in the electrical and electronics industry in malaysia. In this regard, a questionnaire based survey was developed and accomplished to explore the extent of implementation in 5 main uncertain areas namely supply, demand, environment, process and control. The average mean score and standard deviation were calculated for the each of these key areas. Moreover, this paper surveyed issues associated to risk identification such as the level of understanding among the respondent companies, the benefits of adoption, the level of adoption for each risk identifying technique as well as its difference between smes and large companies. The result indicated that most of responding companies have been committed toward implementation of supply chain risk identification and its techniques. Although large companies are more interested into implement risk identification techniques in each area, two areas of supply and demand predominately are in the center of attention for both types of business. In general, every uncertain area, investigated, serves as a useful guide for companies when they attempt to implement the risk identification step of supply chain risk management. Furthermore, the findings show the number of adopted techniques increases along to the years of implementation regardless size of business. However, the current study is the first that investigating the extent of risk identification implementation in electrical and electronics industry in malaysia.

With the intense competition in the retail sector, achieving high store equity can be a means to gain competitive advantage for retailers. Retailers’ sole reliance on store attributes may not be sufficient to build relationship with customers, as prior studies demonstrate the high likelihood of customer opting to shop at stores with loyalty programs. Accordingly, the current study aimed in examining the contribution of loyalty program attributes and store attributes to store engagement and store equity in the context of department stores in Malaysia. Survey responses from 484 department store cardholders were collected, and PLS-SEM structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses. While all of the proposed hypotheses were supported, the relative contribution of both attributes towards store engagement and store equity provides insightful implication in terms of theory and practical. From a theoretical perspective, the integration of social exchange theory and S-D logic offers significant contribution in understanding the effect of loyalty program attributes and store attributes on the relationship between the cardholder and the store. From the practical perspective, retailers should pay more attention in putting more value in their offering by incorporating experiential and interactive marketing approach to stimulate customer relationship in order to further enhance the store equity.

Water conservation continues to remain a priority on the international agenda. It is therefore all the more important that we continue to do as much as possible to conserve our already scarce water supply. This research aims to quantify the current awareness levels of the water crisis in South Africa. All one hundred members of staff at a faculty at one of the leading tertiary education institutions in the country formed the population for the study. Data collection took place through questionnaires, with a response rate of 25%, after which a quantitative analysis took place. The research found that a fair level of awareness does exist regarding the water crisis in South Africa, despite the fact that people are largely unaware of existing awareness campaigns. People are however willing to learn more and to become more responsible water users, as they have shown an interest in receiving more information. Although current awareness campaigns do accomplish a fair bit, future research should focus on not only maintaining these campaigns, but also on improving their efficiency and reach. Increasing the awareness and acceptance of the virtual water concept can also have far reaching implications for water scarce countries.

Customers differ greatly in terms of their demographics, lifestyles, needs, perceptions, preferences and behaviours. A business entity needs to understand the profitability of each individual customer in a segment as well as their potential lifetime profitability. In this paper our focus is on the application of sentiment analysis to analyze feedback of passengers obtained from airline forum. For this purpose Multinomial Naive Bayes and Linear Support Vector models are used. Training data consists of 1217 positive reviews and 955 negative reviews. Sentiments were predicted for 868 reviews. This work also aims at finding suitable data model that achieve a high accuracy and the dependence of accuracy on various pre-processing approaches. The result of sentiment analysis is plotted as a bar graph visualization and evaluated against overall trip rating obtained from forum. By this work we would like to help the airline industry to maximize the delivery and service to meet the customer expectation and build customer loyalty.