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Portugal has become the second most expensive footwear brand manufacturer in the global market in just one decade. How does an offshore-outsourcing provider become a direct competitor with former clients? This study applies a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to 12 Portuguese footwear manufacturers and identifies the underlying factors of the managerial transition from an offshore-outsourcing provider to a direct brand manufacturer. The study finds that the transformation of external knowledge from the client into internal knowledge must occur first. But the decisive factor is the management's recognition that brand creation is a long-term investment and is less risky than remaining dependent on outsourcing. These findings contribute to the understanding of the transition to becoming a direct brand manufacturer.

Data mining (DM) techniques have been used to solve marketing and manufacturing problems in the fashion industry. These approaches are expected to be particularly important for highly customized industries because the diversity of products sold makes it harder to find clear patterns of customer preferences. The goal of this project was to investigate two different data mining approaches for customer segmentation: clustering and subgroup discovery. The models obtained produced six market segments and 49 rules that allowed a better understanding of customer preferences in a highly customized fashion manufacturer/e-tailor. The scope and limitations of these clustering DM techniques will lead to further methodological refinements. We investigate customer segmentation in highly customized fashion industries.Two data mining methods are used, clustering and subgroup discovery.The segments obtained enabled a better understanding of customer preferences.Different approaches provide complementary perspectives.Lines for further methodological refinements were identified.

Brochures are a versatile and ubiquitous tourism advertising medium. Although almost all types of advertisement message strategies are considered in brochure development and production, the relationship of those strategies with brand destination attributes has not been studied. Likewise an extensive inventory of executional tactics can be applied to put forward a brochure concept. This research shows the relationship among executional tactics, message strategies and destination attributes in 400 tourism brochures from around the world. On average, each message strategy is associated with seventeen executional tactics. A single brand destination attribute may work with many message strategies. However, the connection between destination attributes and executional tactics is rather loose. This media-centered approach study will provide a benchmarking profile to advertising agency and tourism destination managers in their endeavor to develop brochures.

The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of channel governance structure on export performance ex post. The study surveyed 105 foreign buyers of crane services from five countries and used MANOVA to test the effects of channel governance structure on export short term and long term performance outcomes. The study found that short term profitability was higher for indirect distribution channel arrangements while longer term outcomes of buyer economic satisfaction and loyalty were higher for direct. The results suggest that exporters are more likely to achieve immediate financial objectives with the support from indirect channels; however, long term objectives are more effectively achieved through direct channels.

The tweens are a transitional age group undergoing deep physical and psychological transformations. Based on a thirteen-focus group research design involving 103 students, and applying a tweens-centered approach, the characteristics of SMS, IM, Internet, digital photos, electronic games, and email were analyzed. Categories such as moral issues, psychological and social consequences, problems/drawbacks, general benefits, and technical attributes synthesized the main characteristics attached to each form of digital technology. Their relative relevance was not gender dependent. Furthermore, tweens exhibited both metacognitive knowledge and personal epistemological observations associated with most of the digital technologies.

To obtain development information of individual plant cells, it is necessary to perform in vivo imaging of the specimen under study, through time-lapse confocal microscopy. Automation of cell detection/marking process is important to provide research tools in order to ease the search for special events, such as cell division. In this paper we discuss an automatic cell detection approach for Arabidopsis thaliana based on segmentation, which selects the best cell candidates from a starting watershed-based image segmentation and improves the result by merging adjacent regions. The selection of individual cells is obtained using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, based on a cell descriptor constructed from the shape and edge strength of the cells' contour. In addition we proposed a novel cell merging criterion based on edge strength along the line that connects adjacent cells' centroids, which is a valuable tool in the reduction of cell over-segmentation. The result is largely pruned of badly segmented and over-segmented cells, thus facilitating the study of cells. When comparing the results after merging with the basic watershed segmentation, we obtain 1.5% better coverage (increase in F-measure) and up to 27% better precision in correct cell segmentation.