Promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) is a modern managerial issue, as BSI seems to impact not only sustainability but also consumer psychology toward a brand. In this regard, the author has extended self-congruity theory and suggested the concept of brand-sustainability-self-congruence (BSSC) as the image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI, and self-concept. Former surveys report predictive effects of BSSC on consumers’ brand evaluation, leading to increased brand equity (Kumagai, 2022, 2023).

Promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) is a modern managerial issue, as BSI seems to impact not only sustainability but also consumer psychology toward a brand. In this regard, the author has extended self-congruity theory and suggested the concept of brand-sustainability-self-congruence (BSSC) as the image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI, and self-concept. Former surveys report predictive effects of BSSC on consumers’ brand evaluation, leading to increased brand equity (Kumagai, 2022, 2023).

A common approach adopted in the practice of advertising photography in Hong Kong is about using celebrity, pleasant environment and astonishing visual effect but the photographs so taken may not convince audience. As such, this paper attempts to formulate a new approach to incorporating concept development, visual statement and photographic composition.

When apparel brand managers attempt to raise their brand value, store location is a big concern since they consider it to influence their brand value. Brand managers expect that their store operations in high status location will raise brand status and attractiveness even when the expected rate of return directly generated by the store is very low. In this case, they regard the new store as an effective brand contact point of their marketing communication and expect its comprehensive impact on their business to be positive. In actual business, however, this influence is difficult to compute quantitatively but common to estimate based on brand managers’ experiences: this creates uncertainty for apparel companies whether their investment in the new store is appropriate or not. Besides, it is not certain whether non-luxury brand status is raised by store location status as with luxury brands where store location status is identified as a key marketing driver (Kapferer and Bastien, 2012). This paper focuses on the status of shopping malls and adjacent stores as store location factors and assesses their effects on perceived brand status. In this study, consumer research on three brands with different characteristics (a luxury, a non-luxury, and an unknown brand) was conducted in Japan and the variation of perceived brand status and attractiveness in four location frames (two levels of shopping mall status × two levels of adjacent store status) was analyzed. The result of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) suggests store location prestige influences perceived brand status and attractiveness of luxury brands more than in the case of non-luxury ones. Moreover, store location status is confirmed to influence unknown brands only very slightly. This result implies that raising the status of non-luxury is difficult just by constructing a new store in high status location following luxury strategy. Also, it may be impossible for a brand whose status is not high to pretend to be a high status brand by launching a new store in high status location of the new market.

This study enhances the capability to reproduce multi-coloured images in woven Jacquard forms where weave structure and pattern design were considerably involved in fabrication. In modern weaving, great convenience and efficiencies were established in both production and design process through digitalisation, while the colour adoption has been constrained as the applicable number of figuring yarns were limited. The enhancement toward colour realisation is traditionally related to weaving capability. Surface colour display is dominated by additive, subtractive or optical mixing (Mathur, 2007). An additive colour system offers the largest gamut among output models yet, the light mixing principle is not suitable to apply to weave colour creation. Pre-dyed opaque yarns are used and juxtaposed; small particles of yarn colours reflect lights and they were observed as a certain form of colour. The common and crucial criterial pertinent to an optical mixing of weave colours were aligned more with the subtractive mixing principle. A weave pattern was designed by subtractive primary colour classification and a multi-weft figuring method. Secondary colours are theoretically produced when coupled CMY layers are mixed(i.e., cyan + magenta = blue, cyan + yellow = green, magenta + yellow = red) and black is generated when all CMY primaries are mixed (Berns, 2000);however, non-bendable colours of threads are employed for colour reproduction in weaving and there is a limit to adopt a pigment mixing principle in the woven form. Therefore, each weave pattern required a modification to redefine primary colour regions and densities once an original artwork was separated and presented in greyscales levels. The weave patterns in an original subtractive scheme were altered by applying region-based segmentation to maximise the accessible colour gamut. In this study, the weaving application developed for the multi-coloured image was introduced and the design process was explained based on a practical experiment proceeded with a newly developed weaving application.

ANIR (Atacama Near InfraRed camera) is a near infrared camera for the University of Tokyo Atacama 1m telescope, installed at the summit of Co. Chajnantor (5,640 m altitude) in northern Chile. The high altitude and extremely low water vapor (PWV = 0.5 mm) of the site enable us to perform observation of hydrogen Paα emission line at 1.8751 μm . Since its first light observation in June 2009, we have been carrying out a Paα narrow-band imaging survey of nearby luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs), and have obtained Paα for 38 nearby LIRGs listed in AKARI/FIS-PSC at the velocity of recession between 2,800 km/s and 8,100 km/s. LIRGs are affected by a large amount of dust extinction ( AV~ 3 mag), produced by their active star formation activities. Because Paα is the strongest hydrogen recombination line in the infrared wavelength ranges, it is a good and direct tracer of dust-enshrouded star forming regions, and enables us to probe the star formation activities in LIRGs. We find that LIRGs have two star-forming modes. The origin of the two modes probably come from differences between merging stage and/or star-forming process.

High hardness of P/M parts can be obtained in the cooling section of the sintering furnace by using sinter hardenable materials, thus the post-sintering heat treatment can be eliminated. However, the sinter hardened materials would have difficulties in secondary machining if it is required, which will limit the applications of sinter hardenable materials in the machined parts. Recent development in warm compaction technology can enable us not only to achieve the high green density up to , but also the high green strength which is needed for green machining. Therefore by using warm compaction technology, the green machining can be applied to sinter hardenable materials for the high density, strength and hardness P/M parts. In the present study, a pre-alloyed steel powder, ATOMET4601, was used by mixing with 2.0% copper, 1.0% nickel, 0.9% graphite and a proprietary lubricant using a binder treatment process - FLOMET. The specimens were compacted and green machined with different machining parameters. The machined surface finish and part integrity were evaluated in selecting the optimal conditions for green machining. The possibility of applying the green machining to the high-density structural parts was explored.

This paper reports several emotion detecting methods based on various attributes of human voice. These methods have been developed at our Engineering Systems Laboratory. It is noted that, in all of the proposed methods, only prosodic information in voice is used for emotion recognition and semantic information in voice is not used. Different types of neural networks(NNs) are used for detection depending on the type of voice parameters. Earlier approaches separately used linear prediction coefficients(LPCs) and time series data of pitch but they were combined in later studies. The proposed methods are explained first and then evaluation experiments of individual methods and their performances in emotion detection are presented and compared.