Search Results (46)

Japanese sake, a traditional alcoholic beverage, contains several organic acids that may contribute to its sour taste. To identify these, a precolumn derivatization reagent, benzyl 5-(2-aminoethyl)-3-methyl-4-oxoimidazolidine-1-carboxylate (CIM-C₂-NH₂), developed for labeling carboxyl groups, was synthesized and applied to liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis of organic acids in six commercial sake samples. The majority primarily contained lactic acid (LA), and dicarboxylic acids, such as succinic acid (SA), malic acid (MA), and citramalic acid (CMA). The organic acid concentrations and compositions in the sake differed among brands. Notably, both l- and d-forms of LA were detected in all samples, while only d-CMA was present. To estimate the total acidic content, neutralization titration with sodium hydroxide was performed. In four of the six samples, titration results closely matched LC-MS/MS data, suggesting that l-LA, d-LA, SA, MA, and d-CMA were the primary contributors for the sour taste in these sakes. The discrepancy between titration and LC-MS/MS data for the other samples was attributed to the presence of other organic acids, which will be investigated in future studies. Full article

The combustion of fossil fuels is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, drives climate change, and has intensified the search for cleaner energy alternatives such as biomass. Biomass derived from renewable organic materials, is considered a sustainable and carbon-neutral energy source. While biomass represents a renewable and clean energy source, its combustion, especially in pellet form, can produce various pollutants such as CO₂, SO₂, NO₂, CO, and PM. This study focuses on analyzing the combustion of six different pellet brands and the emissions they produce. A dedicated experimental procedure was designed and implemented to evaluate the combustion performance. The temperature shows a gradual increase in ambient temperature around 2.5 °C across all tests, with a similar behavior, the temperature of flue gas shows a similar behavior between tests with temperatures peaking around 300 °C and 340 °C. In the tests conducted, all pellets complied with the legal emission limits defined by legislation. The efficiency calculated using the direct method was lower by around 55%, primarily due to the use of an older boiler (manufactured in 2004) and short duration of the test. The indirect method shows better efficiency, around 70%, influenced by lower moisture content of the pellets. The results indicate that B pellets had a superior performance compared to the others evaluated. Full article

One of the core objectives of the European Green Deal in pursuing climate neutrality and sustainable development is the decarbonization of high-impact sectors. Among the most polluting is the fast fashion industry, driven by linear business models that must urgently transition to circular economy frameworks and decarbonized supply chains. Fast fashion poses significant environmental and social challenges due to its high greenhouse gas emissions, excessive resource consumption, and substantial waste generation. To foster greater sustainability within the sector, this study examines environmental indicators defined by the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), in accordance with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) 2022/2464. Aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), these standards aim to harmonize sustainability disclosures and enable better decision-making across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions throughout Europe. This research focuses on five key environmental aspects—climate change, pollution, water resource management, biodiversity, and circular economy/resource use—across four leading fast fashion brands: Mango, Zara, H&M, and Shein. Using an exploratory web-based methodology, this study evaluates how these companies disclose and implement ESG strategies in their supply chains. The central aim is to assess the sustainability and resilience of their operations, with particular emphasis on communication strategies that support the transition from linear to circular business models. Ultimately, this study seeks to highlight both the progress and persistent challenges faced by the fast fashion industry in aligning with ESG and ESRS requirements. Full article

When it comes to wine communication, winery names can serve as multidimensional communication mechanisms. Their various aspects of communication concern the historical context, tourism geography, socio-economic tourism development, wine knowledge, and even gastronomy. On this basis, a whole communication strategy could be developed, which could lead to progressive interaction and networking with consumers. Quality needs to be fully and properly communicated through multiple channels. This paper aims to reveal the importance of the way in which wine producers in Northern Greece construct their brand identity through strategic naming choices—such as Estate, Ktima, Château, or the producer’s family name—as opposed to more neutral or descriptive labels. The findings suggest that winery names contribute significantly to consumer perception, place branding, and the development of wine tourism. The choice of a winery name influences regional identity, strengthens the connection with local traditions, and enhances the commercial success and tourism appeal of the region. Full article

From the perspective of social media data, this study investigates the coupling relationship between tourists’ spatial perception and tourism image in traditional old urban areas. Using Nanxun Ancient Town as a case study, this paper reveals the interaction and mutual influence between tourists’ perception of space and tourism image in the development of traditional ancient town tourism. We employed Python 3.13.0 to gather 10,789 valuable comments from tourists from Dianping 11.35.3, Ctrip 8.78.4, and Mafengwo 11.2.6. Mini Tag Cloud software is used to analyze the text data, systematically classify the cognitive image of tourists, and identify negative emotional factors. This paper constructs a four-dimensional landscape spatial perception evaluation system centered on “high-frequency words”, “perceptual dimensions”, “semantic networks”, and “emotional tendencies”. The key findings are as follows: (1) Tourists’ spatial perception exhibits pronounced characteristics of subjective preference and emotional attachment influenced by emotional factors. Overall, tourists exhibited positive emotional perceptions, with 59.51% positive emotions, 21.16% neutral emotions, and 19.33% negative emotions. (2) The perception of Nanxun Ancient Town’s tourism image can be summarized into four dimensions. Here are the dimensions in order of how important they are: historical culture and folk heritage (34.18%), perceptions of natural landscape and architectural style (31.03%), perceptions of tourism services and facilities (18.37%), and psychological identity and emotional interaction (16.42%). (3) Tourism image reciprocally influences tourists’ spatial perception. A positive tourism image is anticipated to encourage tourists to explore the spatial details of the ancient town more deeply, enhancing their positive spatial perception and experience. There exists a coupling relationship between tourists’ spatial perception and tourism image. (4) Key aspects of tourists’ perception of Nanxun Ancient Town include its historical and cultural significance, as well as commercialization. Future studies could focus on tourists’ spatial perception and tourism destination brand image building, and tourism policy makers should pay attention to tourists’ perception of Nanxun Ancient Town’s history, culture and commercialization, and use the coupling of the two to improve development and service policies. Full article

Social acceptance of electric vehicles is of great importance for environmental sustainability and economic development. This study aims to examine Turkish and English tweets about electric vehicles with sentiment analysis, text mining, and topic modelling techniques to reveal consumers’ electric vehicle purchasing behaviours, consumer perception and acceptance processes about electric vehicles, and social perceptions. The data was taken from the X platform, and high accuracy and F1 scores were obtained in both languages in the classification made with the deep learning-based LSTM model. The accuracy was 92.1% for English tweets and 96.7% for Turkish tweets. According to the sentiment analysis results, the perception of electric vehicles is generally positive in both languages. However, while the rate of neutral sentiment is higher in Turkish tweets, the rate of negative sentiment is higher in English tweets. This indicates that there is more criticism and debate about electric vehicles globally, while Turkish tweets have more neutral views on the subject. Word frequency analysis shows that positive comments about electric vehicles focus on economic and environmental advantages, while negative comments include concerns about charging time, battery life, and range concerns. The topic modelling identified three main themes related to electric vehicles: (1) reasons for being preferred by consumers and their purchasing tendencies, (2) the role of brands, (3) market developments and marketing strategies. In Turkish tweets, electric vehicle production, charging infrastructure, and consumer purchasing trends were at the forefront. In general, it is emphasised that charging infrastructure should be strengthened, battery performance should be improved, and costs should be reduced to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. Full article

This study evaluated if the material, the substrate, and the cement have no influence on the color of pre-shaded monolithic zirconia crowns. The specific effect of the cement over each substrate/brand group was also studied. Two commercial brands of zirconia, Amann Girrbach (AG) and Zirkonzahn (ZZ), were used to produce crowns that were placed over three substrates (natural tooth, zirconia, metal) using two different resin cements (Ivoclar AG (Shaan, Liechtenstein) Neutral and Light) or glycerol (as the control) (n = 10). Lightness (L*), chroma (C*), hue (h*), and color difference (ΔE) of each crown were measured using a VITA Easyshade V^® spectrophotometer (VITA Zahnfabrik, Bad Säckingen, Germany), following the standardized reference. Since normality was not verified by the Shapiro–Wilk test, data were statistically analyzed using the Kruskal–Wallis test for group comparisons and Tukey’s post-hoc test for multifactorial variance analysis (α = 0.05). ΔE medians ranged between 1.3 in the AG/zirconia substrate/glycerol group and 8.0 in the ZZ/metal substrate/light cement group. In general, lower values of ΔE were recorded in AG restorations compared to ZZ (p < 0.05), zirconia, and natural tooth substrates compared to metal (p < 0.001) and neutral compared to light cements (p < 0.05). Specifically, over the metal substrate, AG crowns with neutral cement and ZZ crowns with neutral cement and glycerol showed lower ΔE values (p < 0.05). Over the zirconia substrate, light cement presented higher ΔE values than glycerol in both brands but similar to neutral cement. Over the natural tooth, no significant differences were observed between cements (p > 0.05) in the AG brand, while in the ZZ group, light cement showed higher ΔE values (p < 0.05). The final color of the restorations was significantly influenced by the zirconia brand, substrate type, and resin cement. Light cement led to greater color variations, particularly in ZZ restorations. These findings highlight the importance of material selection in achieving esthetically pleasing zirconia restorations. Full article

Globally, recycled building materials have attracted much attention, but the ambiguity of the use of recycled building materials makes it difficult for the building material remanufacturer (BMR) to compete with the building material manufacturer (BMM). Brand building is an important strategic tool for enterprises to increase product competitiveness. From the new perspective of the supply chain, this paper aims to examine the decision-making behavior of enterprises under two scenarios of consumer ambiguity neutrality and ambiguity tolerance and to analyze the impact of ambiguity tolerance on the pricing decisions of building materials supply chains in a brand-building scenario. This paper constructs a building material supply chain game model consisting of the BMM and BMR, according to the cognitive–affective personality system (CAPS) theory and through the Stackelberg game. The main findings are as follows. (1) Strengthening brand building can mitigate the negative impact of ambiguity tolerance on new product pricing. The selling price of recycled building materials is positively related to ambiguity tolerance. (2) When the BMM has higher brand value, there is a U-shaped trend between profit and ambiguity tolerance at a cost coefficient above the threshold value of 0.61. (3) When the BMR has higher brand value, profit is negatively related to ambiguity tolerance at operational inefficiencies and cost coefficients below the threshold value of 0.45. Otherwise, profits and ambiguity tolerance follow a U-shaped trend. This paper not only expands the research on brand building and ambiguity tolerance but also provides theoretical guidance for enterprises to make effective decisions in response to consumers’ ambiguity psychology. Full article

This study investigates the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI) in consumer decision-making, particularly in comparison to traditional human influencers. As consumer trust in social media influencers has declined, largely due to concerns about the financial motivations behind endorsements, AI tools such as ChatGPT have emerged as perceived neutral intermediaries. The research aims to understand whether AI systems can replace human influencers in shaping purchasing decisions and, if so, in which sectors. A mixed-methods approach was employed, involving a quantitative survey of 478 participants with prior experience using both AI tools and interacting with social media influencers, complemented by 15 semi-structured interviews. The results reveal that AI is favoured over human influencers in product categories where objectivity and precision are critical, such as electronics and sporting goods, while human influencers remain influential in emotionally driven sectors like fashion and beauty. These findings suggest that the future of marketing will show a reduced need for human social media influencers and may involve a hybrid model where AI systems dominate data-driven recommendations and human influencers continue to foster emotional engagement. This shift has important implications for brands as they adapt to changing consumer trust dynamics. Full article

In light of growing global supply chain instability and carbon neutrality initiatives, South Korea has highlighted the need for a circular economy to reduce its reliance on natural resources. As a critical strategy for promoting a circular economy, remanufacturing has become essential because of its ability to improve resource efficiency and reduce environmental impacts. The automotive sector, which accounts for 80% of the remanufacturing industry, plays a critical role in these efforts. Turbochargers, primarily made of cast iron, represent approximately 20% of sales in this sector and are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, making them an important target for emission reduction. This study examined the greenhouse gas emissions associated with turbochargers across multiple remanufacturing cycles using the LCA method. The results indicated an approximate decrease of 50%, 48%, and 46%, based on a comparative analysis between brand-new products and those remanufactured one to three times. Comparing brand-new and remanufactured products does not fully capture the key advantage of remanufacturing. This advantage lies in its ability to extend a product’s life cycle by using core parts as primary raw materials and reducing the consumption of new resources. Therefore, it is important to consider the environmental impact of remanufacturing within an expanded process, where brand-new products are included in the entire life cycle. Using this approach, the accumulated annual greenhouse gas reduction effect for multiple remanufacturing indicated decreases of approximately 25%, 32%, and 35% for remanufacturing one, two, or three times, respectively, compared to using only brand-new products. This study shows that multiple remanufacturing reduces greenhouse gas emissions compared to the use of brand-new products. In particular, as remanufacturing is repeated, the product lifespan can be extended from 3 years to up to 12 years with a concomitant decrease in annual greenhouse gas emissions. These findings provide valuable data for modeling and encouraging the greenhouse gas reduction potential driven by remanufacturing across various industrial sectors. Full article

As an important asset of an enterprise, brand value reflects its competitive position in the market. With the proposed goal of “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality”, the development of enterprises is paying more and more attention to ESG performance (that is, the performance of enterprises in environmental, social and governance aspects), and the attention of brand management is slowly shifting away from traditional products and markets into being green and sustainable. In order to verify the relationship between ESG performance and brand value, this study takes Chinese A-share listed enterprises from 2012 to 2021 as research samples to reveal the mechanism of ESG performance’s impact on brand value. The results show that ESG performance can significantly improve brand value, indicating that the investment in ESG will ultimately affect brand value. The mediation mechanism analysis shows that R&D innovation plays a mediating role in the relationship between the two. A heterogeneity analysis shows that the ESG performance of state-owned enterprises and large enterprises has a stronger promoting effect on brand value, while small enterprises do not show heterogeneity. The research results provide new evidence to reveal the impact of ESG performance on brand management, and have reference significance for ESG construction, brand marketing innovation, and corporate green innovation. Full article

Reputation is shaped depending on factors such as the quality of products and services offered by a brand to its stakeholders, its reliability, and its innovative aspect in the eyes of stakeholders. The sustainability of a brand reputation depends on the brand creating a positive perception by fulfilling its social responsibilities and maintaining this perception in the long term. In this study, the brand reputation of Hewlett-Packard (HP) computers is evaluated through customer reviews. The data set in the study consists of 2012 customer reviews obtained from Hepsiburada, one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms in Turkey. Sentiment analysis and text mining artificial intelligence methods were used in the study. For sentiment analysis, the Naive Bayes method, which is one of the machine learning methods, was used, and the comments were divided into three groups as positive, negative, and neutral. In the study, 82% of the customer comments were positive, 11% were negative, and 7% were neutral. The fact that most of the comments consist of positive sentiments shows that HP Computer has a positive reputation in the eyes of stakeholders consisting of customers. Comments consisting of negative and neutral emotions show the aspects that the brand needs to improve. In the study, the text mining method emphasises the prominent features of the brand in the comments. This study makes an important contribution to the reputation assessment of brands and to ensuring sustainable brand reputation. Full article

This article draws on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model to understand the role of negative emotions in the anti-brand behaviors of online users who consume snow sports brands. To this end, both the online social influence and the mediating effect of symbolic incongruence (stimulus) on the generation of negative emotions (anger, stress, frustration, fear, boredom and sadness) (organism), and how these influence the formation of negative customer brand engagement (nCBE) (response), are analyzed. The study also analyses the moderating effects of “level of expertise”, this makes it possible to capture differences in behaviors based on the profile of the users in each of the proposed relationships. Questionnaire responses of 400 ski and snowboard users over 18 years of age were analyzed using a quantitative methodology. The results obtained have important theoretical and practical implications, since they confirm that online social influences have both a direct and indirect (mediating) effect on negative emotions, which positively affects the nCBE of online users of snow sports brands. Significant differences in behavior based on experience level (moderation effect) were also found. The study proposes useful practical recommendations applicable in online environments that the extreme sports industry could use to neutralize/avoid highly detrimental consequences. Full article

The first vaccine against chikungunya virus (CHIKV) was recently licensed in the U.S., Europe, and Canada (brand IXCHIQ^®, referred to as VLA1553). Other pathogenic alphaviruses co-circulate with CHIKV and major questions remain regarding the potential of IXCHIQ to confer cross-protection for populations that are exposed to them. Here, we characterized the cross-neutralizing antibody (nAb) responses against heterotypic CHIKV and additional arthritogenic alphaviruses in individuals at one month, six months, and one year post-IXCHIQ vaccination. We characterized nAbs against CHIKV strains LR2006, 181/25, and a 2021 isolate from Tocantins, Brazil, as well as O’nyong-nyong virus (ONNV), Mayaro virus (MAYV), and Ross River virus (RRV). IXCHIQ elicited 100% seroconversion to each virus, with the exception of RRV at 83.3% seroconversion of vaccinees, and cross-neutralizing antibody potency decreased with increasing genetic distance from CHIKV. We compared vaccinee responses to cross-nAbs elicited by natural CHIKV infection in individuals living in the endemic setting of Puerto Rico at 8–9 years post-infection. These data suggest that IXCHIQ efficiently and potently elicits cross-nAb breadth that extends to related alphaviruses in a manner similar to natural CHIKV infection, which may have important implications for individuals that are susceptible to alphavirus co-circulation in regions of potential vaccine rollout. Full article

The environmental impact of the golf industry has garnered increasing attention, emphasizing the need for sustainable practices in golf course management. This study aims to develop strategic frameworks that enable the golf industry to address global environmental challenges and integrate eco-friendly principles. Utilizing topic modeling, the research examines key areas such as pesticide use, waste management, and energy consumption within golf courses, and explores strategies for achieving carbon neutrality and developing sustainable golf wear and branding. The findings reveal specific management practices that significantly reduce environmental harm, including integrated pest management, waste reduction techniques, and the adoption of renewable energy sources. Case studies of leading golf clubs demonstrate successful implementation of carbon neutrality strategies. Furthermore, the research highlights the potential of eco-friendly golf wear to enhance brand credibility and meet consumer demands. These insights hold valuable implications for golf course managers, club operators, policymakers, and golfers, promoting a comprehensive approach to sustainability in the golf industry. The study’s contributions extend beyond the immediate environmental challenges, offering a framework for long-term sustainability and competitive advantage. Full article