To determine how integrated TV advertising and event sponsorship should be evaluated, a theoretical framework derived from global exploratory research of academic literature and consulting reports of more than 50 authors was validated by 16 experts. To investigate how evaluation was managed in practice, 12 campaigns which had sponsored a televised event and placed advertisements during the broadcast of this event were analyzed via case studies. The investigated competitions included the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in London and the Olympic Games in Sydney. The examined brands comprised automotive, financial services, retail chain, office equipment, and consumer goods. The study identified the key techniques that lead to increased corporate sales-four objectives and necessary performance measures, which could be useful to all executives promoting brands through televised sport.

This study investigates the extent of influence of succession planning on Thai FOBs focusing on SMEs, and the attributes/characteristics of the successors to achieve a successful family business. SMEs were identified using Thai government classifications. A total of 449 usable questionnaires were obtained from Thai FOB owners/managers in Bangkok and vicinity. Most of the firms surveyed were small FOBs. The results show that there is a higher degree of success between FOBs that have succession plan and those that do not. The results also revealed five new factors concerning Thai family-owned businesses (SMEs) succession planning. The five factors are shown in this chapter.

This paper presents the result of a study into how organizations choose their supply partners and the extent to which they apply information technology-based systems to co-ordinate and harness potentially diverse sources of knowledge within the organization in carrying out this task. The results revealed that managers have abysmally low awareness of expert systems' capabilities to revolutionize supply partner selection process and alter the dynamics of competitive advantage. This is worrying because many businesses are becoming vulnerable to growing strategic information-related actions and sophisticated competitive intelligence network of their competitors. IntroductionIn today's global, dynamic business environment, trends toward outsourcing and vertical integration are revealing the critical importance of partner-ship sourcing in maintaining and/or improving competitive positions. This paper aims to (a) review organizational approaches to selecting supply-partners and identify the problems inherent in the conventional approaches, (b) identify the factors which organizations take into consideration in evaluating and selecting suppliers and how those factors are weighted, and (c) assess the relevance of Expert Systems technology in developing an effective supplier strategy. There is nothing revolutionacy in 'a' and 'b' above as the literature is replete with studies addressing supplier selection processes and problems (Dickson, 1966;Weber, Current and Benton, 1991). However, the third strand will probably open up a new vista on firm competitiveness in a way that is not hitherto known. In the area of supply-partner selection, it makes sense to speculate on the potential role of Expert Systems in enhancing mutually rewarding relationships linking supplier value-adding activities to organizational competencies, which, in tum, may lead to sustained competitive advantage.

In this research the Analytic Hierarchy Process is applied to analyze the complex problems related to the social field, as, for example, the phenomenon of foreign students' school integration, a phenomenon that is simultaneously considered complex and multidimensional by all the most recent literature. For this purpose a case study is presented, in which we have interviewed twelve teachers of a primary school. The opinions of each of these teachers are represented with three pairwise comparisons matrices: the matrix of paired comparisons of the sub-objectives with respect to the general objective, and the two matrices of paired comparisons of a set of variables with respect to every sub-objective. Precisely, starting from the definition of the general objective "foreign students' school integration", two sub-objectives have been single out: "the interpersonal communication" and "the degree of scholastic profit". Furthermore nine variables B1, B2, ..., B9, have been introduced, in order to give an implicit definition of the general objective and of the sub-objectives. Furthermore, with Saaty's AHP method, for every interviewed teacher, pairwise comparisons matrices are compiled. In order to give a group evaluation of opinions of teachers, for every set of homogeneous matrices, two summarizing matrices are introduced, the geometric mean G, and the uncertainty multiplicative index U. Matrices G and U are utilized to assign fuzzy triangular scores to sub-objectives, and to variables with respect to every sub-objective. In order to obtain the cores of such fuzzy scores, two criteria are considered and compared, the first one based on a weighted arithmetic mean of the columns of G, the second one based on eigenvalues and eigenvectors. As a significant social meaning, it has emerged from the results obtained that the interpersonal communication is resulted far more important than the degree of scholastic profit. Moreover, variables concerning relation and interaction capacity are dominant with respect to variables concerning school, sport or manual abilities.

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