Experiential marketing instruments and the extraordinary experiences they provide are one of the strongest means of branding in B2C. Inter alia as brand worlds, they also exist in B2B marketing practice, but have only received limited attention from the B2B branding perspective. Differences between B2C and B2B branding raise questions regarding why B2B companies operate brand worlds, what they consist of, what their nature is, and how they are experienced. We build on a rich, comprehensive sample of 37 expert interviews, comprising the perspectives of operating companies, business visitors, and exhibition designers. We find that B2B brand worlds differ substantially from their B2C equivalents in several aspects, but they apply similar experiential techniques. Operating companies' motives focus on providing live product experiences to explain complex products and create product awareness. B2B visitors expect more functional than hedonic benefits, and the visit has to support them in their own business activities. Affordances of the experiencescape and the action-perception between visitor, brand employees, and the physical environment are at the core of how the B2B brand world experiences are co-created. Our research highlights the important role and nature of B2B brand worlds as three-dimensional "business cards", where relationships are initiated and built.

No abstract

No abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are often characterized by high node mobility and rapid topology changes which in turn can cause high packet loss rates. In order to cope with this, MANETs typically rely on routing algorithms that try to efficiently distribute messages in the entire network. Such routing schemes introduce an overhead that limits the scalability of MANETs with respect to the number of nodes and/or mobility. Cooperative communication techniques have the potential to improve the efficiency of distributing messages and thus to increase the MANET scalability. In this paper, we propose an efficient cooperative broadcasting scheme based on distributed transmit diversity. To this end, we adapt Space-Time Block-Codes (STBCs), that were initially designed for a co-located setup in quasi-static environments, to a distributed setup with timevariant channels. We perform a comprehensive analysis based on bit error simulations to compare different STBC candidates and identify Linear-Scalable Dispersion Codes (LSDCs) to be a valuable option. For those, we propose an improvement of the inner-code for different channel models without the need for channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Besides, we validate the performance advantage of cooperative broadcasting by outage simulations in typical MANET scenarios.

No abstract