Abstract

Abstract
We present a study in the area of sentiment analysis of clients' commentaries transcribed by assistants of a help-desk service of one Portuguese telecommunications company. We have adopted a lexicon-based approach to determine the polarity of the sentiment of each commentary, based on the so called opinion words. This task was by no means easy, as not many tools are available for the Portuguese language. The initial results with the off-the-shelf solutions were rather poor. This has motivated us to carry out a number of enhancements, including, for instance, enriching the given lexicon with domain specific terms, formulating specific rules for negation and amplifiers. Automatic pruning of some of the lexicon terms has led to a significant improvement in performance. As our final system achieved a very good performance, our work should be of interest to others working on domain specific solutions for languages where ready-made solutions are not available.

Abstract
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.

Abstract
Purpose - This study aims to investigate the reliability of a mystery client (MC) as a service evaluation technique taking into consideration personal differences of the MC agents. Design/methodology/approach - The ratings from 144 MCs from 355 evaluations of computer and electronic stores were cross analyzed with eight psychographic and demographic profile variables. Findings - MCs who were highly involved in the product category were more critical of service responsiveness with respect to product demonstrations and listening to customer requirements. On the other hand, MCs with stronger faith in intuition were more inclined to rate services higher on empathy with respect to employees making a conscientious effort to understand customers' needs. Practical implications - Depending on the service marketing goals, managers learn to define which aspects of MC profile they should consider or avoid during the recruitment as well as becoming more critical when they analyze the evaluation reports to avoid an interpretation bias. Originality/value - The usefulness of the MC tool relies on its reliability and credibility as a marketing research technique. It was identified that the MC personality traits are more likely associated with marketing service evaluation variability.

Abstract
This paper develops a theoretical model to define tourism destination brand's online content. Message strategies and positioning attributes that brands want to communicate are the main inputs to develop communication content. However, the relationship between message strategies and attributes has not been studied in the literature. Our research examines this relationship, using 400 online brochures from around the world. Based on the positioning attributes and message strategies, a taxonomy is developed to analyse online brochures through content analysis. A comprehensive benchmark model was designed to assist tourism destination managers and advertisers while planning the concept and production of their online tourism brochures, and a new creative methodology based on several workable strategic alternatives are proposed.

Abstract
Simulation is a computer-based experimentation tool suitable to determine the efficacy of a previously untried decision. In this paper, we present a model of climate change. The goal behind this project is to provide a test-bed to evaluate theories related to the Earth system so as to test and evaluate metrics such as greenhouse gases and climate change in general. The proposed approach is based on a multi-agent model which has as input a representation of nature and as output the changes that will occur on Earth within a given instant of time. Most views about climate change do not take into account the real severity of the subject matter; however, the present perspective is given in a way so as to make non-experts aware of the risks that are threatening life on Earth. Just recently, the general population has developed considerable sensitivity to these issues. One important contribution of this work is to use agent-based modeling and simulation as an instructional tool that will allow people to easily understand all aspects involved in the preservation of the environment in a more aware and responsible way.