This paper clarifies the competitive advantage of Richemont in comparison to LVMH particularly from the angle of portfolio strategy. Unlike LVMH, limited numbers of people know Richemont that does not comprise the name of maisons under the umbrella. Even though LVMH gradually dominates global luxury market, Richemont as the second largest luxury conglomerate must have unique advantages over LVMH to compete, which could help examine the way to tackle the market's dominant company as a follower. Through this study, one similarity and two differences are found in terms of a business strategy. The similarity is that both Richemont and LVMH commit two kinds of portfolio strategies: product portfolio strategy and regional portfolio strategy. In contrast, the differences are as follows: (1) way of brand expansion, and (2) the nature of each conglomerate i.e. designer-driven or craftsmanship-driven conglomerate.

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This study aims to suggest improvements in the functionality and comfort of hygiene masks. Our preliminary study surveyed users' actual experiences of wearing masks from individual sensory, cognitive, and holistic perspectives. We surveyed 1519 Japanese university students, obtaining information on whether they wore masks, the purpose of the mask, and if there were any problems with wearing masks. We studied reported problems versus intended use by calculating the co-occurrence relationship. The aggregated results showed that women wore masks more frequently than men, and the most common reasons for wearing them were to guard against influenza and the common cold. Reported problems, such as discomfort due to “Humidity”, were cited by both men and women. Using a text mining approach, we identified that this awareness of problems brought on a “feeling of distraction”. Our findings will aid in the design and development of less unpleasant and more practical masks.

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In order to eliminate mismatches between the intentions of questioners and respondents of Question and Answer sites, we have experimentally evaluated the impressions of 60 questioners and their responses posted at Yahoo! Chiebukuro. By applying factor analysis to the scores of the experiment, the impression of the statements could be captured by nine factors. Factor scores of other features are interpreted as syntactic information, word imageability, and closing sentence expressions. As a result, the overall estimation accuracy is good: the accuracy of the estimated values of seven factors is good, while that of the other two factors is fairly good. The estimation accuracy of these two factors should be improved. This paper improves the estimation accuracy by adopting new feature values of statements: word familiarity and notation validity. We show that the estimation accuracy can sufficiently be improved by using them as well as the conventional feature values.

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We compared the production processes of ready-to-wear for high-end in Italy and Japan. We specifically took into account the works of modelists from these countries to understand how their differences influenced the resulting characteristics of garments. We report details of each production stage by predicting the jacket silhouette from body patterns and investigating the characteristics of sleeve patterns. We also investigated the specification sheet for keeping tape and interlining. We found that the concept for producing a jacket differed depending on the country, even for patterns. The predicted silhouette of bodies made in Japan was more planar shapes and linear lines in sleeve, shoulder and waist. On the other hand, the predicted silhouette of bodies made in Italy was loose fitting and three-dimensional. We also showed that interlinings and keeping tapes were used to make more three-dimensional-appearing bodies in Italy. This depended on the discretion of the modelist in Italy.

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We studied differences in production process of garments of Japan and Italy. A jacket which was designed by the same designer was produced in Japan and Italy, respectively. We compared jacket parts before and after assembling. We also compared the front, side, and back styles of jackets and the ironing treatments and usages of interlining and tape. For results we found that the influence of the person in charge of each area was different in each country. The progress can be moved to the next stage by checking the previous stage's progress, in Japan. On the other hand, the final product was first considered in Italy. We also found that there was a difference in use of the keeping tape and interlining. In Italy, it was common for the modelist to select the sub material depending on the design. However, cost and production volume is more important in Japan.

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Consumer response toward food commercial films was examined in this paper, and we quantitatively measured the contribution of informational/emotional appeals to consumers' attitudes and purchase intentions. First, we evaluated impressions of ten samples of existing natural food television commercials. Second, we designed eight original commercial films for a plant factory's products in order to examine whether purchase intention can be controlled by applying different strengths of informational/emotional appeals. The results of multiple regression analysis indicated that a feeling of safety, one of the emotional appeals, explained more than 70% of the variance of purchase intention for both natural food and plant factory commercial films. Interest, another emotional appeal, significantly contributed to favorable attitude. However, informational appeals did not significantly contribute to purchase intention or favorability. Our quantitative analysis suggests that emotional appeals in food commercials may have stronger impacts on purchase intention and favorable attitude than informational appeals

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In visual communication media, various symbols and logo marks are often presented to viewers as plane figures. It has been recently reported that the perception of plane figures is affected by the psychological influence depending on the layout angles in the field of vision. The subjective geometric relationships of figures are also different from their objective relationships. In our previous research, we examined the relationship between the apparent size of a basic geometric form and its layout angle. When vertices of a square were close to the vertical or horizontal lines, the apparent size of the square seemed to be larger than that of the other layout angles. In this paper, we study how changing the layout angle influences the apparent sizes of various geometric forms and their seeming proportions. Our results show that there are some regular features of the relationship between apparent size and layout angle.

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In this research, movements of the upper limbs of caregivers when putting on / removing the dummy's nursing care clothes with different designs were measured using electromyography (EMG) and video filming. Caregivers' sensory assessments of the burden caused by their services were also investigated to determine how the physiological burden in the upper limbs and sensation of burden relate to each other. The subjects were 10 healthy women. None of the women had ever provided nursing care to anyone. For this experiment, four kinds of samples were used. By combining EMG and questionnaires, it was possible to quantify the burden on the upper limbs, which cannot be assessed solely according to work time. Differences in the workload associated with trousers having different designs were also studied. It is possible that by taking such an approach, nursing care clothes may be developed in such a way to further reduce the burden on caregivers while providing nursing care.

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Determination of the sleep stages is essential for sleep quality measurement, which is associated with person's daily activity, emotional disturbance, accidental risk, and illness. In this paper, we analyze electroencephalographic (EEG) signals by means of chaotic analysis methods. The EEG signals measured during sleep were modeled as the deterministic chaos system, whose representation was performed by phase space transformation. The extracted parameters from EEG signals include the delay time, the embedded dimension, the correlation dimension and the largest Lyapunov exponent. Throughout experimental observations, it has been demonstrated that extracted parameters can serve as a relative index for sleep stages identification. The difference between the light sleep and deep sleep was well discernible by all the extracted parameters, but differences within light sleep (between light sleep 1 and light sleep 2) and within deep sleep (between deep sleep 1 and deep sleep 2) were not significant. The standard error of the mean is helpful to discriminate wakefulness, and rapid eye movement (REM), in spite of their similar EEG signal patterns.

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This paper presents an experimental investigation correlation between human feeling (Kansei) impression and some physical feature quantity in sound signal. As for the feature quantity, we focus on three kinds of values, that is, fluctuation value, intercept, and sum of squared errors that are obtained when making a regression analysis of sound signal in Fourier domain. In our investigation using a questionnaire survey over 34 persons, we apply multiple regression model to the relation between the feature quantity of sound signal and human evaluation about feeling impression for each person. And, we show the strength between the quantity and impression after making the construction of the regression equation for each person. Moreover, we classify the set of coefficients of the equation into three groups and discuss some tendency of human impression resulting from the quantity.

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In this paper, we formulate a method of designing artificial Kansei system based on a variable neighborhood model. We use a multi-agent space in order to realize a non-verbal system which can respond to individual situations. We carried out some simulation experiments of the system in which the system generates and produces some color arrangement like web pages as Kansei products. We also conducted a questionnaire survey in order to confirm that the system generates Kansei products which properly reflect users' Kansei.

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If we can relieve patients fear for the cataract operation, we can get their informed consents more smoothly and can help their understanding. Our object is to find out what sort of information we should offer them and how we should do so to relieve their fear and anxiety about the operation. We received content information from Kugayama Hospital concerning the cause of cataract, its therapy, method of the operation, and care after the operation. We recorded an operation at the hospital through two cameras, one from the doctors' viewpoint and another from the observers' viewpoint. From these videos we made a movie for getting Informed Consents from patients. Then we showed patients this movie as an experiment. We found out that we should solve these three points in order to make new tools: 1. How we tell patients through Videos that the operation is painless. 2. How we offer convincing information. 3. How we relieve patients' unpleasant feeling.

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The term “simplicity” is often used to express an impression about the appearance of an object. In a previous study, we found that simplicity strongly affects the visual tiresomeness of a product. Because attention was predominantly directed to the simplicity of a specific product in previous studies, the influence of the function or characterization of the product was inevitably reflected in the results of these studies. Therefore, more fundamental studies are required to help us obtain unadulterated characterizations of simplicity and to apply those characterizations in designing a variety of products. Because of such needs, we focus on the figurative attributes of three-dimensional objects and their arrangements, and try to clarify the morphological attributes of simplicity by considering the nonlinear relations among them. In a preliminary experiment of this study, 11 different features were extracted as the morphological attributes involved in the perceived simplicity of three-dimensional objects. These attributes include surface shape, features of component size, regularity of arrangement, number of components, symmetry, number of different components, continuity of the components at their joints, stability of each component (except for the base part), stability of the entire model, center of gravity, and motif. Among these morphological attributes, we found two combinations of attributes that contribute to perceived simplicity: one involves a balance between number of different components and features of component size, number of components, stability of the entire model, and stability of each component, and the other relies on the combination of surface shape, number of components, and symmetry.

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Japanese paper made in Saijo City is called shuso, and its making is a traditional Japanese craft. One of the main characteristics of shuso paper is a crepe structure called shibo. The shibo structure is made by hand; it is fabricated by bending the edge of the shuso paper toward the front. The shibo structure is affected by the bending angle. In recent years, the demand for shuso paper has stagnated. Shuso paper requires the creation of new products. However, the preferred type of shuso paper is unclear. The shibo structure of shuso paper can easily be changed to prepare many types of shibo structures. This study quantified shibo structures of shuso paper under various fabrication conditions. The preferences of subjects from different countries for shuso paper with various shibo structures were clarified.

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A mathematical model for the hit phenomenon in entertainment within a society is presented as a stochastic process of interactions of human dynamics. The model uses only the time distribution of advertisement budget as an input, and word-of-mouth (WOM) represented by posts on social network systems is used as data to compare with the calculated results. The unit of time is a day. The calculations for the Japanese motion picture market based on to the mathematical model agree very well with the actual residue distribution in time. The model is applied also to weekly TV drama.
We show that prediction is possible in appearance to the number of news and TV and stage with regard reputation of stage actors in Japan in this paper.

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