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These details form the basis of the main branding elements. I met with our CEO, Shanice Watts, and she wanted me to emphasize the following eight categories we would like you to analyze in your report about our two biggest competitors:
brand personality
brand image
brand identity
To carry out this assignment, you need to understand Slate’s competitors’ brand strategies, their consumers, how to acquire market knowledge through primary and secondary research, and how to use that knowledge to build and support a brand.
To start your research, visit the websites of Slate’s two biggest competitors and review both scholarly and reliable nonscholarly sources to explore their branding decisions. Your research of the two companies should focus on the branding elements discussed in the previous step.
Consult a minimum of three scholarly sources and twelve reliable nonscholarly sources (15 total). Make sure that you use reliable, nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Statista, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMGC Library databases such as Hoover’s, IBIS World, and ABI/INFORM.
In addition, explore the following branding websites for relevant content:

I have to write my bachelor’s thesis on how the united arab emirates manage to attract talents and/ or experts to settle there. My methodology is the quantitive-content-analysis. Included should be all kinds of documents, they use to attract such talents. What is proven to be most attractive? What do the UAE think, attracts most talents? How many people do they actually attract? Why are the UAE so much into attracting other talents rather than focussing on the education of their own people? What if the UAE would try and advertise with other “things”, would they attract more talents? What is to be critisized about their techniques? I need a full bachelor’s thesis on this whole topic. It has to be at least 10.000 words long, starting with the main body of the thesis. I need my table of contents, the theoretical appriach, my methodology; also future suggestions on further researchn and of course my reference list needs to be a separate list than the list of e.g. the documents like flyers and advertisement which the UAE are advertising with. 
With my table of contents, I was thinking about something like this:
1. Introduction                                                                                     1
1.1 Background of the Study                                                         x
1.2 Research Objectives                                                                x
1.3 Significance of the Study                                                        x
2. Literature Review                                                                            x
2.1 Expert Settlement Patterns                                                      x
2.2 Cultural Remoteness in the UAE                                            x
2.3 Theoretical Frameworks                                                          x
2.4 Previous Research on Dubai and Other Emirates                   x
3. Theoretical Approach                                                                      x
3.1 Economic Theory                                                                    x
3.2 Cultural Anthropology                                                            x
3.3 Geographical Analysis                                                            x
3.4 Policy and Governance Studies                                               x
3.5 Psychological and Behavioral Perspectives                            x
3.6 Sustainability and Environmental Studies                              x
4. Methodology                                                                                   x
4.1 Research Design                                                                      x
4.2 Data Collection Methods                                                         x
4.3 Analytical Approaches                                                            x
4.4 Limitations                                                                              x
5. Results                                                                                              x
5.1 Qualitative Findings                                                                x
5.2 Quantitative Findings                                                              x
5.3 Spatial Analyses                                                                      x
5.4 Comparative Case Studies                                                       x
6. Discussion                                                                                         x
6.1 Interpretation of Findings                                                        x
6.2 Theoretical Implications                                                          x
6.3. Practical Implications                                                             x
6.4 Differences between Dubai and Other Emirates                     x
7. Conclusion                                                                                        x
7.1 Summary of Findings                                                              x
7.2 Contributions of the Study                                                      x 
7.3 Suggestions for Future Research                                             x
References
Appendices
– please note that this table of contents is just a draft. Please feel free to edit and change it so it fits the bachelor’s thesis. 
The styleguid should be as such:
FONT STYLE & SIZE: Times/Times New Roman (TNR) 12 or Arial 11 
LINE SPACING: 1.5, spacing: 6pt before and after
MARGINS: 3 cm, also above and below text
PAGE NUMBERS
(STARTING WITH THE INTRODUCTION): centered at the bottom
This style & referencing guide covers the formal requirements for all academic term papers and the bachelor/master thesis at the Cologne Business School. Compliance with the CBS style & referencing requirements, compliant with the APA Documentation Style (7th ed.), will ensure that any papers/thesis are of an internationally recognised academic standard. Non-compliance with the guidelines leads to a point deduction, which may result in a fail.
The style sheet is to be applied for all academic pieces of work, regardless of length of paper or thesis. If there are different requirements for individual pie- ces of work, lecturers will give the necessary information: for example, when writing a business report.
Course works in the Bachelor’s program typically have a length of 2000 to 3000 words, in the Master’s program 4000 to 5000 words (these are only guidelines; the actual word count depends on the subject and the examination regulations, e.g. the share of the course work in the overall grade). For full- time programs, the Bachelor thesis (BT) should generally be around 10,000 words, the Master thesis (MT) around 20,000 words. Only the words in the actual body of a paper count, see the structure on page 7. The most recent spe- cifications in the study and examination regulations for the respective degree program are decisive in this respect.
This style guide deliberately omits any information on the relative weighting of any parts of a paper or thesis when it comes to grading: certain parts can be more or less important, varying with the chosen topic.
Depending on the findings of e.g. literature reviews or first research results, the structure and the content, sometimes even the research questions, of a paper may evolve during working on it. This means that even when knowing a topic, the supervisor will not necessarily be able to tell upfront how different parts will be weighted. The focus should therefore lie on presenting a coherent paper with a logical and compelling storyline throughout all parts of it.
All papers/theses must be written in English.The writing style should be suitable for an academic piece of work. A correct syntactic structure should be observed, i.e. sentences grouped together to form paragraphs (usually minimum of 3-4 sentences to a paragraph, no strings of single sentence paragraphs), related paragraphs grouped together in chapters/sections etc.
APA also contains rules for bias free language, which can be found in the APA publication manual. Unbiased language and ethical researching, writing and quoting are a matter of course in academic writing.
Table of contents:
Each Chapter (i.e. Chapter 2, Chapter 3, etc.) is devoted to an overall aspect of the argument and contains only information relevant for this aspect. Subchapters (2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, etc.) are used to structure information within the chapter. There can be any number of sublevels, however, in the interest of clarity and easiness to read, students should use no more than three.
Chapter titles sum up the contents of the chapter as precisely as possible and are as short as possible (Usually nouns, no sentences, no questions). Titles are to be aligned left. There cannot be a single subaspect.
The appendix is optional and usually contains material (statistics, graphs,
maps, questionnaires, etc.) too big for the main text. 
Students should remember to include the page number of the first page of each chapter in the table of contents! 
This is a deliberate deviation from APA style, which offers solutions with no numerotation of the different levels, using bold style, italics, centering and indentations only. It also does not give a heading to the introduction.
However, CBS believes numerotation as outlined above to be more suitable to the purpose of term papers or bachelors’ and masters’ theses.
The body of the paper:
The body contains the elaboration of the argument in clearly defined chapters and subchapters. Each (sub)-chapter has a topic sentence introducing the argu- ment to come, the adequate elaboration of the argument, and it ends with a short wrap-up of the topic. When subchapters are used they cannot directly follow the overall chapter title. The text between the chapter title and the first subchapter title contains a short summary of all arguments tackled within the chapter.
Most theses start wtih an abstract cantaining a brief (150 to 250 words) over- view of the aims, methods and results of the research, plus recommendations where appropriate.
Introductions usually cover the following topics:
– short introduction of the topic and its relevance
– research question & hypothesis/thesis statement
– BT and MT: short explanation of the process of data compilation in case of primary research. The use of scientific secondary literature is standard and does not deserve mentioning.
– BT and MT: very brief introduction of theories/models and methods applied to solve the research question. The indepth explanation of the theoretical framework of a thesis follows in a separate chapter.
– short explanation of the structure of the text
The main body will present and explain the answers to the research question and how much of what had been planned could actually be achieved.
This will be the longest part of any paper: it explains how the author arrived to his findings, what these are, and it also contains a discussion on the results of the research.
Because oft he variety of ways how to get to any findings, the structure of this chapter (or these chapters) may vary greatly. The main body, however, also needs to be well structured and presented in a logical way.
It is also recommended to comment on any obstacles encountered and on po- tential shortcomings of the research. This is especially important in the case of theses. Term papers are shorter and may be so focused on a small question that it is both simpler to position it within current theory and more difficult to lead an elaborate discussion around the findings. Students are invited to use their own discretion on what actually makes sense around their topic.
The conclusion takes up the results presented in the main body, especially the answer to the research question/the thesis statement outlined in the introduc- tion. To do so it gives a short summary of all findings and wraps them up in the overall argument of the paper. It therefore summarises the overall “story” of the paper/thesis: special attention should be given to causal chains of lo- gic. This statement must be substantiated by the elaboration and arguments of the main text; like every part of the paper, the conclusion is no place for unsubstantiated personal emotions or comments. It is rather advisable to see the whole compilation process through elaboration and argumentation as the author‘s personal approach to a scientific topic.
A good conclusion of a thesis also shows potential gaps or open issues and deduces recommendations for further research.
At the end of the body of the paper, students must give the word count (exclu- ding references, appendices, etc.) like this:
(21.428 words).
In-text citations from books, journal and newspaper articles:
Credits for facts, thoughts, ideas, etc. adopted from primary or secondary sources must be given in the text in the format explained below, usually at the end of the paragraph that contains this information, but before the last full stop of the paragraph. Usually ideas from secondary literature are summarised or paraphrased when adopted, avoid unnecessary direct quotes of passages. Only quote sentences literally when the exact wording of the phrase is important.
If possible Students should include page numbers in their source quotations (p. for one page, pp. as in (pp. 21-34) for several pages. other forms like et seq. or ff. are not used for pagenumbers in APA style). Detailed and correct referencing helps to avoid being suspected of plagiarism. Giving page numbers every time deviates from APA 7 but allows examiners to collate with the sources.
The following rules apply for in-text citations:
For a single author, in-text citation involves the last name of the author and the year of publication being incorporated into the text; for example:
Schrödinger (2020) states that cats may or may not exist (p. 666).
or
Cats may or may not exist (Schrödinger, 2020, p. 666).
If there are two authors of a work both should be cited:
Einstein and Schrödinger (2020) note that cats, whether existing or not, cannot exceed the speed of light (p. 299752458).
or
Cats, independently of their existence, cannot exceed the speed of light (Einstein & Schrödinger, 2020, p. 299752458).
The two authors’ names are to be linked with ‘and’ when cited outside parent- heses. When within parentheses they should be linked with an ampersand (&).
From three authors, all authors (and the year) may be cited the first time they are introduced. Subsequently, one should adopt ‘et al.’ after the first author and then the year. According to APA 7, “et. al.” would actually allready be permit- ted from the first citation on.
So the initial citation would be:
Heisenberg, Einstein, and Schrödinger (2021) argue that you cannot both mea- sure location and momentum of cats travelling at any given speed (pp. 34-36). or
One cannot both measure location and momentum of cats travelling at any gi- ven speed. (Heisenberg, Einstein, & Schrödinger, 2021, pp. 34-36).
Remember, there is a comma after the second-last author. For subsequent cita- tions it will be:
Heisenberg et al. (2021) support the idea of uncertainty in cats (p. 0).
or
Cats are subject to uncertainty principles (Heisenberg et al., 2021, p. 0).
If one cites two or more works within the same parentheses they should be in alphabetical order of the first author: i.e. (Curie, Dirac, & Feynman, 2022; Planck & Oppenheimer, 2020). For two or more works by the same author(s), the author name(s) is to be listed once and for each subsequent work, only the date has to be provided: for example (Meitner, 2014, 2018, 2022).
For an author with two or more citations in the same year one should use lower case letters (a, b, c, etc.) to distinguish between outputs published in the same year by the same author(s): for example (Bohr, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c) or (Haw- king & Bequerel, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c).
Alternatively:
Doppler (2010a) notes that there is a change in frequency of meowing in rela- tion to an observer moving relative to the emitting cat; this finding was confir- med by Doppler (2010b).
The a, b suffixes are also assigned in the references list, where such references are ordered alphabetically by title (of the article, chapter or complete work).
If a paper/thesis includes publications by two or more first authors with the same surname, the first author’s initials in all text citations are to be included, even if the year of publication differs. The first initial of the author’s first name assists the reader both to differentiate between writers within the text and to find the reference within the references list. For example, A. Mach et al. (2022) and E. Mach (2020).
When multiple citing appears within one paragraph, the year can be omitted, for instance:
Schrödinger (2020) carried out his time travel experiments with existing and non-existing cats. For this reason, results were unsatisfactory. Schrödinger then decided to carry on with existing cats exclusively.
Remember: there are no foot notes in APA. 
PRINTED SOURCES WITH NO AUTHOR OR WITH INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORS:
Institutions and organisations can be so-called institutional authors with the name of the institution substituting for the name of an individual author in their official publications: (WTO, 2007, p. 12) or (BASF, 2011, p. 67).
Only when the source has neither an individual nor an institutional author (typically a newspaper article), the article title substitutes the author in the citation. When mentioned in the text, the article title is rendered in italics: The existence of cats has not changed since Schrödinger proved that cats may or may not exist. (Cat Lovers Weekly Journal, 2022, p. 4).
According to Cat Lovers Weekly Journal (2022, p. 4) … Longer titles can be abbreviated to the first two words: (Cat Lovers, 2022, p. 4).
The title should then also be rendered in italics in the reference list.
By the way, with the exception of newspaper articles that do not disclose the author, all reliable sources have either individual or institutional authors. Websites without clear disclosure of authorship are usually neither scientific nor reliable and their usage is discouraged. The full disclosure of the person/ institution responsible for a text as the author is a minimal requirement for a scientific text.
Reference list:
The reference (the full title of the source) is contained in a reference list at the end of the paper. A reference list contains all the titles cited in the paper, and all the titles in the reference list must be quoted somewhere in the text. Other sources that simply “inspired” the author should not be included (unless cited: using ideas without quoting is plagiarism). If the ideas have not been used, however, these sources have no connection to the paper/thesis and may not be mentioned.
The reference list contains all sources used in the alphabetical order of the fa- mily name of the authors/name of the institution. This alphabetical list in not numbered! Separate categories for books, articles, websites, etc. in the referen- ce list force readers who are looking for the full title of a source from the text to search multiple lists and should thus be avoided.
Usually the title of the bibliographical unit (book or journal) is made promi- nent by italicising it. Alternatively, it can be underlined (e.g. when preparing a handwritten reference list). The family name of the first author/the institu- tional author is often made prominent in bold print. Authors‘ first names are usually initialized, but it is no mistake to render them in full. Whatever style of formatting is used, it should be followed throughout the whole reference list, e.g. authors‘ first names in full or initials, style of volumes, numbers, etc.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOG POSTS, AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL
Posts on social media or blog posts need to be treated differently, mainly when it comes to the publication date:
Family name of the author, first initials (Date including day of publication). Title of the article or post. Retrieved [date] from [full URL].
Heisenberg, W. (2021, May 1). Nothing can be known for sure. Retrieved 20.10.2026 from http://www.youneverknow.org/pubs/pdf/full/953IIED.pdf.
In order to describe what type of source is cited, it is allowed to put additional information into square brackets after the title and before the full stop, for example [Infographics], [Twitter profile] or [Facebook page].
Audiovisual material is also marked as such within square brackets as in the example below.
University of Naboo (2020, September 30). Space warps for cats [Video]. You- Tube. https://youtu.be/number.
(If there is no author but an owner of the site or page, this has to be used in- stead of the authors name.)
WEBSITES AND WEBPAGES
Websites of institutions, organisations, and companies often provide valuable data (e.g. statistics, annual reports, etc.) for term papers and theses. Websites (the level of www.sitename.xxx) may contain several webpages (e.g. www. sitename.xxx/more/evenmore). Since webpages are subject to constant change and thus no static publications, while a publication year might be possible to be given in references to the web page, a retrieval date has to be added since this marks the state of the information used. Web pages are the only sources where page numbers cannot be given in the source quotation.
Institutional author (Year of access to the web page). Title of the web page. Retrieved [date] from [full URL].
EIA=Energy Information Administration (2006, October 20th). China Coun- try Analysis Brief. Retrieved 10.05.2020 from http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ cabs/China/Background.html.
Many institutions and organisations routinely use abbreviations of their full name. One can take advantage of these abbreviations by using them for in-text citations: (EIA, 2006). In order to clearly match the abbreviations with the entries in the reference list, the respective entries should start with the abbre- viation.
Since webpages are regularly updated and restructured, it is recommended especially for longterm projects like Bachelor/Master theses to print out the version of the webpage used for the respective paper and date it (browsers can be programmed to include the printout date). This can serve as a proof when sites disappear or move.
If more than one webpage has been used, the reference list has to contain a separate reference to each. If a website is just mentioned there is no need to include it in the reference list. An URL should be provided in the text, however.