Within the globalized tourism market, tourism destinations have the option to turn to sustainability as a conceptual and management framework for their unique branding and identity proposition. This research highlights the importance and utility of sustainability branding that stems from clustering tourism destinations based on the similarities of their tourism performance attributes. The study builds on secondary data from 11 coastal destinations in 8 Mediterranean countries. The analysis leads to the formulation of three main sets of evaluation indicators: (a) environmental footprint; (b) destination dependency on tourism; and (c) locals’ prosperity, incorporating elements of social and psychological carrying capacity. Findings identify three to four distinct destination clusters based mainly on the attributes of destinations’ cultural and natural attributes, seasonality of supply, typology of prevailing accommodation and tourist profile. From a theoretical perspective, the research identifies key clustering attributes of sustainable destinations that could inform management interventions around destination branding and competitive sustainability performance positioning.

Agricultural cooperatives are essential in mitigating climate change and food insecurity through the promotion of sustainable agricultural practices and the conservation of biodiversity. However, weaknesses in governance, economic restrictions, market pressures, and regulatory obstacles frequently hinder their efficacy. This study investigates the main factors leading to cooperative failures through qualitative analysis of twenty-three (23) expert interviews. Research demonstrates that strong governance, efficient communication, financial stability, and supportive policies are crucial for the viability of cooperatives. Leadership issues, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and market competition were seen as significant roadblocks. It is essential to tackle these difficulties via governance adjustments, economic resilience approaches, and policy advocacy to strengthen the role of cooperatives in climate change mitigation and food security.

In the European agri-food sector, operators with substantial bargaining power often engage in unfair trading practices (UTPs). Our paper aims to empirically examine the occurrence of UTPs and their influence on the performance of cooperatives. To fulfill the goal of our paper, we collected responses from 109 cooperatives in Greece after the transposition of a specialized EU Directive (i.e., Directive (EU) 2019/633). We found that, on average, the sampled cooperatives encountered three prohibited (“black”) UTPs, while all reported at least one prohibited UTP. Moreover, the two most commonly reported practices (i.e., “unduly late payments” and “buyers’ demand that suppliers pay for the deterioration or loss of products that occurred after ownership transfer”) exerted a significant negative influence on cooperative performance, even in the presence of a proficient Board of Directors. Consequently, policymakers may need to pay more attention to UTPs and ensure that the national enforcement authorities are well-equipped to act rapidly and effectively against offenders.

A main advantage of web advertising over other advertising mediums is its efficiency in driving purchase intentions, enabling consumers to jump from advertisement to purchase in a single click. This paper aims to explore the optimal advertisement placement for Arabic web pages by considering how advertising placement and page context affects advertising outcomes. This study is one of the first to examine the physiological and cognitive processes involved in the understanding of the effectiveness of ad placement in Arabic languages. The theoretical model suggests that advertising outcomes can be affected significantly by hemispheric context (how the two hemispheres of the brain process information on an image or text-oriented page) as well as hemispheric ad placement, pertaining to optimal left-right placement of image/text ads. Demographic and advertisement data was collected from participants during the study upon ensuring ethical approval for this. The data sample involved online testing of 320 Arabic readers who were shown one of eight different web page layouts, with each layout shown to 40 respondents. Results indicate that Arabic readers perform differently to English readers, since the former process text using both brain hemispheres, in comparison to other languages. The implications of this research are that placement and optimal banner advertisement design are highly dependent on the objectives of advertising.