Taking a " Real-Time " Approach to International Marketing Research

The use of traditional marketing research techniques in an international context suffers from two potentially fatal flaws: the over-reliance on purely quantitative data and through the use of rigidly structured approaches to primary data collection, the inability to gather information on problems/issues not thought of in advance by the developers of the survey instrument(s). A means of overcoming these problems is through the use of "real-lime" marketing research activities; activities targeted at checking and challenging marketplace assumptions. A "real-time" approach to international marketing research as described and contrasted with traditional marketing research techniques. A specific approach to this type of research currently being implemented by an institutional investment company is presented. Managerial guidelines are then given for the consideration, development, and implementation of a "real-time" approach to international marketing research by service companies.     

Coordinating manufacturing and marketing in international firms

In this article, the authors argue that manufacturing experiences much of the turbulence and conflict imposed by the dynamic global marketplace through its relationship with marketing, because marketing is usually responsible for introducing changing competitive priorities and demand patterns to the organization. Through a survey of manufacturing and marketing managers within international firms, the authors develop a profile of manufacturing-marketing conflicts experienced in each of four international strategy environments: export, multidomestic, global, and transnational. As international strategies became more complex, firms made use of more techniques for coordinating between marketing and manufacturing, with more use of decentralized and informal approaches. Coordinating techniques included individual MBO-reward systems, joint task forces for problem-solving, and direct involvement of manufacturing and marketing in establishing the competitive priorities of the firm.     

Directing Advertising Copy Creativity through Benefit Segmentation

While much attention has been paid in the marketing and advertising literature to the more quantitative aspects of advertising such as the setting of advertising budgets, media selection, advertising scheduling and effectiveness measurement, relatively little attention has been paid to the generation of effective advertising copy and messages. This area of advertising decision-making, in many ways the most crucial element of any advertising campaign, is an essentially creative element. It is an area, however, where effective marketing research can guide the creative process more efficiently. This article describes the use of conjoint measurement techniques to conduct benefit segmentation which can, in turn, be used to direct advertising copy thinking. The approach is illustrated with reference to a small-scale study of the United Kingdom king-size cigarette market.     

The Adoption of Marketing by Financial Institutions in the UK

This article presents the results of a recent survey into the adoption of marketing techniques and philosophies among UK financial institutions. The research was prompted by the increasingly competitive nature of the markets for financial services and the subsequent recent interest in the adoption of a more marketing-oriented approach to doing business. It was found that financial institutions have moved some way towards adopting more of a marketing orientation. There is still, however, much scope for further improvement.     

The Marketing Activities of UK Charities

ABSTRACT

With well over 176,000 charities operating in the United Kingdom and with changing political, social and economic pressures, the demand for increased funding has become paramount. In order to compete more effectively for funds many have adopted a marketing perspective, focusing on understanding those donors who provide them with the most income.

The use of certain marketing techniques in UK charities is now widespread and most have favourable attitudes towards marketing, feeling that it is an essential part of their organisations' activities. These attitudes, however, are often based on a rudimentary understanding of the term ‘marketing’. Most charities now advertise and use direct mail but, despite the work of many authors over the last twenty-five years regarding the relevance of marketing to nonprofit organisations, most charities still equate marketing solely with advertising and selling. The dependence upon these techniques poses the question as to whether charities in the UK have truly adopted the marketing concept, or whether marketing is still equated with a narrow range of the more visible communication techniques.     

Marketing Foreign Aid:

The article discusses how marketing new products in our domestic (U.S.) market has taught us some valuable lessons and given us insight into techniques and pitfalls related to what the authors call "the marketing" of foreign aid. A short history of inappropriate, failed models are discussed and what the authors believe to be a workable model is detailed.     

美国国民健康教育中公关与广告手段的应用——以“抵御肥胖”运动为例

不健康的现代工作生活方式和饮食习惯导致了各类慢性疾病的频发,严重影响着国民的健康素质。各国政府及相关的公益组织正努力通过有效的手段和方式来说服人们进行观念上和行为上的改变。本文从健康传播的角度,分析美国政府和社会公益组织对"抵御肥胖"健康主题的信息传播与说服的手段、策略,并与我国相关主题的健康传播手段进行比较,由此提出了我国的政府及相关公益组织在进行相关信息传播时,应尽量避免呆板生硬的教科书式宣传,要从整合营销和社会营销的角度进行科学的观念推广。     

A New Promotion Mix Appropriation Model

This paper deals with the promotion budget and some popular appropriation models found in the standard marketing textbooks. All of these models are simplistic and state that relatively more money is spent on advertising and relatively less money is spent on personal selling in the promotion mix for consumer goods. They also state that the converse is true for industrial goods. A sample of 25 companies, all market leaders, was chosen with the objective of establishing how much they spend on promotion as a percentage of total sales. The objective was also to establish the percentage of total sales spent on each promotion mix element. The results were compared with the popular promotion mix appropriation models in the textbooks. In some cases the results were dramatic. From the findings of this study, the authors have put forward a new promotion mix appropriation model.     

Application of multiple adaptive regression splines (MARS) in direct response modeling

Increasing costs of direct marketing campaigns coupled with declining response rates have prompted many direct marketers to turn to more sophisticated techniques to model response behavior. The underlying premise is that even a small improvement in response rate can have significant implications for the bottom line. This article investigates the use of a recently developed technique, Multiple Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS), together with logistic regression in the context of modeling direct response. Specifically, our goal is to assess the relative effectiveness of MARS models vis-à-vis logistic regression with original predictor variables in modeling direct response behavior. Our analysis shows that the MARS models outperforms the logistic model in general, leading us to conclude that MARS offers a number of advantages over a logistic model. Direct marketing strategy implications are also discussed.     

Dimensions of customer orientation: An empirical investigation of the UK financial services sector

The UK financial services industry has experienced a number of sharp discontinuities in its marketing environment in recent years. These have ranged from changing demand patterns to wholesale deregulation and market liberalization. International competition and new entrants exploiting technological innovations have also added to the turbulence in what has been a traditionally parochial and stable sector. Under these conditions, it is to be expected that companies would develop a much sharper customer focus and, if they are to survive and prosper, that they would adopt the core principles of the marketing concept. In this paper, the findings of research which tests this assumption amongst merchant banks, retail banks, insurance companies and building societies are presented. Conclusions are drawn which indicate that there is a growing awareness of the need for a marketing orientation and that some sectors appear to be more customer‐orientated than others at this point in time. Despite this, there is also evidence that in some sectors marketing myopia may be masquerading as marketing orientation and that much work needs to be done to more fully realize the ideals of the marketing concept.     

‘Mum,can I play on the internet?’

Research about the role of parents in children’s consumption of online advertisements is scarce. Parents are viewed as having a responsibility to deter children from invasive marketing, yet with the rise of non-traditional marketing it is unclear whether they have the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake this role. The authors address this research gap and demonstrate that parents have limited understanding of the effectiveness of online advertising and this restricts their ability to protect their children from online marketing endeavours. Parents recognize online persuasive techniques only when they themselves have been exposed to them (e.g. banners, pop-up advertisements) and are often unable to appreciate more subtle marketing techniques in their persuasive capacity (e.g. advergames). In addition, they erroneously believe that children respond to online marketing the same way adults do. Finally, parents display naivety in their conviction that their children would never be taken in by marketers but, paradoxically, this complacency is only limited to online advertising.     

Tracking a Growth Industry: The Development of Marketing Research Services in Canada

The marketing research industry in Canada has grown rapidly during the past twenty years or so, both in the number of users of research and the number of practitioners offering professional marketing research services, and in the type of research being done. The changing nature of the Canadian market-place, coupled with a growing appreciation of the cultural diversity of the country and of the fact that Canadian consumers are not exactly like Americans, has contributed to m increasing acceptance of marketing research in Canadian business. In addition, the use of research techniques in public sector and not- for-profit organisations has become generally accepted in recent years. The techniques used in Canadian marketing research have also undergone considerable change, as researchers are now making much greater use of recently-available technology, computer-based simulations, and automated data capture at the check-outs of retail stores. Possibly the greatest change has been in the increased use of qualitative techniques, reflecting marketers' increased concern for the deeply-held opinions and attitudes of consumers.     

Marketing the Police – from a Force to a Service

The British police service is a highly visible public sector organisation that in recent years has come under mounting pressures from different stakeholders, including successive Conservative and Labour governments and also an increasingly demanding public. In this setting, various business and management models and concepts have been applied to contemporary policing, but only limited research has been undertaken to date on how marketing has been adopted and utilised across the police forces of the British Isles. This paper explores the context of modern policing and suggests why the police are now being compelled to address marketing more seriously than hitherto. It draws on recent empirical work conducted across the police service and situates this within the existing literature on internal marketing. The paper concludes that marketing is underdeveloped across the police service and argues that police forces should develop their internal marketing as a precursor to successful external marketing.     

Canonical Correlation Analysis and Wiener-Granger Causality Tests: Useful Tools for the Specification of VAR Models

Dynamic multivariate models have become popular in analyzing the behavior of competitive marketing systems because they are capable of incorporating all the relationships in a competitive marketing environment. In this paper we consider VAR models, the most frequently used dynamic multivariate models. The drawback of VAR models is that a large number of parameters have to be estimated. The problem has been addressed in several articles and the usual solution is to treat only the variables of interest as endogenous while the other variables are usually included exogenously without dynamic effects. This treatment imposes restrictions on the marketing system, which requires preliminary analysis. We propose to use canonical correlation for this purpose. Canonical correlation analysis and its associated Wiener-Granger causality testing based on the canonical correlation coefficients are useful tools to test the existence of structural relationships between (lagged) consumer response and (lagged) marketing instruments. The tools are applied on data of market shares and marketing instruments in a market of a frequently purchased consumer goods.     

Technology and Optimal Segment Size

Increasingly, there is greater appreciation of the impact of technology on marketing practice. Many strategies like mass customization, relationship marketing, interactive marketing, etc., have gained increased attention, in part, from advancements in manufacturing and information technology. In this paper, we formally examine how technology has made such strategies economically feasible through its impact on optimal segment size. We build on Lancaster's model of product differentiation to derive an equation that exposes the invisible hand of technology. This equation shows how technology influences marketing practice through its effect on optimal segment size. In addition, the equation provides a formal explanation for the apparent paradox of mass customization; that customized products can be mass-produced profitably, without the benefit of large production volumes. We then use this equation to gain a more insightful view of the history of segmentation.Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Service Marketing     

New perspectives on marketing mix programme standardisation

The marketing mix programme standardisation/localisation policies of 63 UK multinationals operating in a developing market (the six Gulf States) are examined, using a three-factor, 53-variable model of country, firm and marketing mix programme factors. The research framework is unusually broad compared with other standardisation studies, which have also tended to concentrate more on the developed than the developing economies. Three firm variables and three country variables correlate closely with differing degrees of marketing mix programme standardisation. Product strategies are much more standardised and promotion, distribution and price more localised. Unexpectedly, industrial product firms appear to be no more standardised in marketing mix programmes than consumer goods firms in the Gulf. British Multinationals tend to treat the six Gulf states as a single market cluster with only minor variations between each state.     

Estimating time-varying parameters in brand choice models: A semiparametric approach

Nowadays, brand choice models are standard tools in quantitative marketing. In most applications, parameters representing brand intercepts and covariate effects are assumed to be constant over time. However, marketing theories, as well as the experience of marketing practitioners, suggest the existence of trends or short-term variations in particular parameters. Hence, having constant parameters over time is a highly restrictive assumption, which is not necessarily justified in a marketing context and may lead to biased inferences and misleading managerial insights.In this paper, we develop flexible, heterogeneous multinomial logit models based on penalized splines to estimate time-varying parameters. The estimation procedure is fully data-driven, determining the flexible function estimates and the corresponding degree of smoothness in a unified approach. The model flexibly accounts for parameter dynamics without any prior knowledge needed by the analyst or decision maker. Thus, we position our approach as an exploratory tool that can uncover interesting and managerially relevant parameter paths from the data without imposing assumptions on their shape and smoothness.Our approach further allows for heterogeneity in all parameters by additively decomposing parameter variation into time variation (at the population level) and cross-sectional heterogeneity (at the individual household level). It comprises models without time-varying parameters or heterogeneity, as well as random walk parameter evolutions used in recent state space models, as special cases. The results of our extensive model comparison suggest that models considering parameter dynamics and household heterogeneity outperform less complex models regarding fit and predictive validity. Although models with random walk dynamics for brand intercepts and covariate effects perform well, the proposed semiparametric approach still provides a higher predictive validity for two of the three data sets analyzed.For joint estimation of all regression coefficients and hyperparameters, we employ the publicly available software BayesX, making the proposed approach directly applicable.     

内蒙古经济型酒店营销策略研究

目前,内蒙古经济型酒店营销存在的问题是:市场竞争激烈,产品缺乏创新;缺乏专业的营销人才;市场营销手段单一,网络技术水平较差;营销策略缺乏特色。针对这些问题,内蒙古经济型酒店应创新产品策略,注重对产品质量把关,发挥特殊民族风情优势,制定符合自身的产品策略,加大酒店营销人才的培养力度,提高全体员工服务意识,加强网络营销和有效沟通,树立品牌形象,增强客人对酒店的信赖感和真诚度,以提高内蒙古经济型酒店的市场竞争力。