Advertising and Knowledge Intermediaries: Managing the Ethical Challenges of Intangibles

In today's business environment, the knowledge-based society, globalisation, and information and communication technologies (ICT) have increased the role of "intangible" values of assets and resources for all industries. As a result there is an increased role for knowledge intermediaries; one of these, advertising, plays an important role in affecting consumer choice and knowledge. Ethical issues which arise for traditional purveyors of intangibility – cultural industries such as art, music, or film, spread to advertising. Building on our perspective of the measurement of intangibles we propose a new categorisation of types of goods or services, and a framework for identifying some future ethical challenges in today's global knowledge based society.     

Macro-level change and micro level effects: A twenty-year perspective on changing grocery shopping behaviour in Britain

In this paper we summarise key elements of retail change in Britain over a twenty-year period. The time period is that covered by a funded study into long-term change in grocery shopping habits in Portsmouth, England. The major empirical findings—to which we briefly allude—are reported elsewhere: the present task is to assess the wider context underlying that change. For example, it has frequently been stated that retailing in the UK is not as competitive as in other leading economies. As a result, the issue of consumer choice has become increasingly important politically. Concerns over concentration in the industry, new format development and market definition have been expressed by local planners, competition regulators and consumer groups. Macro level changes over time have also created market inequality in consumer opportunities at a local level—hence our decision to attempt a local-level study. Situational factors affecting consumer experiences over time at the local level involve the changing store choice sets available to particular consumers. Using actual consumer experiences thus becomes a yardstick for assessing the practical effectiveness of policy making. The paper demonstrates that choice at local level is driven by store use and that different levels of provision reflect real choice at the local level. Macro-level policy and ‘one size fits all’ approaches to regulation, it is argued, do not reflect the changing reality of grocery shopping. Accordingly, arguments for a more local and regional approach to regulation are made.     

Psychological Determinants of Paying Attention to Eco-Labels in Purchase Decisions: Model Development and Multinational Validation

Environmental labels are useful from an environmental policy perspective only if they are noticed by the consumer in the shopping situation and next – what is more – understood, trusted, and valued as a tool for decision-making. In this paper, a psychological model explaining variations in consumer attention towards environmental labels is developed and its ability to predict attention towards environmental labels in various European countries is tested.     

A Guadagni–Little Likelihood Can Have Multiple Maxima

Despite many advances in marketing models, the Guadagni–Little (1983) model is still in widespread use by both practitioners and academics. For many new marketing models, the Guadagni–Little model serves as a benchmark. The key variable that allows the Guadagni–Little model to accurately fit data is the loyalty variable, which is an exponential smoothing of past purchases. In this paper, I show that inclusion of this variable in the logit model may result in a likelihood function that can have multiple maxima. I am able to demonstrate this using simulated data and actual household scanner panel data. In addition, I document a systematic relationship between the loyalty coefficient and the loyalty smoothing parameter. Insight for this systematic relationship and the multiple maxima is obtained by recognizing a trade-off between capturing household heterogeneity and state dependence. Finally, in the Guadagni–Little model extreme parameter values capture two different idealized forms of consumer behavior. However, reported studies rarely find these extreme parameter values. I show that procedures commonly used to initialize loyalty biases against these extreme parameter values. This bias offers some explanation for the observed empirical regularity in Guadagni–Little parameter estimates and suggests that researchers should be cautious concluding these parameters capture regularity in consumer behavior.     

Voluntary simplicity and the ethics of consumption

The increased levels of consumption that have accompanied our consumer‐oriented culture have also given rise to some consumers questioning their individual consumption choices, with many opting for greater consumption simplicity. This link between consideration of actual consumption levels and consumer choices is evident among a group of consumers known as ethical consumers. Ethical consumers consider a range of ethical issues in their consumer behavioral choices. Particularly prevalent is voluntary simplification due to concerns for the extent and nature of consumption. Through the presentation of findings from two qualitative studies exploring known ethical consumers, the relationship of consumer attitudes to consumption levels, and how these attitudes impact approaches to consumer behavior, are discussed. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Cultural differences in consumer socialization: A comparison of Chinese–Canadian and Caucasian–Canadian children

Based on the extant literature on the cultural/subcultural differences in socialization goals and parental practices in the childrearing process, this study compares Chinese–Canadian and Caucasian–Canadian families with respect to three issues central to consumer socialization – family communication patterns, children's consumer decision-making styles, and children's influence in family purchase decisions. Some significant results include: (1) Chinese–Canadian children perceived both of their parents as more socio-oriented than Caucasian–Canadian children perceived theirs whereas no significant between-group difference was found on the perceived level of concept-orientation for either parent; (2) Chinese–Canadian children, relative to their Caucasian–Canadian counterparts, exhibited more utilitarian and confused-by-overchoice consumer decision-making orientations but less social/conspicuous and impulsive orientations; and (3) Chinese–Canadian children exercised greater purchase influence than their Caucasian–Canadian counterparts for the adolescent ‘convenience’ product category but no difference was found for the adolescent ‘durable’ product category.     

Changes in the informational content of term spreads: Is monetary policy becoming less effective?

We examine the predictive power of term spreads as predictors of economic recessions in Europe and the US. Using a battery of methodologies that include endogenous changepoint detection we find that the predictive power of spread-type variables has changed significantly during the 1980s and 1990s: in the most advanced countries the domestic spread has lost its informative content in favor of international – US and German – spreads, whereas in less developed countries this informational content has appeared during the late 1980s. Given the theoretical arguments for the predictive power, these findings suggest that domestic monetary policy may have become less effective in the most developed countries of the sample.     

An evolving historical paradigm: from ‘home economics' to ‘family and consumer sciences’1

With the professional name change in the United States of ‘home economics' to ‘family and consumer sciences’, the purpose of this paper is to facilitate communicating an understanding of our profession to our students. This paper focuses on an historical perspective depicting a progression of conceptualizations about the profession. Four developmental models are presented to provide a system of organization that will help students develop their professional identity. This paper is a reflection of an individual journey to gain a personal-professional identity. The sharing of this pilgrimage and the visual models that have been developed to enhance its communication have become a valuable resource and meaningful part of an undergraduate core class that provides students with the initiative to begin their own professional clarifications.     

The Performative Nature of Consumer Research: Consumers’ Environmental Awareness as an Example

This article considers the way “green consumers” are constructed – or performed – in studies on consumer environmentalism aiming to inform policy makers. The focus is on concrete data gathering operations, which are exemplified by four brief examples from the author’s own research experience. The conclusion is that consumer research is a creative process, in which consumers are made to interact with different contexts, thus eliciting different outcomes. These conclusions give rise to two suggestions. More attention should be paid to context in research, which is already occurring. More fundamentally, researchers should recognize their active, performative role when interacting with consumers as research subjects, on the one hand, and with policy-makers and other social actors as research utilizers, on the other.     

Vice and Virtue in Everyday (Business) Life

This paper describes how a family of ethical concepts can be taught through focusing on how values play out at the most basic level – in the sphere of everyday business interactions. If our goal is to create an "ethical business culture," it makes sense to attend to our treatment of one another in the simplest, and most frequently occurring of duties. The paper examines the kinds of daily interactions common to many business settings – attending meetings, sharing information, taking phone calls, utilizing common resources – and demonstrates how these practices set up encounters in which lived moral values can make a difference in the quality of life, morale, and company productivity.     

Health as a consumption object: research notes and preliminary investigation

Through the processes of commodification and marketization, materials and human activities are brought within the domain of market exchange. The results of these accelerating processes are observed in the consumer culture centred on objects of consumption. We contend that, in addition to healthcare, health itself has become yet another object incorporated within consumption space. This contention is consistent with the perspective of consumption as the dominant social paradigm in the structuring of health and healthcare practices. In this paper we present the conceptual backdrop for our contentions, together with details of a heuristic study. Our findings support the view that people regard health as a consumption object. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a patterning of responses by social grade and gender. Given our wider interest in class‐based health inequalities, we use our results to comment on the broader policy debate concerning this phenomenon in relation to consumerism.     

The Principles of European Contract Law and the Protection of the Weaker Party

The Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) must be seen as a major step forward in the development of a body of European rules and principles which enshrine the common heritage of different national legal orders and cultures. They are meant to define general rules equally applicable to any person independent of his or her status as a professional supplier and/or as a consumer. The leading principles are party autonomy and self-determination, restricted by the notion of good faith. This paper tests whether and to what degree the European Principles manage to deal with consumer protection law as it has developed over the last 20 or 30 years. It is argued that – with some effort – the European Principles can be read so as to leave room for integrating the protection of the weaker party, albeit to a limited extent only. The insufficiencies can be overcome only by merging the acquis communautaire in consumer law with the European Principles.     

Work, Identity and Self: How We Are Formed by The Work We Do

Because work looms so large in our lives I believe that most of us don't reflect on its importance and significance. For most of us, work is well – work, something we have to do to maintain our lives and pay the bills. I believe, however, that work is not just a part of our existence that can be easily separated from the rest of our lives. Work is not simply about the trading of labor for dollars. Perhaps because we live in a society that markets and hawks the fruits of our labor and not the labor itself, we have forgotten or never really appreciated the fact that the business of work is not simply to produce goods, but also to help produce people. We need work, and as adults we find identity and are identified by the work we do. If this is true then we must be very careful about what we choose to do for a living, for what we do is what we'll become.     

A paradox of price–quality and market efficiency: a comparative study of the US and China markets

The price–quality schema rests on an assumption that price is credible information about product quality. However, the credibility of price information varies across different markets. In an inefficient market, consumers would believe in the price–quality relationship to a lesser extent because price information is less credible. Paradoxically, in such a market, sometimes consumers have to rely more on price to infer quality because other product information is less available. With a cross-national perspective, this study investigated the influences of market efficiency and consumer risk aversion on the price–quality schema between the China and the US markets. We found that due to the inefficient market environment, Chinese consumers possess a weaker price–quality schema than American consumers. Chinese consumers are more risk averse than their American counterparts. However, in China, risk-averse consumers are more likely to use price to infer product quality. Implications for global marketing are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

An exploration of consumers’ experiences in physical stores: comparing consumers’ and retailers’ perspectives in past and present time

Abstract

In this paper, we explore consumers’ in-store experiences and their components, from both a consumer and retailer perspective. This is a replication of a study we performed in 2006 and thus we also examine how the role of the physical store has changed over the last decade. We use the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to improve our understanding of consumers’ in-store experiences. Moreover, we conduct in-depth interviews with Swedish retailers to achieve an understanding of how retailers use aspects of the store environment to enhance the consumer experience. Interestingly, our results suggest that consumers’ in-store experiences to a large extent are created by the same aspects today as ten years ago (e.g. personnel, layout, atmosphere). Furthermore, while retailers today emphasize the importance of fulfilling new and more advanced consumer demands, they often still accentuate the weight and use of traditional values (e.g. personnel and layout) ahead of advanced technology.     

Information,Incentives, and Proenvironmental Consumer Behavior

The article discusses the factors influencing proenvironmental consumer behaviors and the policy implications of knowledge about these influences. It presents a conceptual framework that emphasizes the determining roles of both personal and contextual factors and especially of their interactions. The practical usefulness of the framework is illustrated by evidence of the interactive effects of information and material incentives – typical interventions in the personal and contextual domains, respectively. The author concludes that incentives and information have different functions, so that efforts focused on only one are sometimes misplaced; however, properly deployed, they can have synergistic effects on behavior. Some policy conclusions are drawn for consumer and environmental policy.     

Do Cultural and Generational Cohorts Matter to Ideologies and Consumer Ethics? A Comparative Study of Australians,Indonesians, and Indonesian Migrants in Australia

We explore the notion that culture influences people’s values, and their subsequent ideologies and ethical behaviors. We present the idea that culture itself changes with time, and explore the influence of culture and generational markers on consumer ethics by examining differences in these ethical dimensions between Australians, Indonesians, and Indonesian Migrants in Australia, as well as differences between Generation X versus Generations Y and Z. The present study addresses the need to investigate the role that culture plays in consumer ethics, and the interaction between culture and generational attitudes in determining consumer ethics. Results established a distinct multiculturality in our three cultural samples, including a generational cohort differences. This suggests that culture and generational markers influence ethical beliefs, ideologies, and consumer ethics. It further indicates that Indonesian Migrants have acculturated to Australian society both in terms of their values and consumer behaviors, illustrating a crossvergence effect; scores indicate that these Migrants have the highest cultural intelligence among our samples. Implications of the findings for consumer ethics theory and practice are considered and future directions identified.     

Creating the Customer: The Influence of Advertising on Consumer Market Segments – Evidence and Ethics

For over half a century market segments have been considered objective groupings of individuals which marketers identify, understand, and target with advertising messages. The process of market segmentation has, therefore, occupied a position of moral neutrality. An increasingly popular method of segmentation is by consumer personality, with advertisers targeting messages to specific personality types. This paper explores personality segmentation, and presents empirical evidence to support the proposition that personality metrics that are used to assign individuals to segments may, in fact, be manipulable by advertising executions themselves. Quite apart from the implications that this has for the business efficacy of the segmentation process, the ethical implications – particularly as applied to children – are considerable.