Influencing consumers’ selection of domestic versus imported products: Implications for marketing based on a model of helping behavior

Recent marketing campaigns have urged American consumers to “Buy American.” Marketers can improve the success of their campaigns if they understand the network of influences that lead American consumers to help threatened domestic workers. Consumers’ cooperation in purchasing domestic products may be viewed as a form of help for American workers whose jobs are threatened by the success of imported products. This study presents a model designed to explain consumers’ willingness to help these workers. Survey data were subjected to structural equation analysis to test the model. Results confirmed willingness to help is influenced by the salience of the problem, identification with the workers, inequity of the situation, felt similarity with the workers, empathy with the workers, and the costs of helping. These findings suggest ways to market the Buy American theme. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Her research interests include international marketing and channels of distribution. Her work has appeared in theJournal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Retailing, and other marketing journals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. His research interests include the fitness market, consumer logistics, helping behavior, and marketing channels. His research findings have been reported in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science and in various other business and social science journals and proceedings. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Dr. Biswas’s work has been published in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Psychology and Marketing, andJournalism Quarterly, as well as other refereed journals.     

French versus American consumers’ attachment of value to a product in a common consumption context: A cross-national comparison

This article investigates the influence of French and American national culture on consumer perceptions of productrelated value. Employing means-end theory, hypotheses are developed to predict how French versus American national culture influences the content and structure of consumer value hierachies. Hypotheses are tested using data from in-depth laddering interviews with a matched sample of French and American consumers. The findings support the contention that differences exist in the meaning and relative importance of consumer value hierarchy dimensions across the two national cultures. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that consumption consequences are especially culturally sensitive. Jeffrey W. Overby (joverby@cob.fsu.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing and international business in the Department of Marketing at Florida State University. He holds a doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests focus on customer value determination, service quality, and cross-cultural marketing issues. His work has appeared inInternational Marketing Review and numerous domestic and international conferences, includingProceeding of the 2001 Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference andProceeding of the Tenth Biennial World Marketing Conference. Sarah Fisher Gardial (sgardial@utk.edu) is an associate professor and associate dean for academic programs in the College of Business Administration at the University of Tennessee. She holds a doctorate from the University of Houston. Her research interests focus on customer value and satisfaction, consumer decision making and information processing, and buyer/seller dyadic relations. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Advertising, Industrial Marketing Management, and theJournal of Macromarketing. Robert B.Woodruff (rwoodruff@utk.edu) is the Proffitt’s, Inc. Professor of Marketing and head of the Department of Marketing and Logistics at the University of Tennessee. His primary interests are in customer value theory, customer satisfaction theory, and market opportunity analyses, all with applications to customer-value-based marketing strategies. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Consumer Research, and theJournal of Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction & Complaining Behavior. He has received two outstanding reviewer awards from theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science.     

How consumers’ assessments of the difficulty of manufacturing a product influence quality perceptions

This research shows that the perceived difficulty of manufacturing a product influences consumers’ perceptions of the firm’s other products. In three experiments (with 152 participants in Study 1, 86 in Study 2, and 91 in Study 3), participants received information about the quality of a firm’s product and then inferred the quality of another product from the firm. When participants believed that the initial product was relatively more difficult to manufacture than the second product, they inferred that the second product would be high in quality. However, when participants believed that the initial product was relatively easy to manufacture, they inferred that the second product would be low in quality. These effects occurred when perceived difficulty of manufacture was manipulated (Study 2) and occurred regardless of whether both products had dissimilar product benefits (Study 1) or whether brand names were present (Study 3). Allison R. Johnson and Valerie S. Folkes contributed equally to this article.     

A customer perspective on product eliminations: how the removal of products affects customers and business relationships

Regardless of the apparent need for product eliminations, many managers hesitate to act as they fear deleterious effects on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Other managers do carry out product eliminations, but often fail to consider the consequences for customers and business relationships. Given the relevance and problems of product eliminations, research on this topic in general and on the consequences for customers and business relationships in particular is surprisingly scarce. Therefore, this empirical study explores how and to what extent the elimination of a product negatively affects customers and business relationships. Results indicate that eliminating a product may result in severe economic and psychological costs to customers, thereby seriously decreasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This paper also shows that these costs are not exogenous in nature. Instead, depending on the characteristics of the eliminated product these costs are found to be more or less strongly driven by a company’s behavior when implementing the elimination at the customer interface.     

How good is the overseas competition?: A survey of car dealers in America

This paper reports on a survey of car dealers in six states. Dealers were asked to rate cars “made in the U.S.A.” in comparison to imports from four overseas countries. The results suggest several potential areas for product improvement in U.S. models but also identified a number of areas where U.S. makes were judged as superior. Foot Locker, Incorporated     

An expanded and strategic view of discontinuous innovations: deploying a service-dominant logic

The service-dominant logic (S-D logic) provides a novel and valuable theoretical perspective that necessitates a rethinking and reevaluation of the conventional literature on innovation. This literature is built upon a goods-dominant logic and has resulted in a restricted and out-moded perspective that overlooks many major discontinuous innovations. In this article, we show how many innovations can be better understood by deploying a S-D logic perspective. We present six S-D logic categories of discontinuous innovation positing that they can help scholars and managers analyze, design and implement breakthrough advances in resource use. We argue that discontinuous innovation can arise by changing any of the customers’ roles of users, buyers and payers on the first dimension. On the second dimension, the firm changes its value creation by embedding operant resources into objects, by changing the integrators of resources, and by reconfiguring value constellations. Finally, we offer some managerial and research implications of this expanded and strategic view of discontinuous innovation.

Institutionalization of ethics and its consequences: a survey of marketing professionals

Because of increasing ethical problems in business, organizations have tried to control these problems by institutionalizing ethics, such as by creating new ethics positions and formulating codes of ethics. In this study, the authors develop a scale for measuring the institutionalization of ethics in organizations and assess it for dimensionality, reliability and validity. Two separate studies are conducted, both using samples drawn from an American Marketing Association practitioner population. In Study 1, using a sample of 126 marketing practitioners, we performed exploratory factor analysis on 44 institutionalization items resulting in two separate dimensions of the institutionalization of ethics construct: implicit and explicit institutionalization. Using a national sample of 306 marketing practitioners in Study 2, we performed confirmatory factor analysis on these two dimensions and investigated the effects of these dimensions on perceived importance of ethics, job satisfaction, esprit de corps and organizational commitment. Implicit institutionalization had a significant direct affect on all four of these constructs. On the other hand, explicit institutionalization significantly influenced only the perceived importance of ethics.     

Linking multiple layers of innovation-oriented corporate culture, product program innovativeness, and business performance: a contingency approach

In recent years, firms have invested considerably in programs to raise their innovativeness by inspiring employees with an innovation-oriented corporate culture. However, extant literature is inconclusive on how an innovation-oriented culture leads to increases in product program innovativeness (PPI). This study investigates this question by analyzing a multilayer model of innovation-oriented corporate culture, using data from three different informants: marketing managers, R&D managers, and customers. The effects of innovation-oriented values and norms on PPI are fully mediated by cultural artifacts. Therefore, values and norms must be transformed into specific artifacts to exert an influence on innovativeness. Furthermore, market dynamism and technological turbulence have opposite moderating effects on the relationship between innovation-oriented artifacts and PPI. Market dynamism weakens this relationship, whereas technological turbulence strengthens it.     

Creating market anticipation: An exploratory examination of the effect of preannouncement behavior on a new product’s launch

Preannouncements are strategic marketing communications directed at market participants including investors, suppliers, distributors, and buyers. Most empirical literature focuses on antecedents influencing a firm’s preannouncement behavior and on outcomes related to deleterious responses by competitors. This study differs and follows the large body of extant research that examines preannouncing behavior as a deliberate marketing communication process aimed at influencing market participants in the firm’s favor. The authors develop and test a model of preannouncement behavior that affects the success of a new product launch through market anticipation, competitive equity, and new product development resources. The findings indicate that preannouncement behavior engenders new product success through its positive effect on market anticipation—a favorable industry-wide bias in advance of new product introduction—and emphasizes the use of preannouncements as business-to-business marketing communications aimed at influencing current and prospective supply chain partners in the firm’s favor. Kim Schatzel (schatzel@umd.umich.edu) (PhD, Michigan State University) is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Her business experience includes more than 20 years of corporate and new venture work including tenure as the founder and CEO of a multinational $250 million automotive components firm and three start-up technology-based companies. She is interested in the study of new product development, business-to-business marketing communications, and firm reputation issues. She has published articles in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Business Research, and theJournal of Product Innovation Management. She is also highly committed to teaching excellence and has won several awards for undergraduate, graduate, and executive teaching. Roger Calantone (rogercal@msu.edu) holds the Eli Broad University Chair in Business at Michigan State University and is also the director of the Broad Information Technology Management Program (ITMP). He is interested in the study of new product innovation and technology decisions in industrial firms. Currently, his research is focused on new product decisions, industrial market segmentation, global logistics, and the use of neural network and autonomous learning models to valuate product components. He is the author of more than 200 refereed academic articles and proceedings and is coauthor of several books. His publications have appeared in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Decision Sciences, and theStrategic Management Journal.     

Marketing survey research best practices: evidence and recommendations from a review of <Emphasis Type="Italic">JAMS</Emphasis> articles

Survey research methodology is widely used in marketing, and it is important for both the field and individual researchers to follow stringent guidelines to ensure that meaningful insights are attained. To assess the extent to which marketing researchers are utilizing best practices in designing, administering, and analyzing surveys, we review the prevalence of published empirical survey work during the 2006–2015 period in three top marketing journals—Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), Journal of Marketing (JM), and Journal of Marketing Research (JMR)—and then conduct an in-depth analysis of 202 survey-based studies published in JAMS. We focus on key issues in two broad areas of survey research (issues related to the choice of the object of measurement and selection of raters, and issues related to the measurement of the constructs of interest), and we describe conceptual considerations related to each specific issue, review how marketing researchers have attended to these issues in their published work, and identify appropriate best practices.