Changes in industrial buying: Implications for industrial marketers

Some of the most dramatic changes in organizational buyer behavior have occurred and continue to occur in the industrial purchasing function. Purchasing is becoming less and less a lower-level staff function and more and more a top-level management position. This article examines some of the major changes in the purchasing function and the reasons for those changes. The article concludes by considering some of the major implications of these changes for the industrial marketer.     

Rating industrial advertisements

Industrial advertisers can create more effective advertisements if they have some notion about the immediate effect their advertising has on the target audience. Here, a multiple item scale is developed for categorizing an audience's reactions to print ads. The proposed scale is discussed as a copytesting instrument and could be used to evaluate alternative executions in order to indicate which ads may be most effective.     

Developing better industrial advertising

This paper reports on various factors that should be applied by industrial advertisers in order to improve their advertising effort. Topics on setting objectives, developing copy, designing the layout, and selecting media are covered in an applications-oriented way. The result is a concise approach of how industrial advertising can be more effective.     

Trends affecting industrial distributors

Industrial distribution has only recently been affected by the trend of large distributors to merge, acquire, and expand. Independent distributors are confronted with new challenges that threaten their very survival. Major efficiencies must be developed in order for independent distributors to remain an important force in industrial distribution.     

Successful industrial advertising campaigns

This study investigated the correlation of seven hypothesized factors to outcomes of industrial advertising campaigns. It is based on a survey of advertising agency executives and advertising executives of corporations. The results indicate that the correlates of successful industrial advertising campaigns vary according to the intended objectives of a campaign: awareness, attitude, and sales.     

Co-branding on industrial markets

During the last decade branding has developed to be one of the main focus areas in consumer marketing. In the industrial marketing area there has only been limited attention to this phenomenon. In this paper we focus on how co-branding can be used on industrial markets to increase value. Through an empirical study of professional purchasers' attitudes towards co-branding activities between two companies, we explore the potential of this strategy.     

Strategizing in industrial networks

This paper provides an overview of the implications for strategizing offered by an industrial network perspective and a comparison of this view with strategic management thinking. We argue that it is crucial for a company to relate its activities to those of other firms in order to enhance its performance, and it is through the continuous combining and recombining of existing resources that new resource dimensions are identified and further developed within business relationships. From the standpoint of a single company, strategizing from an industrial network perspective implies that the heterogeneity of resources and interdependencies between activities across company boundaries, as well as the organized collaboration among the companies involved, must be considered simultaneously.     

Realigning industrial marketing channels

Dramatic changes are occurring in industrial patterns of distribution. This article provides a structure for analyzing realignments in industrial marketing channels. Specifically, the analysis centers on the channel efficiency and effectiveness dimensions that were generated by a shift from industrial distributors to a public warehouse.     

给产业用纺织品一个长镜头

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Improving industrial advertising copy

This article advances a variety of suggestions for improving industrial print advertising copy. A number of research projects serve as the basis for the suggestions and a number of examples are discussed in order to illustrate the applications.     

Women in industrial advertisements

This is one of the first studies to analyze the way in which women are portrayed in industrial advertising. It concludes that the use of sex is not a major selling strategy and that, with one exception, women's role in industrial life is accurately reflected.     

Predicting industrial ad readership

This study examined the effect of visual and psycholinguistic elements (such as picture size and the number of adjectives in the headline) on industrial advertisement readership. Multiple regression techniques were used to analyze the data, which were obtained from AD-CHART. AD-CHART is a research firm which specializes in the measurement of industrial ad readership. The analyses showed that visual and psycholinguistic elements are better predictors of industrial advertising readership than more complicated models.     

Revitalizing weak industrial products

The study reported in this article focuses on the policies and practices of industrial goods companies to revitalize weak products. The decision was found to be a multiple-stage sequential process that begins with “diagnostic” routine to identify the causes of a product's unsatisfactory performance and ends with the implementation of a corrective action that management believes could restore the product's health.     

The neglect of industrial design

This paper aims at helping innovators to rethink their overall approach to industrial design in product innovation. It examines the role of industrial design in product innovation and demonstrates with both normative and empirical evidence that industrial design is still neglected in British manufacturing industry. The research reveals that firms satisfied their industrial design needs through engineering designers in preference to professional industrial designers. It is concluded that to make the most of design and create market-winning products, the synthesising, interfacing and 'integratorial' approach of an industrial designer is of paramount importance; engineering design, while both necessary and crucial, is by itself insufficient to ensure that innovative products satisfy physical form as well as functional requirements of customers/users. The paper warns that the continued inattention to industrial design may place UK firms at a competitive disadvantage in international markets.     

Increase response to industrial surveys

The results of this article support the contention that a prenotification telephone call increases the probability of response to a mail survey request. The article also discusses the practical problems associated with the use of a telephone prenotification in an industrial setting and provides a step-by-step procedure to help overcome these problems.     

Personal inducement of industrial buyers

There has been extremely little previous research done on the use of personal inducements as a form of sales promotion in industrial marketing. An exploratory study was conducted in this area and the results are reported in this article. Buyers' attitudes about inducements and vendors' use of inducements were measured. Profiles of relatively more receptive buyers were derived from the study data. Implications for managing the buying and selling functions and for further research are discussed.     

Experience curves and industrial policy

Experience curves purport to show that average real price or costs of a product decrease with its cumulative output and are used to justify increases in industrial concentration on efficiency grounds. But the published evidence for their existence is not always convincing. Even if they do exist, they are merely mongrel relationships reflecting many economic forces including technical progress and economies of scale in addition to ‘learning’ or ‘experience’. They should not be generalised to all products or be used to underpin industrial policy.     

The dynamics of industrial organization

This paper introduces the special issue of The Review of Industrial Organization on ‘The Dynamics of Industrial Organization’. What binds these papers together is a focus on markets in motion—the process by which new firms enter an industry, either grow and survive, or else ultimately exit out of the industry. In contrast to more traditional static analyses, the concern of these papers is identifying where do firms come from and what happens subsequent to their entry. Influences of geographic as well as product space are found to exert an influence on the dynamics of industrial organization.