Social relationships and social anxiety appeals in direct-to-consumer advertising

The use of social relationships as a promotional tool in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising has received limited attention despite relational impacts on illnesses and empirical evidence supporting social relationships’ positive influence with some patients. This content analysis provides insights into social relationship appeals’ use in DTC magazine ads for each drug-class category. Further, the current study introduces the concept of social anxiety appeals into the DTC advertising literature, which had previously focused more on fear appeals, such as the fear of pain. Social relationships appeared in 42.5% of the 421 DTC ads included in the sample. Social anxiety appeals appeared in 28.5% of ads with social relationships. Types of social relationships depicted (nonromantic, romantic, non-human pets or cartoon characters, and family) vary across drug-class categories. The current study affirms that DTC advertisers frequently appeal to the theoretical importance of relationships as an aid to improved health. It also raises ethical issues when neither the implied improvements in relationships nor decreased social anxiety are direct consequences of prescribed use of the advertised pharmaceutical.     

How well do patent citations measure flows of technology? Evidence from French innovation surveys

Patent citation data are used in a growing body of economics and business research on technological diffusion. Until now, there exists little evidence on whether patent citations are a good measure of knowledge flows. Our paper assesses the legitimacy of using European patent citations as a measure of technology flows. It uses information from the Community Innovation Survey collected by the French Service des Statistiques Industrielles (SESSI), which contain firms’ responses to questions about their innovative activity. We show that patent citations are indeed related to firms’ statements about their acquisition and dispersion of new technology, but that the strength and statistical significance of this relationship varies across geographical regions and across channels of knowledge diffusion.     

Compensation and Employment Impact of a Full-time MBA Program

The changing Master of Business Administration (MBA) marketplace and considerable direct and indirect costs for an MBA degree mean that school administrators and other stakeholders need a better understanding of what factors may influence the rate of return to their MBA programs. We investigated the potential of using analytical frameworks to identify those variables that may predict employment probabilities and starting salaries of full-time MBA graduates, in the context of a single, private MBA program. Our results suggest that for graduates of this particular program, pre-MBA salary and work experience in accounting, banking, finance, and consulting industries predicted higher post-MBA salary levels, as did having a liberal arts major as an undergraduate. Other human capital measures, such as Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) scores or elite undergraduate education, were not associated with higher employment probabilities or salary levels for this program’s students, while having an undergraduate business major was associated with lower employment probability. Although our study has limited inference to determine the value of an MBA education more generally, it has potentially important implications for administrators of MBA programs, who could gain useful insights on applying empirical analysis to their own programs. Although this process can be costly and time consuming without a supportive institutional environment, it could provide useful evidence-based guidelines for practice with substantial payoffs for both the program and the students.     

Relational foundations of an unequal consumer credit market: Symbiotic ties between banks and payday lenders

Banks have financially supported payday lenders for decades. In this article I qualitatively demonstrate how these financial relationships have reinforced and expanded a bifurcated consumer credit market, and why these relationships matter for consumer access to financial services. I use archival financial documents from publicly traded payday lending companies between 1996 and 2014, available through the Securities and Exchange Commission, to construct the bank-payday lender network and reveal motivations for these financial relationships. I find that bank-payday lender relationships are sustained over many years, and that these relationships are mutually beneficial, enabling payday lender expansion and providing a way for banks to quietly profit from high-interest lending in the face of other regulatory constraints. Further, I show that these relationships have significantly reshaped the consumer credit market over the past two decades. I conclude by considering broader implications of symbiotic institutional relationships in contemporary markets.     

A warm welcome for destination quality brands: the example of the Pays Cathare region

In this paper, the salient complexities characterising quality management at the tourism destination are outlined, and in light of these, a number of quality principles are deemed particularly appropriate for the further investigation of destination quality management (DQM). The complexities include the significant number of services provided at the destination, the highly fragmented nature of the tourism destination product and the large number of small businesses that go to comprise this product. General principles are drawn from the SERVQUAL, Kano and EFQM Business Excellence models in order to provide a tentative framework for investigating how one destination has striven to overcome these challenges. The example of the Pays Cathare Region in southern France, which has been recognised by the European Commission as an example of best practice in integrated quality management (IQM), shows how these quality tenets can be translated from the theoretical framework into actual practice by means of its destination quality brand. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.