Pseudo Market Timing and the Long-Run Underperformance of IPOs

Numerous studies document long-run underperformance by firms following equity offerings. This paper shows that underperformance is very likely to be observed ex-post in an efficient market. The premise is that more firms issue equity at higher stock prices even though they cannot predict future returns. Ex-post , issuers seem to time the market because offerings cluster at market peaks. Simulations based on 1973 through 1997 data reveal that when ex-ante expected abnormal returns are zero, median ex-post underperformance for equity issuers will be significantly negative in event-time. Using calendar-time returns solves the problem.     

Principles involving marketing policies: An empirical assessment

We examined nine marketing textbooks, published since 1927, to see if they contained useful marketing principles. Four doctoral students found 566 normative statements about pricing, product, place, or promotion in these texts. None of these statements were supported by empirical evidence. Four raters agreed on only twenty of these 566 statements as providing meaningful principles. Twenty marketing professors rated whether the twenty meaningful principles were correct, supported by empirical evidence, useful, or surprising. None met all the criteria. Nine were judged to be nearly as correct when their wording was reversed.The authors thank the many people who commented on early drafts, including Eileen Bridges, Fred Collopy, Douglas Dalrymple, Alan Dubinsky, Andrew Ehrenberg, Jonathan Freeman, Raymond Hubbard, William Perreault, William Ross, Steven Schnaars, and Gerald Zaltman. Jennifer L. Armstrong, Gina Bloom, and Phan Lam provided editorial assistance.     

Interactive integrated marketing communication: combining the power of IMC,the new media and database marketing

The interactivity of the new electronic media requires that a database-driven segmentation approach to communication strategy be employed to take advantage of its uniqueness. To accomplish this, firms must develop ways of collecting information at the individual level by traditional and/or electronic means, and of using that data to create informationintensive customer communication strategies. These strategies should then employ the new media to generate interaction with customers. We term this approach ‘Interactive IMC’. In this article we propose and illustrate an interactive IMC process model.     

Are the strategic stars aligned for your corporate brand?

In recent years, companies have increasingly seen the benefits of creating a corporate brand. Rather than spend marketing dollars on branding individual products, giants like Disney and Microsoft promote a single umbrella image that casts one glow over all their products. A company must align three interdependent elements--call them strategic stars--to create a strong corporate brand: vision, culture, and image. Aligning the stars takes concentrated managerial skill and will, the authors say, because each element is driven by a different constituency: management, employees, or stakeholders. To effectively build a corporate brand, executives must identify where their strategic stars fall out of line. The authors offer a series of diagnostic questions designed to reveal misalignments in corporate vision, culture, and image. The first set of questions looks for gaps between vision and culture; for example, when management establishes a vision that is too ambitious for the organization to implement. The second set addresses culture and image, uncovering possible gaps between the attitudes of employees and the perceptions of the outside world. The last set of questions explores the vision-image gap--is management taking the company in a direction that its stake-holders support? The authors discuss the benefits of a corporate brand, such as reducing marketing costs and building a sense of community among customers. But they also point to cases in which a corporate brand doesn't make sense--for instance, if you are a product incubator, if you've recently experienced M&A activity, or if you are expecting fallout from risky ventures.     

The EU’s Medium-term Financial Perspective and Turkey’s Potential Slice of the Cake

The issue of Turkey’s membership in the EU remains controversial, and the arguments for and against are not only economic. Nevertheless, the potential economic impact of Turkish membership does play an important role. How much financial support is Turkey presently receiving under existing pre-accession programmes and what changes could be expected in the case of full membership?