JMM 25th Anniversary Editorial

This double edition is one of two quite distinct halves. The first is a collection of pieces that have a connection to the first edition of the Journal of Marketing Management, published in the summer of 1985. The connections exist largely through the authors, who appeared in the first edition and who have written again for the 25th Anniversary edition. Many of their themes are also related to those explored in that first edition, as are writing styles, methodologies described and methods used. The second half is a 'regular' edition, comprising five papers which reflect well the current preoccupations of those engaged in research into marketing management.     

Interpreting discourse: a critical discourse analysis of the marketing of an extreme right party

Viewing marketing as an ideological discourse that places consumption in a central position in people's lives provides further insights into the construction of political marketing discourse. Politicians and political parties now follow the 'logic of the market' in their attempts to connect with voters. Critical discourse analysis can be used in general to study the nature of political marketing discourse and specifically to document the web of identities and power relations that this discourse reproduces. To illustrate this application of theory we examine the marketing of the Vlaams Blok, a successful Flemish extreme-right party. The Vlaams Blok provides a good example of how the adoption of a marketing approach is used in politics, especially in the way a political party communicates to a wide audience using market logic. The analysis echoes approaches used by advertising and marketing communications scholars and highlights the strategic use of lexical, rhetorical and other linguistic devices to brand, sell and differentiate the Vlaams Blok from other political products. The analysis demonstrates that the Vlaams Blok creates a ready-to-consume product that achieves success at the electoral 'checkout'. We set the stage for marketing scholars to help both further understand how marketing methods are deployed with increasing sophistication outside the traditional domain of marketing, and to consider the consequences of a marketing discourse in the civic sphere.     

Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Public Sector: The Lessons of Headteachers as Entrepreneurs

This article argues that headteachers of primary schools have been at the forefront of the marketing/entrepreneurship interface since attempts to introduce competitive market forces into the maintained education system. It examines primary school headteachers' marketing strategies and compares them to those of owner managers of small firms. Case studies of ten schools illustrative of a variety of provision and market conditions provided the empirical data over a five year period. The headteachers shared many of the marketing problems of owner-managers of small firms. Headteachers found that the most effective marketing strategies consisted of: i) marketing to improve relationships with existing parents, staff and governors as an essential precursor to any external marketing effort; ii) parental involvement in the school which improved the likelihood of word of mouth recommendations; and iii) influencing such recommendations by marketing to improve parental and other involvement in the school. As word of mouth is also the most important source of new business for small firms, there are opportunities for lessons from the public to the private sector.     

Drivers of sales and marketing collaboration in business-to-business selling organisations

This paper focuses on identifying and exploring the antecedents and consequences of collaboration between the sales and marketing functions within organisations and empirically tests the resulting model. There is evidence to show that collaborative sales and marketing functions have benefits to an organisation in terms of improved business performance, but many organisations have not yet achieved collaborative internal functions. The study identifies five antecedents to collaboration between sales and marketing and tests the proposition that greater collaboration between sales and marketing is linked to benefits in terms of improved business performance.     

Beyond matrices and black-box algorithms: setting marketing priorities with Marketing Strategy Conferences

With this paper, we introduce Marketing Strategy Conferences to set strategic marketing priorities effectively and allocate marketing-related resources accordingly. The system is based on managerial preference modelling with a decision model (analytical side) and communication-enhancing strategy conferencing (interactive side). After a review of alternative resource allocation frameworks, as rule-of-thumb approaches, matrix-based analyses, statistical analyses and management science models, we analyse existing analytical, behavioural and organisational impediments to effective marketing resource allocation. Addressing some of these impediments, this paper outlines two Marketing Strategy Conference cases, which we carried out for a pharmaceutical company, Schering Argentina.     

Grey Power,School Gate Mums and the Youth Vote: Age as a Key Factor in Voter Segmentation and Engagement in the 2005 UK General Election.

This paper seeks to examine attempts by the main political parties in the UK general election of 2005 to segment the electorate according to their age and position within the life cycle. Particular attention is given to product adjustments and the party campaigns for the votes of older people, the "grey vote", as the political market shifts profoundly driven both by demographics, the ageing of the population, as well as by electoral behaviour, the declining participation of younger voters. Consideration is also given to segmentation of voters in the first age, the "youth vote", and the second age, "Generation Jones" and "school gate mums". The paper moves on to discuss age and segmentation in the context of elections remaining essentially mass communications campaigns, and the responses within civil society to the apparent power allocated to sub-groups identified as priority targets.     

The Gay Family in the Ad: Consumer Responses to Non-traditional Families in Marketing Communications

This paper investigates consumer responses to gay families portrayed in advertising, drawing on critical visual analysis, reader response analysis and queer theory. Twenty-five consumers were interviewed about a selection of family oriented ads. Several themes emerged from the interviews, including straightening up – reading apparently gay images as heterosexual, or straight, despite rather overt gay signals. This important interpretive phenomenon seems to "interfere" with processing of apparently gay imagery, revealing interesting interpretive strategies. Findings are discussed within the advertising as representation research tradition, and illuminate interpretive strategies that consumers use when confronted with culturally sensitive images in advertising.     

Antecedents of Perceived Quality in the Context of Internet Retail Stores

This study investigates specific antecedents of perceived service quality in the Internet environment for trust to a retail store, experience with e-commerce, Internet familiarity, excitement with e-commerce, extent of using e-commerce, frequency of purchases from a company, in addition to exploring the reasons for shopping on line: such as price discounts, convenience, product availability, and purchase conditions. The results indicate that perceived e-service quality is comprised of four key dimensions: information, user friendliness, interaction / adaptation and aesthetics. Moreover, the study reveals that different dimensions of perceived e-service quality are influenced by diverse antecedents. For instance, whilst customer trust to a company influences all four dimensions, Internet familiarity has an impact solely on user friendliness. This picture remained when the type of store, either pure dot. com versus hybrid retailer, was tested as a moderator variable. Implications for practice, the limitations of the study, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Accessing healthy food: availability and price of a healthy food basket in Scotland

Access to healthy food and its marketing have been asserted as limitations on changing behaviour to improve diet. A retailer survey in Scotland is reported that considered availability and affordability of a basket of indicator healthy food items, termed the Healthy Eating Indicator Shopping Basket (HEISB). It comprised 35 items drawn from 5 major food groups. A census of HEISB availability in 466 stores was undertaken in a sample of locations that varied on dimensions of urban-rural and affluent-deprived. Around half of the supermarkets surveyed stocked all the items. Availability of healthy food items was generally seen to be adequate but there were notable variations in availability for specific items. There were large variations in price for the HEISB items across the stores and the survey areas. The total HEISB median price varied by store type. Basket price tended to rise with deprivation with a caveat of the lowest prices in the most deprived areas. Accessibility to a range of healthy food depends more on the presence of medium and large stores than being in a deprived or affluent area.     

The Contribution of Ethical Obligation and Self-identity to the Theory of Planned Behaviour: An Exploration of Ethical Consumers

Whilst the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) has generated much research interest, many market researchers are divided over the addition of further constructs to the model. The TRA and its many modifications have been applied in numerous behavioural contexts, however, research to-date has neglected an emerging group of "ethical" consumers. This paper outlines results from a recent survey of over 1400 UK consumers that applied the TRA to this complex area of decision making. Using readers to the Ethical Consumer magazine, the study addresses issues involving proposed model modifications - specifically, by the addition of control, ethical obligation and self-identify. Management implications of the findings are discussed, including the importance of understanding consumers' self-identification with ethical issues in marketing communications programmes; and the underlying potential importance of ethical issues to mainstream consumer groups. Finally, the need to develop conceptually as well as practically robust techniques by using Structural Equation Modelling, which represents the next stage in this research, is outlined.