Product Attribute-Based Voter Segmentation and Resource Advantage Theory

Political parties have long since targeted the marginal constituency and floating voters using demographic segmentation approaches and the use of market segmentation techniques in general election campaigns is now well-documented (see Johnson 1971; Ahmed and Jackson 1979; Yorke and Meehan 1986; Baines et al. 2003). The actual practice of segmentation as undertaken by political parties and its relation to theory is less well-considered. This paper represents a serious attempt to outline how political parties targeted a priori segments of the electorate including gender, age and lifecycle in the 2005 British General Election when they should have been adopting a product attributed-based approach. Selected MORI surveys from April 2005 were analysed, using logistic regression to indicate the most important factors in determining how Britons vote. Principal components analysis provides an indication of how the three main British political parties are perceived. The paper discusses, using resource-advantage theory (Hunt 1995; Hunt and Arnett 2004) how political parties might use their party and leader image, and policies to build their popularity in an election campaign.     

Internal marketing: a qualitative study of culture change in the UK banking sector

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study carried out in the UK retail-bank sector on the implementation of Internal Marketing (IM). While the overall aim of Internal Marketing is the creation of a unified culture around the values of customer service, employee empowerment and service quality, the evidence suggests that Internal Marketing is perceived and enacted in ways that at times contradict such managerial rhetoric. The paper sheds light on what internal marketing is (its underlying principles within the organisations studied), the ways in which the banks studied use it in order to change their organisational culture as well as the difficulties encountered in implementing IM as a culture change agent. It concludes that the implementation of Internal Marketing in the banks under the study is problematic and does not result into a unified organisation culture. Indeed, implementing Internal Marketing is a process fraught with difficulty, which at times leads to divisions, ruptures and ambiguity in the newly created organisational culture.     

No Space – New Blood and the Production of Brand Culture Colonies

This paper explores implications for marketing education curricula of developments in marketing practice. Research from a variety of sources is drawn together and suggests that many marketing graduates are not being well equipped for 'the new marketing'. Marketing curricula should be reconsidered with respect to the nature of the learning outcomes, skills and knowledge that are required by graduates. Specifically, a range of marketing research and information issues are raised, together with implications of the new marketing metrics and the nature of marketing's wider role (via alliances and partnerships) in Knowledge Management strategies. This is furthered by the need to revisit the marketing concept itself in terms of its wider social responsibilities.     

Can design improve the performance of marketing management?

Marketing management and design is assumed to be well performing when well integrated. Seen from a marketing management perspective, design is complementary and provides useful tools like visualisation and prototyping as well as empathy with the consumers. Jointly this can increase the performance of the company. Due to different cultures, languages and procedures marketing management often fails to deliver these advantages. The introductory essay provides an overview of methods to afford a better integration between the two and introduces a number of articles providing an overview and up-to-date analysis of the current situation.     

Marketing the Police – from a Force to a Service

The British police service is a highly visible public sector organisation that in recent years has come under mounting pressures from different stakeholders, including successive Conservative and Labour governments and also an increasingly demanding public. In this setting, various business and management models and concepts have been applied to contemporary policing, but only limited research has been undertaken to date on how marketing has been adopted and utilised across the police forces of the British Isles. This paper explores the context of modern policing and suggests why the police are now being compelled to address marketing more seriously than hitherto. It draws on recent empirical work conducted across the police service and situates this within the existing literature on internal marketing. The paper concludes that marketing is underdeveloped across the police service and argues that police forces should develop their internal marketing as a precursor to successful external marketing.     

Cultural Brands/Branding Cultures

This conceptual paper examines the interface between culture and business, with specific reference to branding. It argues that, while considerable strides have been made in recent years to develop Arts Marketing theory, the subject now needs to take account of wider social and cultural issues. The paper explores the way in which processes of meaning-making have been theorised in consumption and cultural studies. It argues for a view of the symbolic dimensions of branding practices that positions them within the circuit of culture, as a cultural phenomenon. It is argued that brands are symbolic articulators of production and consumption. In this sense, all brands are representational texts, and are socially, not merely managerially, constructed. Different kinds of cultural brands are identified, including cultrepreneurs, cultural corporates and commercial corporates, and their practices in relation to business and culture are discussed. It is suggested that marketing (including branding) is not a neutral analytical repertoire for the study of exchange relationships, but is itself a particular kind of cultural brand, namely an ideological myopia which operates in the service of capital. It is suggested that Arts Marketing practitioners and scholars consider these wider issues in formulating their marketing practices and research strategies.     

Some Attitudinal Predictors of Home-Shopping through the Internet

Economic and political imperatives of the 1980s have seen governments turn to private sector managerial techniques, practices and orientations to enable them to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Among these is marketing which has received increasing attention as governments have looked to privatize, corporatize or simply introduce some level of “user‐pays” principle into their operations.

Despite the ambitious claims of the marketing discipline, the transposition of marketing to the public sector has not proved to be without problems. This paper reviews why such a transposition might be difficult. It also reviews the claim of marketing to be an appropriate discipline at all for widespread application in the public sector.

The paper concludes that marketers should be cautious as to the extent to which their discipline can be transposed or modified to assist governments identity, plan, deliver and evaluate services more efficiently and effectively.     

From Cattle and Coke to Charlie: Meeting the Challenge of Self Marketing and Personal Branding

Since the late 1990s, self marketing and personal branding have become increasingly popular as subjects of self-improvement books, Web sites and consultancy services, especially in the USA. To date, little of this interest appears to have permeated the discipline of marketing, either in terms of formal research, textbook contents or academic curricula. This paper examines the theoretical basis of self marketing and personal branding, identifies some of the conceptual, practical and ethical problems it poses for the discipline, and points to some of the challenges facing higher education in attempting to create a curricular framework within which marketing professionals can learn how to market and brand themselves effectively.     

Mapping out the Field of Gender and Buyer-Seller Relationships: Developing a New Perspective

Buyer-seller relationships have long been of intense interest to marketing academics and practitioners, most particularly within the domain of business-to-business markets, but also more recently within the purview of business-to-consumer markets. This paper looks at the role of gender in buyer-seller relationships. Covering the literature from sales and from consumer behaviour, the general lack of a specific gender perspective in the interactions between buyers and sellers is identified and weaknesses in the current literature are highlighted. It identifies an opportunity to develop and apply feminist research practice to this increasingly important area. The benefits, opportunities, and limitations of the feminist research approach are specified and some initial conclusions presented.     

A grounded theory of doctors' information search behaviour. Implications for information provision,pharmaceutical market entry and development

This research examines the information search and usage behaviour of physicians when they choose pharmaceutical treatments for their patients. It details this behaviour, its causes, variations and information sources. Grounded Theory was used, with data collection primarily based on depth interviews with primary and secondary care physicians. Two main categories of search behaviour emerged and were labelled self-referencing and surrogating. Self-referencing describes the process where physicians first use internal, patient case experiences to discover behavioral patterns for the successful treatment of patients. If insufficient confidence is held in their internal knowledge, physicians will attempt to use the patient case experience of external sources and surrogate this experience as their own. Recommendations are made regarding matching the information usage behaviors of physicians with that provided by organisations and marketing outputs.