Financial services and the elderly poor: Development and implementation of sustainable intervention strategies

Given the significance of the elderly consumer market in the development of successful and comprehensive marketing strategies, it is imperative that marketing decision-makers and policymakers better understand and respond to the varied needs of this significant consumer segment. The management of financial matters is important at every juncture in life, but particularly so for the elderly. This area of concern is exacerbated when considering the large number of elderly in poverty or near-poverty levels of existence. On the basis of the extant literature review, most consumer education programs focus on young consumers. As the population ages, the societal role of the mature market becomes more and more significant. A well-developed consumer financial initiative designed to assist this important market segment can generate tremendous dividends in both the short- and long-run for sponsoring institutions/business organizations. Consumer financial education programs offer considerable promise for this market sector. Given this state of affairs, the article's key objective is to offer an integrative conceptual platform to address some of major concerns in developing and implementing consumer financial education programs for the elderly poor. The conceptual model details the mechanics of constructing and executing effective financial education initiatives for the elderly poor, with the attendant marketing management implications.     

Levels of Aggregation: A Conceptual Model

Aggregate analysis has been established as a standard method on the study of market response behavior for a long time. Aggregation has advanced our understanding of the linkages among social characteristics and aggregate response behavior. However, aggregate analysis has been hindered by fragmentary and unsystematic procedures to determine the most appropriate level of aggregation. The general objective of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework to determine the level of aggregation of variables in data analysis. In addition, statistical procedures are suggested in this framework to verify and to determine the level of aggregation represented by a variable. The conceptual framework is useful for deciding if the variables are to be analyzed from micro-analysis focus or macro-analysis focus. The statistical procedures enable the researcher to systematically identify and verify the level(s) of aggregation of variables in an existing data set.     

Ethical Decision-Making Differences Between American and Moroccan Managers

Our research’s aim is to assess the effect of cultural factors on business ethical decision-making process in a Western cultural context and in a non-Western cultural context. Specifically, this study investigates ethical perceptions, religiosity, personal moral philosophies, corporate ethical values, gender, and ethical intentions of U.S. and Moroccan business managers. The findings demonstrate that significant differences do exist between the two countries in idealism and relativism. Moroccan managers tend to be more idealistic than the U.S. managers. There is a strong positive relationship between religiosity and idealism. There were mixed findings in examining the correlates of religiosity and various components of ethical intentions. Moroccan managers were more homogenous in their corporate ethical values than were the U.S. managers. The results demonstrate that (in general) idealism is a good predictor of ethical intentions and behaviors. Additionally, managers from the two countries differed in the degree of relationship between perceptions and intentions in three of the four scenarios. This study’s results confirm other research findings that, in general, female business managers have higher ethical sensitivity in terms of their ethical judgment than their male counterparts. Managerial implications are also discussed.     

Some simple structure significance tests for exploratory component analysis with market survey data

Several uncertainties continue to hinder researchers using exploratory factor analysis. Among other decisions, the choice of the number of factors to retain and the interpretability of the rotated solution remain problematical. In this paper, we suggest a simple structure criterion as a general framework for choosing the number of factors and for interpreting the rotated factor structure matrix. The proposed methodology is demonstrated with demographic data from a consumer panel. The results show the importance of increasing the information yield from exploratory factor analysis.