Eventalizing the marketing concept

This paper “eventalizes” the marketing concept and in doing so will highlight the value of detailed cross-source analysis in historical research. But more than this, it will not simply call upon canonical sources in relation to debates surrounding the marketing concept for the reason that non-canonical sources – that is, periodical material or out-of-print texts that very few people have read or have acknowledged as central contributions to the field – may contain references to debates that have long been written out of the historical record and could encourage us, as marketing scholars, to adopt a more sceptical stance toward what we take for granted historically and neglect to subject to critical scrutiny. This argument is illustrated via the demonstration that marketing scholars and practitioners were well aware of the benefits that accrue from a customer orientation and were encouraged to orient their organisations in this manner by the growth in industrial production facilities stimulated by World War I. This growth meant that production output could be maintained at levels far in excess of consumer demand, thereby necessitating that organisations register and act upon consumer requirements. These themes continue to gain prominence until World War II when there was a brief return to a production orientation. At this point, business and marketing practitioners adopted a critical stance with regard to certain types of consumer research. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, the U.S. government became the major purchaser of industrial and consumer goods. Secondly, business practitioners were sceptical of the value of market and consumer research as a result of the failure by pollsters (who were utilising sophisticated statistical techniques) to predict the outcome of the 1948 U.S. Presidential election. Given the conflation of market research with polling research in the popular press and business community, business practitioners were unsure about the validity and usefulness of market research. In equal measure, environmental factors including rising levels of competition, employee specialisation, product diversification and organisational decentralisation would contribute to the (re)emergence of themes associated with the marketing concept.     

The Marketing Campaign: The British General Election of 2005

Political marketing was a key factor in the 2005 campaign, but more for its ineffectiveness than for its success. The use of marketing techniques such as segmentation and targeting was prolific, however the extent to which the parties adopted the marketing concept was limited. The impact of Labour's Big Conversation and 'Team Labour' campaign approach was always going to be hindered by Tony Blair's perceived dismissal of party and voter opinion on the Iraq War and top-up fees; appointing a marketing director to work on the presentation rather than the design of policy, combined with a highly negative campaign, was never going to win the election for the Tories. The lessons of electoral history – and marketing - were proved right once again: only if parties fully embrace the marketing philosophy and comprehensively design their behaviour by reflecting and responding to public demand. Nevertheless the key to future success for UK parties is to bring back ideology: market-oriented politics should also include using party principles and leadership judgement in order to be able to produce a distinctive response to the public concerns that is both popular and credible.     

Inter-firm Market Orientation: Its Significance and Antecedents in Distribution Networks

It is often argued that competition takes place between networks or value chains, rather than between individual companies. This means that market orientation needs to be recognised at this level, in order to understand how an inter-firm network can become more competitive and effective in serving its final market. Still, market orientation has been analysed only as a property of individual companies. This paper stresses the importance of recognising market orientation on a network level and as an inter-firm phenomenon. The notion of inter-firm market orientation, i.e.joint activities by firms that make a network more sensitive to market demands, is thus suggested. A framework is presented that discusses the meaning and content of inter-firm market orientation in a distribution network, and how it is influenced by different network and relationship characteristics. The framework is based on previous research on market orientation, inter-firm networks and relationships.     

How do consumers know which brand is the market leader or market pioneer? Consumers' inferential processes,confidence and accuracy

Prior research has suggested that the brand consumers believe is the market leader or market pioneer can earn positive feedback for these achievements. The key question is how do consumers form these beliefs? This research examines the sources of information and cognitive processes that consumers utilise when determining which brand in a particular product category is a pioneer or market leader. These processes of source identification - including memory trace, schematic inferencing, direct-cue retrieval, and guessing – are applied in this brand characteristic context, and measured in terms of their relative frequency of occurrence, degree of confidence from each process, and accuracy of each process. Consumers may feel varying degrees of confidence in the different types of inferential processes, and these different processes may actually result in varying degrees of accuracy.

Results show that consumers typically evoke "schematic inference" as a rationale for their identification of a given brand as having a category characteristic. Those who use memory trace, however, are particularly confident that they have identified the true category characteristic, but are particularly inaccurate in such identification for the pioneer brand. These findings are discussed in the broader context of source inferential processes and their importance to marketing strategy.     

Effect of strategy,structure and performance variables on store brand market share

The results obtained by store brands in a large number of markets have been favoured by a set of factors. Prominent among these factors are the actions by manufacturers and distributors on price and differentiation, market competition at both a manufacturer and a retailer level, and the economic-financial results of the latter for the product categories in which they work with a store brand. This research presents an explanatory fixed effects panel model of the market share of these brands that shows clearly the influence of the variables of competitive strategy, structure and performance. The study is applied to the Spanish market for 50 consumer product categories over 5 years, from 1996 to 2000.     

The Effectiveness of Environmental Claims among Chinese Consumers: Influences of Claim Type,Country Disposition and Ecocentric Orientation

This study empirically examines how environmental claim type affects the communication effectiveness of environmental advertising claims among Chinese consumers, and how two individual difference variables—country disposition and ecocentric orientation—moderate the claim type-effectiveness relationship. The present findings reveal that environmental claim type, country disposition, and ecocentric orientation all exert significant influences on communication effectiveness. Specifically, it is shown that substantive environmental claims generate greater communication effectiveness than associative environmental claims for both high-involvement and low-involvement purchases. For both types of purchases, environmental claims also generate more positive responses from consumers exhibiting a strong ecocentric orientation than from those exhibiting a weak ecocentric orientation. In addition, when compared with those holding a negative country disposition toward the source country, consumers holding a positive country disposition express more favorable responses toward environmental claims in high-involvement purchases. Finally, the present study also reveals that country disposition and ecocentric orientation jointly exert significant moderating effects on the claim type-effectiveness relationship in high-involvement purchases. These results remind marketers of the importance of adopting a situational perspective by taking country disposition and ecocentric orientation into account when determining which types of environmental claims should be employed to appeal to their targeted Chinese consumers.     

Using metaphors in new brand design

This paper addresses an important gap in brand development. While attention has been rightly focused on consumer understanding of brand imagery, insufficient attention has been given to how the firm's managers create, understand and communicate to each other something so intangible as a future brand's vision. We demonstrate how using metaphors in brand design enhances the ability of a cross‐functional team to create a coherent brand vision: facilitating both creativity and its communication. Brand visions are vital given the essential periodic improvements and mutations brands must undergo, without sacrificing the integrity and values which drive their purchase. Management complexity arises because brand development happens in a multi‐disciplinary environment. Moreover these different managers must translate the intangible meanings held by consumers into very tangible product and service specifications. The role and nature of metaphor in this process is examined in detail. We then provide practical examples of how this technique has been used with managers in a variety of branding tasks.     

高油价背景下我国石油期货的发展

随着世界经济的复苏,世界各国对石油的需求旺盛,供给比较紧张等原因,使油价逐步攀升而且居高不下,并有继续攀升的势头。我国是石油消费大国和进口大国,已经开设了燃料油期货市场,但是市场品种单一,仍然面临被动地接受国际油价的局面。在这样的背景下,我国应该大力发展其他的石油期货品种,完善原油、燃料油和成品油价格形成机制,使我国逐步成为影响世界油价的重要因素,同时也为我国石油相关企业提供套期保值的场所。     

Market orientation and design orientation: a management model

Market orientation and design orientation as strategic concepts have a proven impact on business results, but the direct relationship between these concepts has not yet been analysed. This research attempts to prove the relationship by studying the managerial implication of design orientation as it relates to market orientation. After analysing 28 case studies of Spanish companies well-known for their business excellence and their design orientation, a management model is proposed. The model is a management tool that offers companies a scheme for auto-diagnosis and a review of best-in-class design practices that have shown to improve business results.