Marketing

The new challenges that the 21st century brings to the field of marketing competition inspired the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) to sponsor a special section on the topic. This special section was preceded by a conference at the University of Mainz, co-sponsored by IJRM, MSI, SMU (Singapore) and the University of Mainz.

Five marked evolutions around the turn of the century present new challenges in marketing competition, which may lead to particularly fruitful streams of research.

We review a selected set of tools and frameworks for customer-centric new product development. We structure our review around the typical steps of the new product development process: opportunity identification, idea generation, design, testing, and launch. The list of topics addressed in this chapter is by no means exhaustive. We focus on topics which tend to be more recent and to present opportunities for further development and research.

Paid placements on search engines reached sales of nearly $11 billion in the United States last year and represent the most rapidly growing form of online advertising today. In its classic form, a search engine sets up an auction for each search word in which competing websites bid for their sponsored links to be displayed next to the search results.

Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in the short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious: More discounted last-minute tickets may lead to more consumers anticipating the discount and delaying the purchase rather than buying at the regular (higher) prices, hence potentially reducing revenues for the company.

Focus groups are the most used and abused qualitative marketing research method. Refocusing Focus Groups by Robert J. Morais lays out, in simple terms, the best practices for planning, designing, conducting, and interpreting focus groups. The book draws upon perspectives and techniques from psychology and anthropology, along with decades of the author's and other experts' experience.

The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols and that rituals mediate tension inherent in two forces, stability and change, which define the brand and the advertising collaboration.

Marketing research and advertising strategic planning offer viable and financially attractive career options for anthropologists because many businesses seek deep understandings of consumer lifestyles and brand use. As professionally trained anthropologists operating in the corporate world, we see a bright future for anthropologists, but we believe that there are merits in broadening the typical anthropological approach to incorporate additional theory and methods from other social and behavioral sciences, particularly psychology.

Consumers learn quality of many durable products through word-of-mouth information while firms launch new and improved products frequently in these markets. This paper examines firm incentives to invest in R&D to compete for patents in markets where consumers rely on word-of-mouth information and have expectations about the new products before launch. When its loss due to a possible entry is above a threshold, an incumbent has more incentives than a potential entrant to invest in R&D for patents.

The silver lining effect predicts that segregating a small gain from a larger loss results in greater psychological value than does integrating them into a smaller loss. Using a generic prospect theory value function, we formalize this effect and derive conditions under which it should occur. We show analytically that if the gain is smaller than a certain threshold, segregation is optimal. This threshold increases with the size of the loss and decreases with the degree of loss aversion of the decision maker.