Marketing

We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision-making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees of freedom of their world. Cultural coherence among agents is defined as the overlap of mental representations and is characterized using an adequate order parameter.

The author discusses his work with the Conference Board's Council on Corporate Brand Management to develop a brand scorecard for monitoring the health of a brand.

What's a customer really worth? Can you find out, without endlessly complex modelling? And once you know, what should you do with that knowledge? Managing Customers as Investments has the answers. You'll learn simple ways to get reliable customer value information - in a form you can use. You'll discover how to use it to measure marketing effectiveness, generate improvements throughout the entire customer relationship lifecycle, and improve decision making. Everyone tells you to manage your business around customers. This book tells you how to do it.

Adaptive metric utility balance is at the heart of one of the most widely used and studied methods for conjoint analysis. We use formal models, simulations, and empirical data to suggest that adaptive metric utility balance leads to partworth estimates that are relatively biased—smaller partworths are upwardly biased relative to larger partworths. Such relative biases could lead to erroneous managerial decisions.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory (Higgins 1997, 1998, 2002)—a theory of motivation and self-regulation that has been rapidly gaining prominence in consumer research (e.g., Aaker and Lee 2001; Briley and Wyer 2002; Pham and Avnet 2004; Zhou and Pham 2004)—can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision-making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two modes of self-regulation called promotion and prevention.

The contribution of the feelings-as-information hypothesis to our understanding of the role of affect in judgment and decision making is discussed. Basic principles and regularities in how affective feelings guide judgments and decisions are then identified. Based on these principles and regularities, it is argued that the role of feelings in judgment and decision making may be more adaptive than has been assumed in most academic circles.