Marketing

A study uses Procter & Gamble's value pricing strategy as an opportunity to examine consumer and competitor response to a major, sustained change in marketing-mix strategy. The study estimates an econometric model to trace how consumers and competitors react to such changes. For the average brand, the study finds that deals and coupons increase market penetration and surprisingly have little impact on customer retention as measured by share-of-category requirements and category usage.

This research examines, across 2 studies, the interplay between the valence and arousal components of affective states and the affective tone of a target ad. In the first study, music was used to induce a pleasant or unpleasant mood, while controlling for arousal. Participants were subsequently exposed to an ad that either had a positive-affective tone or was ambiguous in its affective tone. As predicted, the valence of the affective state colored the evaluation of the ad in a mood-congruent direction, but this coloring effect occurred only when the ad had an ambiguous-affective tone.

Tests for mediation and moderation are widely employed, usually in a formulaic manner. However, these tests are only a means to the goal of developing a causal understanding of a phenomenon.

The author is asked to consider the following: For a meta-analysis, how should one decide if the same independent variable was used in all studies? When one is studying the effect of a drug, it is relatively easy. However, in consumer experiments, all the experimenters may state that they manipulated the same construct, but they actually manipulated the construct in two different ways, and the type of manipulation produces differences in the results.

Returns policies are usually thought of as being a way to insure retailers against excess inventory. The work of Pellegrini (1986), Chu (1993), Lin (1993) and Padmanabhan and Png (1997) highlights the fact that there is considerably more to returns policies than just a mechanism for insurance. Our work identifies a heretofore undocumented rationale for returns policy: its role in learning the demand for a new product. The model of manufacturer?retailer interaction assumes that the demand is uncertain but correlated across time periods.

Professional services firms (e.g., consultants, accounting firms, or advertising agencies) generate and sell business solutions to their customers. In doing so, they can leverage the cumulative experience gained from serving their customer base to either reduce their variable costs or increase the quality of their products/services. In other words, their "production technology" exhibits some form of increasing returns to scale.

Two marketing and communications experts present a cutting-edge model for managing group creativity, expanding on the ideas introduced in Bernd Schmitt's revolutionary Experiential Marketing. Bernd Schmitt, a leader in experiential thinking, introduced the concept of the "experience organisation" a business that thrives on innovation, buzzes with ideas, rejects bureaucracy, questions convention and allows the spirit of its employees to soar. Now he teams up with Laura Brown to show not only that these companies exist, but how any company can become one.