This study explores the relationships between selected marketing mix elements and the creation of brand equity. The authors propose a conceptual framework in which marketing elements are related to the dimensions of brand equity, that is, perceived quality, brand loyalty, and brand associations combined with brand awareness. These dimensions are then related to brand equity. The empirical tests using a structural equation model support the research hypotheses. The results show that frequent price promotions, such as price deals, are related to low brand equity, whereas high advertising spending, high price, good store image, and high distribution intensity are related to high brand equity.

An examination of selected marketing mix elements and brand equity

What We Know and Don't Know About Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review and Research Agenda

The authors update and extend their 1978 review of conjoint analysis. In addition to discussing several new developments, they consider alternative approaches for measuring preference structures in...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1251756

Conjoint Analysis in Marketing: New Developments with Implications for Research and Practice:

The authors seek to understand which of three different strategic orientations of the firm (customer, competitive, and technological) is more appropriate, when, and why it is so in the context of d...

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Strategic orientation of the firm and new product performance

Many service organizations have embraced relationship marketing with its focus on maximizing customer lifetime value. Recently, there has been considerable controversy about whether there is a link between customer satisfaction and retention. This research question is important to researchers who are attempting to understand how customers' assessments of services influence their subsequent behavior. However, it is equally vital to managers who require a better understanding of the relationship between satisfaction and the duration of the provider-customer relationship to identify specific actions that can increase retention and profitability in the long run. Since there is very little empirical evidence regarding this research question, this study develops and estimates a dynamic model of the duration of provider-customer relationship that focuses on the role of customer satisfaction.

This article models the duration of the customer's relationship with an organization that delivers a continuously provided service, such as utilities, financial services, and telecommunications. In the model, the duration of the provider-customer relationship is postulated to depend on the customer's subjective expected value of the relationship, which he/she updates according to an anchoring and adjustment process. It is hypothesized that cumulative satisfaction serves as an anchor that is updated with new information obtained during service experiences. The model is estimated as a left-truncated, proportional hazards regression with cross-sectional and time series data describing cellular customers perceptions and behavior over a 22-month period.

The results indicate that customer satisfaction ratings elicited prior to any decision to cancel or stay loyal to the provider are positively related to the duration of the relationship. The strength of the relationship between duration times and satisfaction levels depends on the length of customers' prior experience with the organization. Customers who have many months' experience with the organization weigh prior cumulative satisfaction more heavily and new information relatively less heavily. The duration of the service provider-customer relationship also depends on whether customers experienced service transactions or failures. The effects of perceived losses arising from transactions or service failures on duration times are directly weighed by prior satisfaction, creating contrast and assimilation effects.

How can service organizations develop longer relationships with customers? Since customers weigh prior cumulative satisfaction heavily, organizations should focus on customers in the early stages of the relationship-if customers' experiences are not satisfactory, the relationship is likely to be very short. There is considerable heterogeneity across customers because some customers have a higher utility for the service than others. However, certain types of service encounters are potential relationship "landmines" because customers are highly sensitive to the costs/losses arising from interactions with service organizations and insensitive to the benefits/gains. Thus, incidence and quality of service encounters can be early indicators of whether an organization's relationship with a customer is flourishing or in jeopardy. Unfortunately, organizations with good prior service levels will suffer more when customers perceive that they have suffered a loss arising from a service encounter-due to the existence of contrast effects. However, experienced customers are less sensitive to such losses because they tend to weigh prior satisfaction levels heavily.

By modeling the duration of the provider-customer relationship, it is possible to predict the revenue impact of service improvements in the same manner as other resource allocation decisions. The calculations in this article show that changes in customer satisfaction can have important financial implications for the organization because lifetime revenues from an individual customer depend on the duration of his/her relationship, as well as the dollar amount of his/her purchases across billing cycles.

Satisfaction levels explain a substantial portion of explained variance in the durations of service provider-customer relationships across customers, comparable to the effect of price. Consequently, it is a popular misconception that organizations that focus on customer satisfaction are failing to manage customer retention. Rather, this article suggests that service organizations should be proactive and learn from customers before they defect by understanding their current satisfaction levels. Managers and researchers may have underestimated the importance of the link between customer satisfaction and retention because the relationship between satisfaction and duration times is very complex and difficult to detect without advanced statistical techniques.

http://www.ruthnbolton.com/Publications/RelationshipDurationandSatisfaction.pdf

A Dynamic Model of the Duration of the Customer's Relationship with a Continuous Service Provider: The Role of Satisfaction

Some statistical methods developed recently in the biometrics and econometrics literature show great promise for improving the analysis of duration times in marketing. They incorporate the right censoring that is prevalent in duration times data, and can be used to make a wide variety of useful predictions. Both of these features make these methods preferable to the regression, logit, and discriminant analyses that marketers have typically used in analyzing durations.

This paper is intended to fulfill three objectives. First, we demonstrate how decision situations that involve durations differ from other marketing phenomena. Second, we show how standard modeling approaches to handle duration times can break down because of the peculiarities inherent in durations. It has been suggested in recent marketing articles that an alternative to these conventional procedures, i.e., hazard rate models and proportional hazard regression, can more effectively handle duration type data. Third, to investigate whether these proposed benefits are in fact delivered for marketing durations data, we estimate and validate both conventional and hazard rate models for household interpurchase times of saltine crackers. Our findings indicate the superiority of proportional hazard regression methods vis-i-vis common procedures in terms of stability and face validity of the estimates and in predictive accuracy.

Analyzing Duration Times in Marketing: Evidence for the Effectiveness of Hazard Rate Models

Product-harm crises are among a firm's worst nightmares. A firm may experience (i) a loss in baseline sales, (ii) a reduced own effectiveness for its marketing instruments, (iii) an increased cross sensitivity to rival firms' marketing-mix activities, and (iv) a decreased cross impact of its marketing-mix instruments on the sales of competing, unaffected brands. We find that this quadruple jeopardy materialized in a case study of an Australian product-harm crisis faced by Kraft peanut butter. We arrive at this conclusion by using a time-varying error-correction model that quantifies the consequences of this crisis on base sales, and on own-and cross-brand short-and long-term effectiveness. The proposed modeling approach allows managers to make more informed decisions on how to regain the brands' pre-crisis performance levels.

The Impact of a Product-Harm Crisis on Marketing Effectiveness

PART ONE: GLOBALIZATION.1. Globalization Imperative.PART TWO: GLOBAL MARKETING ENVIRONMENT.2. Global Economic Environment.3. Financial Environment.4. Global Cultural Environment and Buying Behavior.5. Political and Legal Environment.PART THREE: DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETITIVE MARKETING STRATEGY6. Global Marketing Research.7. Global Segmentation and Positioning.8. Global Marketing Strategies.9. Global Market-Entry Strategies.10. Global Sourcing Strategy: R&D, Manufacturing, and Marketing Interfaces.PART FOUR: GLOBAL MARKETING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT.11. Global Product Policy Decisions I: Developing New Products for Global Markets.12. Global Product Policy Decisions II: Marketing Products and Services.13. Global Pricing.14. Communicating with the World Consumer.15. Sales Management.16. Global Logistics and Distribution.17. Export and Import Management.PART FIVE: MANAGING GLOBAL OPERATIONS.18. Planning, Organization, and Control of Global Marketing Operations19. Global Marketing and the Internet.Cases.Web Cases.Photo Credits.Index.

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Global Marketing Management

Country segmentation has been proposed to assist in marketing strategy decisions for international marketing managers. Such schemes typically consist of grouping or clustering a set of specified countries on the basis of a wide array of macroeconomic variables. The authors focus on the merits of such country classification schemes in gaining an understanding about multinational diffusion patterns. More specifically, they analyze the extent to which countries belonging to the same (different) grouping reveal similar (dissimilar) diffusion patterns. To that end, they compare the results of traditional segmentation approaches with diffusion-based country segments derived for three different consumer durable goods. For the latter, they rely on a recently developed latent-structure methodology, here modified to accommodate the Bass diffusion model, which simultaneously determines the segments and segment-level estimates of the diffusion parameters. They find that the market segments derived from these two approaches differ dramatically and that macro-level variables do not fully explain differences in diffusion patterns across countries. In addition, country segments formed on the basis of diffusion patterns often differ by product. Finally, they discuss some managerial implications and directions for future research.

Kristiaan Helsen

Papers

Analyzing Duration Times in Marketing: Evidence for the Effectiveness of Hazard Rate Models

The Impact of a Product-Harm Crisis on Marketing Effectiveness

Global Marketing Management

A New Approach to Country Segmentation Utilizing Multinational Diffusion Patterns

the impact of a product-harm crisis on marketing effectiveness