Knowledge that Transforms

The world is preparing itself for the challenge of the EEC countries after 1992. For small and medium size firms it represents another chance for retaining the existing as well as for the conquest of new market segments. Market orientation towards consumer marketing will not be enough, thus the identification with them will be necessary. The role of the following aspects is important in such situation: products, price, distribution, product promotion which the firm is using for influencing the consumers and the market.

Following factors are considered as essential for keeping and growing Yugoslav furniture export: harvest natural resources, design and product quality, export price and efficiency of industrial production. The autor is analyzing factors and dynamics of Yugoslav furniture export.

Marketing as business philosophy becomes familiar, though not in the right form, with the most Yugoslav wine producers. The authors intention is to initiate by this article better recognition of market principals in this industrial branch of high export potentials.

The topic of this article is to show the possibility of use same mathematical function in analysis and prognosis lifetime of product. Validity of compute result depend about value and outstanding of mathematical function - particularly time function.

An early dismissal policy for unproductive recruiters is proposed. The policy is based on a bivariate stochastic model for productivity; this model considers both incidence of reporting a positive quantity of sales and the quantity per report. All recruiters are observed for a probational period; those who exceed minimum incidence and quantity requirements are allowed to continue to the end of a (fixed) maximum tenure while others are replaced with new recruiters after the probational period. We show that those who report less often must report a larger total quantity over the probational period in order to compensate for a larger chance variation. The univariate negative binomial distribution (NBD) model which considers quantity only is examined with respect to its robustness as an approximation in this context. It is found that the NBD leads to serious errors when the quantity reported is relatively homogeneous and reporting incidence is bimodal. Extensions to more conventional salesforces and to direct mail applications are indicated.

The author points out that psychology in marketing is one of the most interdisciplinary fields which penetrates beyond the customer's behaviour research. Psychology in marketing is a wide and still not enough examined field, which includes research of customer's behaviour as well as other aspects - advertising, psychology of marketing management, psychology of marketing activity of an organization, placement of new products on the market, etc.

Rotating indifference curves are used to induce an income effect that favors superior brands at the expense of inferior brands in a discrete choice model. When calibrated on scanner panel data, the model yields an objective measure of brand quality which is related to the rate of rotation. The model also leads to asymmetric responses to price promotions where switching up to high quality brands is more likely than switching down. The model is capable of nesting the standard logit model, and is similar to a nested logit model when there exists clusters of brands of like quality. The model is used to explore a product line pricing decision where profits are maximized subject to the constraint that consumer utility is maintained.

A recent paper by Novak and Stangor (Marketing Science, Winter 1987) on testing competitive market structures involves testing a two-sided hypothesis to determine the nature of the competitive market structure. In this paper we provide an improvement to the Novak and Stangor procedure by considering a one-sided multivariate hypothesis and suggest methods for testing such hypotheses.

Consumers are different in their purchase rates and it is important to determine this heterogeneity. If a consumer's purchases follow a Poisson process (hence exponential interpurchase time), and purchase rates are distributed gamma across consumers, then a simple measure of heterogeneity is the shape parameter r of the gamma distribution. Although we can use either the number of purchases or the interpurchase time data to estimate this heterogeneity, we suggest that number of purchases data are better and easier to use. It is also suggested that while method of moments (MOM) gives good parameter estimates for models using number of purchases data (e.g. NBD), it may be very misleading for models using interpurchase time data (e.g. Pareto). We also recommend caution when using maximum likelihood estimation procedure for the interpurchase time data if multiple observations are available for each consumer. This is to ensure that the model captures heterogeneity across consumers and not across observations.

This paper discusses the formal analysis of the structure underlying distance-based representations of consumer similarity judgments. Four models common in the marketing and psychological literature are examined—Euclidean and city-block spaces and ultrametric and additive trees. The analysis uses the distinction between “algebraic” and “geometric” structures as the basis for a unifying framework within which the four representations are compared and contrasted. The framework is then used to understand (1) the conditions under which model structure is theoretically revealing of the cognitive structure behind consumer behavior and (2) the degree to which similarity judgments and the resultant distance patterns are diagnostic of the appropriateness of a particular model. An important implication of the analysis is that there is a basic measurement indeterminacy associated with distance patterns, so that similarity data may not always reveal which is the “true” model in a given application. The consequences arising from this indeterminacy for the problem of model selection in marketing are illustrated with an empirical experiment designed to test the implications of the formal analysis in practical settings.