Search results

The quantity surveying profession has a long history in the building industry. Although the profession has reached maturity, practising quantity surveyors seem to have failed in so far as strategic marketing and planning are concerned. Many quantity surveying firms do not have formal written marketing plans. They do not appear to believe that such plans are useful because of uncertainties in the construction market. In view of this lacuna, aims to highlight the importance of strategic marketing and planning to quantity surveyors. Examines the seven Ps in the marketing mix concept for applications in the quantity surveying profession. Quantity surveyors should keep these applications in mind when marketing their professional services.

The dominant worldview among marketers is one of technology optimism, which holds that technological advances influence consumers and businesses in positive ways. In direct contrast to this perspective, I advance the thesis that at the organizational frontlines where marketers interact with consumers by observing, informing, persuading, negotiating and co-creating with, and entertaining them, technology commonly produces unforeseen and unexpected effects on consumers with significant negative implications for marketers. The result is Adverse Technology-Consumer Interactions (ATCIs). Marketing practitioners play an instrumental role in producing and exacerbating ATCIs. Yet, I argue they have few incentives to fully investigate the underlying reasons, understand their scope, or find solutions to these potentially troublesome phenomena. Academic researchers, however, are uniquely poised to identify ATCIs, investigate them in depth by considering their industry-wide and society-wide import, develop appropriate theoretical frameworks, and design and test solutions to alleviate their effects. I develop these ideas by considering two ATCIs, falling response rates to customer surveys and customer reactance to frequent price changes. I also point out promising research opportunities for both these phenomena.

The utilization of the Internet and Internet marketing for marketing research has received considerable attention. Although there is a growing body of research devoted to this issue little has been done to explore the impact of Internet technology, e‐mail users’ on‐line skills and experience, on their choice of the new survey medium. This study is based on a sample of 122 responses from UK marketing executives using e‐mail and mail questionnaire surveys respectively. The research instrument included measures of respondents’ extent of e‐mail use, their general knowledge of online communications and their time of using the Internet. Some significant impact of these factors has been identified. The empirical evidence supports the hypotheses that the use of e‐mail survey methods is positively connected with high technology awareness and extensive e‐mail use. The findings imply that proper survey planning and administration are important for Internet‐based marketing surveys and suggest the existence of certain user patterns among different Internet user populations.

Distribution has been a major element of retailers′ marketing strategy in recent years as companies strive to control costs but at the same time seek competitive advantage through improving service to stores and gaining greater control of stock in the supply chain. In an interview survey of distribution directors from major multiple groups, all companies were reviewing their distribution strategy and many had made major changes to their distribution system. Centralisation of stock in strategically located RDCs and the use of third party contractors were main features of retail companies′ strategy. Contractors were much more aggressive in marketing their services to retailers than hitherto. This is partly related to the competitive and turbulent nature of the industry. In a survey of marketing directors/managers of distribution companies, it was clear that firms were trying to raise their profile in the market as they “went public” and/or because they were moving into new industry sectors away from their “core” specialist areas.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the case where – by design – one needs to impute cross-country cross-survey (CCCS) data (situation typical for example among multinational firms who are confronted with the need to carry out comparative marketing surveys with respondents located in several countries). Importantly, while some work demonstrates approaches for single-item direct measures, no prior research has examined the common situation in international marketing where the researcher needs to use multi-item scales of latent constructs. The paper presents problem areas related to the choices international marketers have to make when doing cross-country/cross-survey research and provides guidance for future research.

Multi-country sample of real data is used as an example of cross-sample imputation (292 New Zealand exporters and 302 Finnish ones) the international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) data. Three variations of the input data are tested: first, imputation based on all the data available for the measurement model; second, imputation based on the set of items based on the invariance structure of the joint items shared across the two groups; and third, imputation based both on examination of the invariance structures of the joint items and the performance of the measurement model in the group where the full data was originally available.

Based on distribution comparisons imputation for New Zealand after completing the measurement model with Finnish data (Model C) gave the most promising results. Consequently, using knowledge on between country measurement qualities may improve the imputation results, but this benefit comes with a downside since it simultaneously reduces the amount of data used for imputation. None of the imputation models leads to the same statistical inferences about covariances between latent constructs than as the original full data, however.

Considering multiple imputation, the present exploratory study suggests that there are several concerns and issues that should be taken into account when planning CCCSs (or split questionnaire or sub-sampling designs). Even if there are several advantages available for well-implemented CCCS designs such as shorter questionnaires and improved response rates, these concerns lead us to question the appropriateness of the CCCS approach in general, due to the need to impute across the samples.

The combination of cross-country and cross-survey approaches is novel to international marketing, and it is not known how the different procedures utilized in imputation affect the results and their validity and reliability. The authors demonstrate the consequences of the various imputation strategy choices taken by using a real example of a two-country sample. The exploration may have significant implications to international marketing researchers and the paper offers stimulus for further research in the area.

In the spring of 1982, I published an article in Reference Services Review on marketing libraries and information services. The article covered available literature on that topic from 1970 through part of 1981, the time period immediately following Kotler and Levy's significant and frequently cited article in the January 1969 issue of the Journal of Marketing, which was first to suggest the idea of marketing nonprofit organizations. The article published here is intended to update the earlier work in RSR and will cover the literature of marketing public, academic, special, and school libraries from 1982 to the present.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Product & Brand Management is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Pricing; Promotion; Marketing research, customer behavior; Product management.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Product & Brand Management is split into ten sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Pricing; Promotion; Marketing research; Product management; Channel management; Logistics and distribution; New product development; Purchasing.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing is split into seven sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Sales management; Promotion; Product management; Marketing research/customer behavior; Sundry.