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The role of culture in international marketing strategies for a widely traded cultural service, television programming, is examined. The focus is on how non‐US television programme producers can exploit opportunities in the foreign marketplace by adopting a marketing approach that analyses the needs of foreign buyers and audiences in terms of the options available for segmenting the market. One approach is to identify a cross‐national segment where the producer possesses a competitive advantage. Another is to offer customised attributes desired by viewers in a major foreign market. An international coalition helps assure this. Paradoxically we find that this strategy may not always be inconsistent with standardisation.

This research paper aims to investigate detailed relationships between market selection and product positioning decisions and their associated short- and long-term product performance outcomes in the context of the music category: a cultural goods industry with high amounts of product introductions. Market selection decisions are defined by the size, competitiveness and age of market subcategories within an overall product category. Positioning decisions include where a product’s attributes are located spatially in the category (periphery versus the market center), whether a product resides within a single subcategory or spans multiple ones and what brand strategy (single versus co-branding) is used.

Data are from multiple sources for the US music industry (aka product category) from 1958 to 2019 to empirically test the hypotheses: genres (rock, blues, etc.) correspond to subcategories; artists to brands; and songs to products. Regression analyses are used.

A complex set of nuanced results are generated and reported, finding that key marketing decisions drive short-term new product success differently and frequently in opposing ways than long-term success. Launching into very new, well-established or very competitive markets leads to the strongest long-term success, despite less attractive short-run prospects. Positioning a product away from the market center and spanning subcategories similarly poses short-run challenges, but long-run returns. Brand collaborations have reverse effects. Short-run product success is found, overall, to be difficult to predict even with strong data inputs, which has substantial implications for how firms should manage portfolios of products in cultural goods industries. Long-run product success is considerably more predictable after short-run success is observed and accounted for.

While managers and firms in cultural goods industries have long relied on intuition to manage market selection and product positioning decisions, this research tests the hypothesis that objective data inputs and empirical modeling can better predict short- and long-run success of launched products. Specific insights on which song characteristics may be associated with success are found – as are more generalizable, industry-level results. In addition, by distinguishing between short- and long-run success, a more complete picture on how key decisions holistically affect product performance emerges. Many market selection and product positioning decisions have differential impacts across these two frames of reference.

This paper brings insights from accounting scholarship to the measurement and reporting challenges of metagovernance approaches to sustainable development. Where scholarship on metagovernance—the combination of market, hierarchical and network governance—proposes deductive approaches to such challenges, we contend that a historically informed “abductive” approach offers valuable insight into the realpolitik of intergovernmental frameworks.

The paper adopts a Foucauldian “archaeological–genealogical” method to investigate the inclusion of climate change as a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). It analyses more than 100 documents and texts, tracking the statement forms that crystallise prevailing truth claims across the development of climate and SDG metagovernance.

We show how the truth claims now enshrined in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change constrained the conceptualisation and operationalisation of SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The paper thereby reframes recent measurement and reporting challenges as outcomes of conceptual conflicts between the technicist emphasis of divisions within the United Nations and the truth claims enshrined in intergovernmental agreements.

This paper demonstrates how an archaeological–genealogical approach may start to address the measurement and reporting challenges facing climate and SDG metagovernance. It also highlights that the two degrees target on climate change has a manifest variability of interpretation and shows how this characteristic has become pivotal to operationalising climate metagovernance in a manner that respects the sovereignty of developing nations.

This study aims to focus on the role of niche brands in online retailer assortments and the general market positions of niche brands, no prior study has explicitly focused on if and when brick-and-mortar retailers should include niche brands in their category assortments.

The authors empirically analyze the category performance implications of focusing assortments on niche brands, at the expense of mainstream brands, in two product categories that have significant niche brand presence, namely, coffee and beer. The empirical data include sales, distribution and marketing tactical information for 50 US geographic markets from 2001–2011.

This research finds that a mainstream brand focus has a generally positive impact on category performance. However, a store’s strategic shift toward niche brands is beneficial in certain cases such as when a store has higher average prices or product form variety or when they are part of a powerful chain. The authors also find that a niche brand focus strategy is becoming increasingly viable over time for brick-and-mortar retailers.

Little is known about the parameters that might make a brick-and-mortar retailer more or less likely to pursue a niche brand focus strategy and when doing so might improve category performance. This analysis helps clarify the conditions under which a brick-and-mortar retailer may experience category level sales increases from focusing assortments on niche brands.

This paper aims to investigate how the current size and structure of a branded product portfolio impacts new product performance for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), testing the long-standing proposition that extending a firm’s brand and product portfolio too far is a dangerous proposition that may damage the market performance of the firm’s new product launches.

Aspects associated with brand size and structure that may impact new product performance are operationalized along two key dimensions: within-category (scale) and cross-category (scope). The impact of the brand’s scale and scope on the sales performance of newly commercialized products by the brand is empirically investigated in the context of FMCG. Over 2,000 new products launched in 2009 and 2010 across 31 food and non-food FMCG product categories in the USA are included in the regression-based analysis.

The authors find strong evidence that brands with broader within-category scale and cross-category scope overall are associated with more successful new product introductions, and that these influences generally are driven more by increased product trial than by repeat or persistence. The authors argue that the higher new product performance observed for more established and proliferated brands may be attributed to advantages of firm product development abilities and product acceptance by the marketplace.

The current results serve to temper the strong cautions set forth in much of the marketing literature about the dangers of overextending the firm’s brand and product portfolio. These results also suggest that future research should be conducted to further understand more nuanced implications of how best to grow the scale and scope of the firm’s brand and product portfolio.

A significant body of extant empirical evidence has shown that online customer reviews (OCRs) are important in driving organizational performance outcomes. However, it is posited in this manuscript that the relationship between OCRs and organizational performance is unlikely to be the same in all cases. This paper aims to study if niche organizations experience different performance impacts from OCR activity than mainstream organizations do.

To test the hypothesized predictions, an empirical analysis is conducted in the context of higher education in the USA, where liberal arts colleges are classified as niche organizations and research universities are classified as mainstream organizations. The regression methods are used to analyze archival data on these organizations of interest.

The first major finding is that niche organization status positively influences the relationship between OCR valence and organizational performance outcomes. Second, a large volume of OCRs is found to have a negative impact on performance outcomes for niche organizations.

The research uncovers important differences in the relationship between OCRs and organizational performance for niche and mainstream organizations. These findings add to the extant body of literature on this area of inquiry by providing further nuance to the existing arguments and empirical evidence.

This paper aims to move beyond previous investigations juxtaposing the performance of global versus domestic brands, where domestic is referred to as “localness” in the literature, conceptualizing and developing two measures of “within-country brand or product localness.” In doing so, it uses objective localness measures, rather than consumer perceptions of brand localness, as have been primarily used previously. Then, by leveraging established theory on brand authenticity and corollary literatures on brand identity and country-of-origin effects, this research develops and empirically tests key hypotheses about how these within-country, more geographically local products or brands (referred to as simply “localness” hereafter, for brevity), influence sales outcomes through increasing perceptions of brand and product authenticity.

Two empirical studies using different archival data sets are conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 focuses on new product sales from 2002 to 2011 for 31 categories of consumer packaged goods US product launches initiated in 2002–2005, whereas Study 2 investigates online consumer review and retail sales data in the US craft beer industry from 2001 to 2011. Localness is operationalized as two different objective measures: in Study 1, local distribution is measured, and in Study 2, firm headquarters denotes the geographic bounds of localness. These two measures are motivated by prior consumer perceptual studies of Locavores (consumers who strongly prefer local products), which identify that local systems of production and/or distribution are the key signals of localness. Using two measures allows the localness construct to be tested for the potential firm-side boundaries of its scope and provides two empirical measures that future researchers can leverage.

Brand (or product) localness gives performance advantages over national brands in the form of increased sales across both studies. The second study, focused on craft beer, dives more deeply into the theoretical mechanism (localness operates through increased perceptions of brand authenticity) and shows that while brand authenticity directly translates into higher sales, as anticipated, localness fully mediates this relationship. When coupled with supporting marketing tactics (high price and/or product variety), the link between localness and brand authenticity grows stronger. Local brands with low prices and/or limited product variety are deemed inauthentic by consumers, so it is important for brand managers to use marketing tactics that reinforce brand authenticity to support localness as a strategy.

Future research could extend this inquiry in a number of ways. These include combining both empirical measures of localness into a single empirical inquiry, investigating additional product categories and further integrating aspects of strategy such as market positioning and innovation strategy. Newer data could also reveal how these phenomena are continuing to evolve.

Based on this study, managers can benefit by leveraging localness as a key brand or product attribute to achieve a sales advantage, but they must do so by using marketing tactics consistent with an authentic brand positioning. Efforts to expand a brand’s geographic reach over time should likely be conducted very locally at first, before extending to regional markets and then to a global footprint. It is also posited that retail store managers can benefit from allocating some shelf space to local brand and product offerings.

This paper conceptualizes and measures localness in new ways compared to the previous literatures. It develops objective measures of within-country localness instead of using consumer perceptions of localness and/or considering domestic brands as being “local” compared to global brands; builds key linkages between concepts of localness, authenticity and sales performance; and uncovers when and how within-country localness is a key brand or product attribute associated with increased sales success.

This paper examines recent Canadian public policies intended to create a window for domestic entertainment programming on television in the face of a series of economic and technological factors which favour greater cultural integration with the American television market. These factors include the limited revenues available to the conventional public and private TV sectors, audience fragmentation through cable, and both the readily availability, and audience acceptance in English Canada, of inexpensive shows from the USA. Recent policies have focussed upon increasing the number of Canadian cable channels in a country where most people subscribe to cable; but paradoxically, public funding for the mainstay of domestic entertainment programming, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is being drastically cut. The impacts of these cuts on the Corporation’s mandate, and proposed remedies, are outlined. It is concluded that public broadcasting policies are now being determined by economic rather than cultural goals, and that the Corporation is a victim of this trend.

Based on the induction link principle for the production of an electrical signal having a linear relationship with movement, the Schaevitz linear differential transformer provides a versatile tool in the hands of transducer designers.

INTRODUCTION With the increasing importance of capital investment selection in modern business the field has attracted a large body of interest in the literature of the last two decades. It is the purpose of the survey to trace this development from the use of simple financial criteria for assessing investments to the use of more sophisticated financial measures, techniques for assessing risk in investments and finally complex models for selecting portfolios of investments.