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Introduction In his quest to maintain or gain market share, the manufacturer of branded goods makes various assumptions about potential customers, using his current knowledge to picture who they are and how they can be reached cost‐effectively. In essence, he builds on the socio‐demographic characteristics and assumes that people of a particular profile will respond to image, price, point‐of‐sale material, competitions or bargain offers. His decision is made and implemented and, provided the outcome is satisfactory, it is taken that the assumptions are correct. If the market reacts in an unexpected way, he deems that perhaps there were other variables which affected behaviour—or perhaps that his judgement was wrong—in which event he is apt to try another tack to see if that will produce the desired response. He works best on experience and rationalisation, believing that his inadequate knowledge of the market‐place is unavoidable and that he is doing the best he can in the circumstances.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.