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This industry viewpoint paper provides a comprehensive overview and critical viewpoint on the use of collectable toy premiums via instant reward programs (IRP) within the retail industry as a marketing tool.

This paper draws upon the uses of a “free” collectable toy premium promotion with a fixed purchase spend (via an IRP) in the supermarket industry as a marketing instrument to increase customer basket spend and repeat visits. Reflections on the recent use of toy premiums by Australian supermarket retailers are also utilised to highlight the ingredients for a successful promotion but also the controversies associated with such promotions.

One of the key findings suggest that the role of toy premiums is a successful marketing tool by retailers to increase customer total basket spending. However, notable points of caution regarding offering IRPs incorporating collectable toy premiums promotions are established, including environmental concerns and the social, ethical dilemma as to whether these promotions are indirectly targeted at children rather than adult consumers.

The findings have important implications for retailers to attract customer attention, increased market spend and repeat purchases through a desired collectable premium promotion (via an IRP).

This is the first paper to critically review the usage of collectable toy premiums within the supermarket retail industry.

Children are familiar with retail outlets (especially supermarkets) and the reality of shopping from an increasingly early age. In turn, retailers are actively engaging this young market, targeting them through various promotional strategies. One popular strategy adopted by grocery retailers is giveaway collectible set items. The purpose of this paper is to question the ethicality of such campaigns, within the framework of vulnerable consumers by examining children’s opinions of the campaigns and the supermarkets who run them, and the drivers of children’s involvement in the campaigns.

Qualitative focus groups were employed with 67 children aged five to ten years. Focus groups were made up of children in similar age groups to cluster responses by age and allow for comparisons. Thematic analysis was undertaken and responses were coded into themes.

Children were initially driven to collect through promotional advertising or because a third party offered them a collectible. The drivers for subsequent collecting differed between age groups, with younger children more focussed on themes around play and older children (seven and above) collecting through habit, because it was a craze amongst their peers and therefore the collections became items of social currency. Children’s perceptions of the supermarkets motivations also differed by age. Younger children thought supermarkets gave the collectibles away as “gifts” for altruistic reasons. The older children articulated a clear understanding of the economic motives of the organisation including: to attract children to their stores, to encourage pester power and to increase revenue by encouraging customers to buy more. The older children questioned the ethics of the collectible campaigns, referring to them as scams.

The findings extend the important discussion on the nature of children’s vulnerability to advertising by showing that the children’s vulnerability stretches beyond their ability to understand advertising intent. Despite older children in the present study being cognisant of retailers’ intentions they were still vulnerable to the scheme; the embeddedness of the scheme in the social lives of the children meant they lacked agency to opt out of it. Further, the finding that the scheme transcended boundaries in the children’s lives, for instance, being associated with social currency at school, highlights the potential negative impact such schemes can have on the well-being of children.

Until now, research has investigated the motivations that children have to collect, but previous studies have focussed on collections which have been determined by the children. This paper presents the opinions and perceptions of the children who are directly targeted by commercial organisations to collect and raises concerns around the ethicality of such schemes.

This paper aims to examine how an innovative concept was introduced to a new market segment through varied marketing techniques.

Newspapers from 1958 were reviewed to assess the impact of a chocolate company advertising campaign targeting children. The paper examines the interpretation of the campaign message and the information contained in an album of collectable cards.

Parents leave the teaching role in the hands of companies when they do not clearly understand new technologies such as nuclear energy. Companies can take advantage of what governments introduce into the market to increase their sales.

The originality of the paper lies in the examination of collectable cards as a means of researching marketing history and contributes to the study of market segmentation, particularly in the case of children, focussing on nuclear energy.

Collecting behaviour is a special type of consumption, which consists of several traits, such as “completion”, “perfection”, “caring” and “cooperation”. The purpose of this study is to shed light on this complex consumption behaviour, by effectively developing an empirical typology of collectors and explaining their motivation to engage in collecting.

In total, 208 questionnaires were collected among Thai collectors. A set-theoretic comparative approach was implemented – namely, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The value of the proposed approach over conventional correlational methods, is illustrated through an examination of a set of relevant research propositions.

The study develops an empirical typology of collectors, on the basis of the various collecting behaviour traits. It has been suggested that different combinations of motives are sufficient for identifying collector types accurately, and the proposed typology is stable and generalizable across collectors of different demographic characteristics. Specifically, “expert professionals” are mainly driven by adventure and social motives, while the role of idea motive is crucial for “introvert focusers”. Adventure and social motives are necessary conditions for “extrovert altruists”, while gratification has a deleterious role. The presence of social motive is necessary for “hobbyists”, while the absence of value motive is also required.

The brand collectible market is booming, and the collectibles can be a strategy for brands to maintain existing users and reinforce loyalty levels. Global brands, such as Swatch and Coca-Cola, have been acquired for collection rather than typical consumption purposes. Marketers and brand managers should therefore monitor the motivation behind this complex consumption behaviour. The mosaic of motives to engage in collecting behaviour varies across different types of collectors, and therefore specifically tailored strategies are proposed.

The study tackles the lack of literature specifically focussing on collecting behaviour in relation to motivation. This is the first attempt to empirically derive a collectors’ typology and provide a nuanced coverage of how financial and nonfinancial (hedonic) motives and their combinations affect different collector types.

The primary and secondary market activity in collectible sportscards has evolved into that of a primitive, but organised financial market. This report reviews some aspects of the collectible sportscard market. The objective of the report is to introduce the sportscard investment medium to finance professionals, including those interested in the research potential of the market. The report includes an empirical analysis of the performance of some selected sportscard portfolio strategies for the period between March 1988 and December 1993. Sportscard collecting has evolved from an adolescent hobby of the 1950s into an active national market, estimated to involve approximately $5 billion and 3 million persons and served by a network of dealers and price information suppliers. The evolution of the sportscard market into its current state is described in this presentation. The description includes an empirical analysis of the performance of some selected sportscard portfolio strategies for the period between March 1988 and December 1993. The objective of the report is to provide information to those considering collectible sportscards as an investment medium and to those who might be interested in conducting financial research with collectible sportscard pricing data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine long‐term return of new China collectible stamps after their issuance and how stamp characteristics affect the return.

The authors construct a model to analyze the determinants of stamps' long‐term return and test their hypotheses empirically in a sample of 1,201 sets of Chinese collectible stamps issued between 1949 and 2008.

The paper finds Chinese stamps provide decent returns for collectors in terms of exceeding comparable one‐year savings rates. Among factors affecting annual excess returns of Chinese stamps, variables related to usage are the most important; quantity issued has significantly negative impact on returns of early stamps, but its coefficient has weak economic implications and it is not significant for BianNian stamps issued in more recent years. In general, variables related to topic have weak influence on stamp returns, but the topics about the most significant events of China in recent years have huge impact on stamp returns; in addition, variables related to design and printing can influence stamp returns to some extent.

Overall, the results reveal that variables related to usage are the most important determinants of long‐term stamp return.

There have been fierce disputes among stamp collectors about how stamp features affect returns. Nevertheless, no systematic empirical studies exist about the issue. This paper sheds light on the disputes by providing the first piece of empirical evidence.

Moreover, existing studies of stamps treat them as one asset, but often ignore different characteristics within the group. This paper systematically investigates the influence of stamp characteristics to stamp return, and thus fills the caveat in the literature.

This article examines the applications of RFID technology in the world of sport. It provides the reader with an overview of RFID and its uses in business. The article looks at how RFID can be employed in the games themselves, in sports venues and in sports memorabilia as a means of enhancing the value, enjoyment and security of sports. The author concludes by discussing the importance of this technology for sports marketing and research.

This study provides a performance analysis of using a rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) to supply water for toilet flushing and garden watering, with reference to a student accommodation hall in the University of Nottingham Malaysia in Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia. Three different models were used in this analysis, in which the monthly analysis was based on the mass-balance approach, while the daily analysis was based on the yield before spillage and yield after spillage algorithms to define the tank release rule based on different sizes of storage tank (i.e. 3, 5, 7 and 10 m³). The performances of the various storage tanks were presented for water saving and reliability. The monthly analysis found promising results of collectable water on the demand, in which the average reliability is higher than 50%. Also, the daily water balance simulation verified the results from the monthly analysis. A cost analysis was performed that the best storage rainwater harvesting tank size was 10 m³ for the combined demand of toilet flushing and garden watering. Based on the findings, the proposed implementation of RWHS in the chosen campus university was reliable, not only environmentally beneficial but also economically viable.