Search results

Over the past 20 years it has become increasingly clear that sound business strategy is the key to good financial performance. Senior managers in diversified companies have long known from experience that top‐notch business resources — modern equipment, state‐of‐the‐art technology, a motivated workforce — can be wasted in the service of competitively unrealistic business goals. But it is only in recent years that the principles of effective competitive strategy have begun to be soundly studied and codified.

Much of the literature on strategy focuses on the external environment of the organization; and an external orientation makes sense. Changing markets, for instance, are key drivers of strategic change. But this external focus needs balancing. If the organization is to respond to changing markets then the internal arrangements of the business need to be synchronized with external activities. The problem is that they do not always do this.

With trade amounting to more than US$400bn, counterfeiting is already affecting many successful brands. Often, consumers are deceived into buying fake products due to the visual similarity between fake and original brand logos. This paper aims to explore the varying forms of fraudulent imitation of original brand logotypes (operationalized at the level of logotype transposition), which can aid in the detection of a counterfeit brand.

Across two studies, this research tested how well consumers can differentiate counterfeit from original logos of well-known brands both explicitly and implicitly. Seven popular brand logos were altered to create different levels of visual dissimilarity and participants were required to discriminate the logos as fake or genuine.

Results demonstrate that although consumers can explicitly discriminate fake logos with a high degree of accuracy, the same is not true under conditions in which logos are presented very briefly (tapping participants’ implicit or automatic logo recognition capabilities), except when the first and last letters of the logotype are substituted.

A large body of research on counterfeit trade focuses on the individual or cross-cultural differences behind the prevalence of counterfeit trade. There is limited research exploring the ability of a consumer to correctly identify a fake logo, based on its varying similarity with the original logotype; this paper addresses this gap. Given that many of the purchase decisions are often made automatically, identifying key implicit differentiators that can help a consumer recognize a fake logo should be informative to both practitioners and academics.

To identify ways for business managers to reduce consumer complicity with counterfeit products by better aligning their actions with consumer beliefs of complicity.

A mall intercept methodology was used to interview 54 US and 48 Brazilian business managers' understandings of consumer complicity with counterfeit products. A parallel web survey containing the questions in the interviews was used to assess 401 US and 390 Brazilian consumers' perceptions of what is important to them in determining that a product is counterfeit, the reasons why they were willing to acquire counterfeits, and the perceived effectiveness of anti‐counterfeiting actions.

Managers in both countries held beliefs that ran counter to those of the complicit consumer, particularly in the areas of understanding the reasons for consumer complicity and the perceived effectiveness of anti‐counterfeiting actions to reduce that complicity. Several anti‐counterfeiting actions considered to be of little use by managers were reported to be important by consumers regarding their intended complicity.

As the different motivations of consumer complicity with counterfeit products in different country markets become better known, managers can reduce their loss of business to counterfeiters by directly targeting those factors each country's consumers believe affect their complicity.

Comparing manager and consumer views of complicity with counterfeit products and the anti‐counterfeiting actions that can reduce that complicity in two country markets.

Mobile Internet technology (MIT) is an extension of the Internet beyond the static terminal of the personal computer or television. It has been forecasted that by the end of 2005, there will be almost 500 million users of mobile m‐commerce, generating more than $200 billion in revenues. Contributes to the body of knowledge on how to approach the study of MIT products. Proposes that consumer perceptions of MIT products can lead to dichotomous decision making and argues that the challenge for marketers is to harness and fit this dichotomy to the MIT product continuum through an understanding of consumer psychological and attribution factors. The overall findings indicate that technology anxiety correlates with demographic variables such as age, gender and academic qualifications. Therefore, the implications of the study are that technology product engineering and marketing should recognise the importance of: study of the psychosocial needs of technology products, human factors in engineering design which need to fit these needs; and developing product designs facilitating consumers' psychosocial needs.

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; Promotion; Product management; Marketing research.

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.

Counterfeiting is a menace in the emerging markets and many successful brands are falling prey to it. Counterfeit brands not only deceive consumers but also fuel a demand for lower priced replicas, both of which can devalue the bona-fide brand. But can consumers accurately identify a counterfeit logo? This paper aims to explore this question and examines the accuracy and speed with which a consumer can identify a counterfeit (vs original) logo.

Seven popular brand logos were altered by transposing and substituting the first and last letters of the logotypes. Consumers then classified the logos as counterfeit (vs original) across two experiments.

Participants were faster and more accurate in identifying a counterfeit logo when the first letter (vs last letter) of a logotype was manipulated, thus revealing last letter manipulations of a brand’s logotype to be more deceptive.

This paper comments only on the manipulation of logotypes but not of logo symbols. Similarly, findings may not be generalizable across languages which are read from right to left.

Counterfeit trade is already a multibillion dollar industry. Understanding the key perceptual differentiators between a counterfeit (vs original) logo can be insightful for both consumers and firms alike.

Research available on objective measures of similarities (vs dissimilarities) between counterfeit (vs original) brand logos is limited. This paper contributes by examining the ability of consumers to discriminate between counterfeit (vs original) logos at different levels of visual similarity.

The puropse of this article is to identify consumers who experience difficulty in making their buying decisions, especially in the face of variety of choice, proliferation of brand choice, small inter‐brand differences, brand counterfeiting, marketing communication overload and so on.

A questionnaire administered to 264 consumers in north Germany used a scale developed by the authors at the University of Hanover in 2002 to measure three types of difficulty in marketplace decision making. Those relate to similarity among product‐service offerings available, information overload, and marketing communications that lack clarity. Data collected were analysed by ANOVA and hierarchical cluster analysis.

ANOVA suggested that high levels of marketplace decision difficulty were characteristic of older, less well‐educated female consumers. Subsequent cluster analysis identified four distinct and meaningful consumer types, in terms of “marketplace decision difficulty” or MPDD.

The present study was restricted to a single large city in one European country, and one of the test statistics was perhaps too rigorous for useful conclusions in the case of some variables, but the findings do contain clear managerial implications and future research developments are proposed.

Marketing strategists should find it useful to understand the demographics of consumers who are likely to experience difficulty in making marketplace decisions – for instance, to segment audiences for their marketing communications, and to vary style and content accordingly.

This study offers a practical market segmentation scheme, based on demographic influences on decision‐making behaviour.

Building great products can be a reality for any company that takes the time and effort to create and execute the linkages between: winning strategy; the role of products and services; the product building blocks; and, linkages to customer needs. In fact, our research and work with clients suggests that a lack of alignment of these factors is the number one cause for the poor performance of many new products. This article defines for the reader the four winning strategy choices a company has – Product Leader, Distribution Giant, Innovation Superstar and Customer Lover and how each of these models puts a different emphasis on products and services. Once a company has selected a winning strategy, executing that strategy successfully requires adherence to the business model, including aligning product and services, customer imperatives and financial realities to that winning strategy model. Losing focus and drifting away from the chosen strategy or interspersing, for example, the product priorities from one winning strategy with the customer imperatives from another is a recipe for lackluster earnings and poor stock performance. Readers will learn how to outsmart the competition and build products that really win in the marketplace.