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Early in AT & T Bell Laboratories' involvement with plasma smear removal for multilayer boards, the generic problem of uniform etching over large size panels became obvious. Techniques were developed which provide a quantitative measurement of the etch uniformity. These techniques were used to evaluate the etch performance of existing reactors and as an aid in developing a better understanding of the factors which influence etch uniformity. This characterisation procedure enabled the development of new reactor geometries which greatly improved etch uniformity as compared to previously used configurations. This paper describes these steps along the road to uniform etching of printed circuit boards.

Marketers frequently lament the lack of representation of marketing in the boardroom and the short tenure of CMOs. The most common explanations offered are that marketing is not perceived as a strategic discipline and that marketers do not demonstrate a strong enough understanding of how the business makes money.

Financial accounting is how “score is kept” in terms of business performance. It is, therefore, in the self-interest of marketers to become familiar with financial reporting. Doing so will allow them to understand how marketing activities are recorded. In addition, academic researchers need to understand the meaning of the financial measures that they often use as the metrics of success when researching marketing strategy questions.

This is especially important since financial reporting generally does not recognize assets created by marketing investments. In order to substantiate a claim that “brands are assets”, marketers must be able to explain how the financial accounting rules misrepresent economic reality and why managers might use a different set of principles for management reporting.

We argue that the misrepresentation of market-based assets has two forms of negative impact for marketers: external and internal. The external problems are that financial statements are not especially informative about the value of marketing for the providers of capital and do not provide a true portrait of the economic resource base of the company. The internal problems are that marketers cannot point to valuable assets that they are creating, nor can they be effectively held accountable for the way that these assets are managed given that the assets are not recorded.

We do not expect immediate radical changes in financial reporting because financial accounting rules are designed with the specific interests of the suppliers of capital (debt and equity) in mind. To influence financial accounting developments, such as encouraging greater disclosure of marketing activity in the notes to the published accounts, marketers must be able to communicate in language understood by accountants and the current users of financial accounts. To aid this we provide guidance for marketers on the purpose and practices of accounting. We also discuss how academic marketing researchers might wish to adjust financial accounting data to capitalize a proportion of marketing expenses for companies where marketing is a primary driver of business performance.

The aim of the chapter is to evaluate the concept of corporate parenting styles, identify missing elements in the theoretical constructs, and develop new theoretical constructs.

The chapter provides a summary of the existing literature on corporate parenting styles and uncovers the missing elements in the theoretical constructs. New theoretical constructs fill the gaps.

The chapter presents a new typology of corporate parenting style by combining corporate parents’ processes of adding value to and extracting value from subsidiaries. The five-type typology of corporate styles outlines the different levels of value addition and value extraction and various degrees of reciprocity in both processes. This chapter determines the most important factors that affect the selection of corporate parenting style. It postulates that the multinational corporation should exhibit different parenting styles toward its subsidiaries simultaneously and should be ready to amend its parenting styles to reflect changes in a subsidiary’s strategy and its motives for corporate ownership.

A new agenda for empirical studies oriented toward variability of parenting styles is proposed. Empirical tests of our propositions are needed. I encourage researchers to extend our research by considering the regional (supra-national), industry, and individual levels of analyses.

The chapter provides a more realistic view of corporate parenting styles than that found in the previous literature and outlines promising directions for further theoretical and empirical research.

Managers face the challenge of balancing resources needed to support value creation and value appropriation. In this study the authors analyze the impacts of innovation investments (i.e. value creation: VC) on advertising expenditures (i.e. value appropriation: VA), and vice versa, and verify the effects of these options on short- and long-term performance.

The effects of these two activities on short- and long-term performance were analyzed observing a panel of 4,090 companies of Standard and Poor's Compustat database from a 40-year period. The authors adopted the panel vector autoregressive (VAR) approach, using the generalized method of moments (GMM).

Although there is a trade-off between the strategic emphases on creating and appropriating value, there is also a synergy between them. The results from the impulse response functions support the argument for a virtuous business circle: companies that choose to intensify their investments in R&D tend to increase advertising expenditures, and vice versa.

Managers, rather than having to deal with a trade-off between allocating resources either on VC or VA activities, can capitalize on synergetic benefits resulting from the interaction among them.

The relationship between the VC and VA activities transcends the trade-off imposed by resource restrictions, since the interaction between them creates additional benefits afforded by the synergy of these activities.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt a customer‐centric value creation perspective to provide insights into the contribution of business orientations, especially marketing orientation and innovation orientation to the creation of customer‐centric value (customer equity and brand performance).

To undertake this examination, a model was developed and then tested to validate its applicability in the context of both developed and developing economies. The paper includes partial least squares.

The findings demonstrate that being marketing‐oriented and innovation‐oriented appears to be important in creating customers, keeping them, and increasing add‐on selling to them and rewards the firm with greater brand performance in the marketplace. Importantly, these relationships are universally held across developed and developing business environments. Interestingly, marketing orientation was found to contribute more to the creation of customer‐centric value than innovation orientation in developing business environment, whereas the opposite was found in the context of developed business environment.

The data incorporate only the subjective measures of customer‐centric value. Future studies can use financial measures to complement the self‐reporting approach used in this paper. This dual‐approach to measuring the value of customers to the firm (customer equity) and brand performance would provide additional insights into the customer‐centric marketing literature.

The findings suggest that managers should strive to develop a high level of marketing orientation and innovation orientation as two efficient ways to achieve higher levels of customer equity. They are also advised that if their firms are more effective in acquiring potential customers, retaining current customers, and enhancing add‐on selling, they see their brands perform better. Importantly, the findings also provide guidance for managers on how to allocate their resources to key business activities (e.g. marketing and innovation) in the context of international business (developing versus developed business environments).

This study contributes to customer‐centric marketing theory by enhancing understanding of the contribution of marketing and innovation to the creation of customer‐centric value in different business environments. This study also contributes to the business orientation literature by demonstrating the utility of a cultural‐behavioral approach in measuring marketing orientation and innovation orientation.

The bonding of surface mounted components to printed wiring boards (PWBs) is critical to the high yield assembly of components to the PWB. This process is one of the last steps performed in a complicated manufacturing and assembly sequence. Poor bondability at this late stage of assembly produces costly scrap. Aggressive wet‐chemical processes may succeed in cleaning the residues from the metal bonding lands, but in the process the polymeric materials that surround the land areas may be mechanically or visually damaged. Even when processing is carefully controlled during the final formation of land areas in the conformal coating, a thin residue, often invisible to the eye, can partially or fully cover the bonding land area. The residue may be extremely thin, but it inhibits bonding and is very resistant to conventional wet‐chemical cleaning methods. Plasma chemical etching is the one chemical process which can remove the residue from the metal lands and restore bondability without damaging other surfaces of the ready‐to‐assemble PWB. This paper reports examples of plasma removed residues from PWB surface mount bonding lands. The land areas are defined in photodefinable conformal coatings by conventional photolithographic techniques and have a non‐visible surface residue which inhibits the subsequent plating or soldering of the copper land. Auger analyses of the copper land surfaces prior to plasma processing show significant carbon peaks indicative of a polymeric residue. Auger analyses of the copper land surfaces following plasma processing show that the strong carbon peaks are gone.

This paper aims to examine how much importance the financial market attaches to advertising spending’s short-term productivity vis-à-vis its investment component and the impact of important contextual factors (investor mix and analyst coverage) on this trade-off.

A stochastic frontier estimation (SFE) approach is used to help disentangle advertising spending. Using a panel internal instruments model and 10,017 firm-year observations from publicly listed US companies over a 13-year period, this study relates aggregated advertising spending and disentangled advertising spending, together with important contextual factors, to Tobin’s q.

The results do not indicate an effect of aggregated advertising spending on Tobin’s q. However, after advertising spending is disentangled, results show the component with an efficient immediate revenue response to have a positive effect on Tobin’s q, whereas the effect of the remaining investment component is negative. Contextual factors moderate investors’ valuation of the components.

Findings are limited to US publicly listed firms, and are based on secondary, non-experimental data. The results imply that investors reward firms only for short-term advertising productivity, casting doubt on investors’ understanding of the long-term value of marketing.

The results confirm managers’ belief that not all money spent on advertising creates shareholder value. Managers should use the outlined SFE to benchmark their firms’ short-term advertising productivity against that of industry peer firms.

This study advances a new perspective, suggesting that advertising spending can be decomposed into two distinct parts by considering how financial market investors evaluate advertising spending. Important contextual effects on this evaluation from firms’ investor mix and analyst coverage are also shown for the first time. The findings help in reconciling conflicting prior results, and shed new light on how the financial market evaluates marketing expenditures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differences and similarities between two methods/models for estimating customer equity (CE): one using behavior-based data and one using market-based data.

Two separate analyses of the same market scenario (telecom industry) were conducted, by applying the CE estimation method from Rust et al. (2004) and the CE model from Gupta et al. (2004).

Different methods/models can produce similar estimates, which corroborates the defense of an integrated multi-method approach to evaluating CE. In addition, they each provide different benefits. The behavioral data model provides identification of CE drivers and assists in the task of marketing resource allocation, the market-based data model is simple and easy to implement and is recommended in cases when CE is used as a financial indicator.

This paper contributes to the CE literature in the following ways. First, it demonstrates the possibility of obtaining similar estimates of CE using distinct types of data and data collection procedures, and with two different estimation methods/models. Second, it confirms that either model allows firms to compute the expected market capitalization at any given time using customer and financial information. Third, it demonstrates the convergent validity of these two methods/models for estimating CE for either public or private companies, thus legitimizing the comparison of their respective CE values, regardless of the type of source data or estimation formula used.

The author aims to present a model of the brand value drivers, measured by brand equity. The goal of this research is to identify the drivers, and determine how they influence brand equity performance in the researched industry, in order to develop a more effective brand strategy.

The author studied an aggregate dataset for 739 food brands. Six predictors were controlled for (i.e. marketing investments, price, revenue, perceived quality [organic and functional] and brand ownership), while the impact of the brand equity drivers on brand value was estimated. The model was formulated and estimated using a robust OLS procedure. Several data sources have were in this study, such as market-based data from ACNielsen, as well as information and variable constructs using data from the Bureau Van Dijk Electronic Publishing AIDA financial statements database.

Results suggest that marketing investment, price, revenue, brand ownership and perceived quality are highly associated with brand equity, and consequently with a higher brand value in the food industry.

This study has only studied one industry (food), one industry segment (enriched-food) and one country (Italy).

The majority of marketing studies apply a single research approach and measures. This is the first study of brand equity that combines consumer, financial and marketing approaches. The model contributes to theory and practice in terms of suggesting which business drivers create brand value and what type of brand strategy a firm can apply in order to create brand value.