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The purpose of this paper is to establish whether consumer focus groups can generate reliable data when used as a consumer research input to copy/graphic design development for retail food packaging.

Six focus groups of six consumers each (n=36) were used to assess four concept designs for a manuka honey cordial product. The focus groups were used to rank the design concepts and to generate specific consumer-driven recommendations to develop/improve each of the designs. A new version of each design was then developed using these recommendations. The eight designs (four original and four improved) were tested together, using a quantitative field experiment at a supermarket in the area from which the focus group sample was drawn.

The results showed that the focus group rankings of the four original designs were largely predictive of the outcomes of the field trial. The improved designs also consistently outperformed their original equivalents in the field trials. Very large improvements were recorded with respect to the weaker original designs.

The research only studied a single product type. However, the results demonstrate that focus group outcomes can be extended onto larger populations if the focus group sample is large enough.

These results support the use of consumer focus groups as a research input to package graphic design development.

Focus groups are used regularly in research where the applicability of their results to larger populations is assumed. This is the first research to formally test that assumption.

This paper examines the attitudes of the New Zealand wine industry towards the proposed New Zealand ‘Registered Origin’ appellation policy. Existing appellations are reviewed, including the motives for their establishment, their performance, and their relationship with the marketing activities of wine producers. The review concludes that existing appellations could be divided into two groups, the ‘active’ appellations of the Old World, and the ‘passive’ appellations of the New World. Passive appellations make assumptions as to industry behaviour. These assumptions are identified. These assumptions have to be both understood and supported by an industry if they are to adequately support a passive appellation policy. An interview survey of New Zealand wine producers examines the industry's understanding of the proposed passive appellation. The results suggest that the level of understanding is low, at around 25% of those interviewed, which has negative implications for the proposed appellation.

This paper aims to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of experimental design and development in academic marketing since 1950.

The paper does so by taking one experimental design, Latin Square, and describing its history and development within academic marketing in detail.

The Latin Square is a powerful experimental technique that first rose to prominence in agriculture in the 1920s and has remained a key tool in this discipline ever since. The technique was introduced into marketing in 1953, and enjoyed a period of great influence and popularity until 1973, when it abruptly disappeared from the publications of the discipline. Careful investigation of the research record of this period revealed that its demise was due to increasingly poor application method that led to compromised results, combined with an erroneous assignation of superior capabilities to full and fractional factorials that occurred at approximately the same time.

Two major implications arise from these findings. First, the discipline has incorrectly retired a tool that is still unmatched in some key research situations. Second, the errors that led to the technique's demise led to the rise of other techniques that do not have the capabilities that many researchers appear to think they have.

This is the first longitudinal historical case study of a single research technique that has appeared in print in a major journal, and it reveals aspects of the discipline's approach to science that could not have been illustrated in any other way.

This purpose of this paper is to present a technique for measuring the impact of package graphic designs on consumer choice and purchase intentions. The technique allows several proposed graphic designs for the same product to be compared, both with one another and with their immediate competitors up to a maximum of eight designs.

The approach is based upon a fractionally replicated Latin square design with two sets of four package graphic designs and five consumer groups as the independent variables. The dependent variable is consumer choice.

Three fully worked examples of the test are presented. The results show that graphic design has a massive and statistically significant impact on consumer choice, ceteris paribus. The test is able to discriminate strongly between package graphic designs that only apparently differ in detail.

The results show that graphic design has a significant impact upon consumer choice, but it also shows that this impact is highly product and situation specific. This may have considerable implications for any claimed wider “empirical generalisations” relating to the impact of graphic designs, or components thereof, on food consumer choice.

The methodology presented allows graphic designs to be tested before they enter the marketplace. It replaces opinion with a reliable and quantifiable output that can be easily interfaced with econometric and market share models that have been developed within the choice modelling literature.

This appears to be the first paper to appear within the literature that presents a reliable, simple and easily administered test that is capable of quantifying the performance of alternative graphic designs on food packaging.

This paper seeks to examine long‐term trends in retailer and manufacturer brand shares in grocery product categories, and to relate these trends to retailer category strategy with regard to these two types of brand.

The study makes use of secondary data and empirical materials from the literature to establish and explain the trends in four countries: the UK, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Additionally, interview data are used to develop issues.

The results indicate the existence of long‐term equilibrium points between the shares of manufacturer brands and retailer brands in grocery product categories in the USA, New Zealand and Australia. Only the UK shows strong growth of retailer brands in line with retailer consolidation and power, but this trend is arrested, reversed and brought to equilibrium in 2001.

The data presented are restricted to four major English‐speaking economies between 1992 and 2005. The data are also consolidated national data. Equilibria within individual categories will vary due to variations in category structure and pace of innovation.

This research indicates that major retailers deploy manufacturer brands to drive the categories via innovation and retailer brands to generate additional profit for the retailers. Therefore manufacturer brands do have a long‐term future. Individual manufacturer brands are likely to be assessed by the retailer primarily on this driving capability, and on the manufacturers' ongoing investment in the capacity to innovate that supports it.

The paper provides a fresh perspective of looking at retailer and manufacturer strategy via brand share trends.

Discusses the targeting and reporting of commercial marketing research. The treatment of this critical stage of the research process is severely underrepresented in the academic marketing literature and in marketing research texts. Six prerequisites for effective targeting and reporting are identified. An extended model of the research process, incorporating the tasks that are essential for targeting and reporting is developed. The model and the six prerequisites are then used as the basis for the development of an operational procedure that allows a targeted set of research hypotheses to be developed from a decision problem, together with a formal record of the logical links between them. The importance of these written links for effective decision support, and the use of these links in the research reporting process, is also discussed.

This study aims to identify people’s perceptions of what behaviourally differentiates effective managers from ineffective managers within a South Korean (SK) public sector organization, and the extent to which the findings are similar or different to those of an equivalent previous study in the SK private sector.

Adopting the “pragmatic approach” and assuming a post-positivist ontology and constructivist–interpretivist epistemology, examples of “effective” and “ineffective” managerial behaviour were collected from managers and non-managerial employees in an SK central government Ministry using the critical incident technique. The collected critical incidents were coded, classified and reduced to a smaller number of behavioural categories. These were then compared against equivalent findings from a previous SK private sector replication study using open, axial and selective coding to identify generic behavioural criteria (GBCs)

High degrees of convergence point towards the emergence of a “two-factor” SK behavioural taxonomy of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness comprised of positive (n = 11) and negative (n = 4) GBCs of effective and ineffective managerial behaviour.

The GBCs constituting the deduced SK behavioural taxonomy could be used by HRD practitioners to critically evaluate the efficacy of extant management and leadership development (MLD) programmes, or to inform/shape the creation of new MLD programmes. Additionally, they could be used by other HR professionals to critically evaluate the relevance and efficacy of the assessment criteria used for existing management selection, 360-degree feedback and formal performance appraisal systems.

The emergence of an SK behavioural taxonomy through Type 3 (emic-as-emic) and Type 4 (emic-and-etic) indigenous research is a rare example of Eastern mid-range theory development.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a “partnership‐research” study of effective and ineffective managerial behaviour within the “local government” setting of the Wolverhampton City Council Social Care Department, and to describe how the research supports and challenges the organisation's existing “leadership and management behavioural competency framework”. Additionally, it reveals and discusses the extent to which the results are consistent with equivalent and comparable findings from an equivalent study within a “central government” department.

Concrete examples of effective and ineffective managerial behaviour were collected using the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) of Flanagan, and the obtained data were analysed using content and thematic analytic methods.

The paper finds that from a total of 218 usable critical incidents 50 discrete behavioural items were identified, of which 25 were examples of “effective” and 25 of “ineffective” behaviour. A comparison against equivalent findings from the “central government” study revealed high degrees of overlap with 92 per cent of the “effective” and 96 per cent of the “ineffective” behavioural items being the same as, similar to, or containing some congruence of meaning.

Although the number of CIT informants (n=40) falls at the top end of the typical sample range for qualitative research, it is possible that data collection “saturation” has not been reached. Whereas the subject of the present “local government” study was first line and middle managers, the focus of the compared “central government” study also included senior managers.

The results of this replica research lend additional empirical support to those who believe in “generic” and “universalistic “ explanations of managerial and leadership effectiveness.

This paper aims to report the results of a replication study of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness within a Romanian public sector hospital, and to discuss the extent to which they are similar to and different from findings from equivalent studies carried out in two British NHS Trust hospitals.

Concrete examples (critical incidents) of effective and ineffective managerial behaviour were collected using Flanagan's critical incident technique (CIT). The critical incidents were content analyzed to identify a smaller number of behavioural statements (BSs). These were then compared and contrasted against two British BS data sets using realist qualitative analytic methods, and deductively coded and sorted into extant behavioural categories.

A total of 57 BSs were identified of which 30 were examples of effective and 27 of least effective/ineffective managerial behaviour. The multi‐case/cross‐nation comparative analysis revealed high degrees of commonality and relative generalization between the Romanian and British findings.

Data saturation may not have been achieved during the CIT collection phase of the study. The relevance and transferability of the findings to other public sector hospitals in Romania have yet to be demonstrated empirically. The results have potential as “best evidence” to inform and shape “evidence‐based HRD” initiatives designed to train and develop effective managers and leaders within the health services sector of Romania and the United Kingdom.

The study is a rare example of indigenous managerial behaviour research in a non‐Anglo country. The results lend strong empirical support for universalistic explanations of the nature of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness.

The concept of managers assuming developmental roles such as coaches and learning facilitators has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, despite the growing body of expert opinion that suggests that coaching is an essential core activity of everyday management and leadership, the literature base remains largely atheoretical and devoid of empirical research. While there is some consensus about what effective coaching looks like, little if any empirical research has examined ineffective coaching behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to compare the empirical findings from three separately conducted studies to derive a comprehensive understanding of the ineffective behaviours associated with managerial coaching.

The current study adopted a cross‐national “etic” methodology based on the empirical findings generated by three previously conducted and purposefully selected “emic” studies. Drawing on Berry's and Lyons and Chryssochoous' “emic‐etic” approach and cross‐cultural comparisons, the researchers employed Guba and Lincoln's file card approach to analyze and compare the three behavioral datasets of the previously conducted studies.

The findings from this cross‐national comparative “etic” study revealed that the vast majority of ineffective coaching behaviours previously identified in the emic studies were held in common with each other. The predominant ineffective behaviours included using an autocratic, directive, controlling or dictatorial style, ineffective communication and dissemination of information, and inappropriate behaviours and approaches to working with employees. Of the 17 ineffective behaviours that were compared only three were not held in common.

Limitations associated with this cross‐national study included minor variations in the use of data collection approaches and samples of managers in the previously conducted emic studies.

The ineffective managerial coaching behaviours derived from the cross‐national comparisons can be integrated as diagnostic tools into coaching training programmes and management and leadership development programmes to improve the practice of managerial coaching. They can also be used to increase managers' awareness of the behaviours that impede their coaching interventions with their respective employees.

The literature base on coaching in general and managerial coaching in particular has been criticized for not being research‐informed and evidence‐based, but rather predominantly practice‐driven and guru‐led. The findings from the current cross‐national etic study not only add to a sparse base of empirical research on managerial coaching, but also illuminate an underdeveloped area, namely that of ineffective managerial coaching practice. Furthermore, the findings provide a foundation on which to compare and contrast future empirical research that may be conducted on managerial coaching behaviours.