Marketing

Web 2.0 provides gathering places for internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and "listen" to what customers write about their and the competitors' products. Our objective is to convert the user-generated content to market structures and competitive landscape insights.

Mad Men depicts advertising agency life as it was decades ago. The practice of creative meetings, like our culture, has evolved. But the aims, conflicts, displays, and compromises in advertising meetings are not markedly different than they were in the 1960s. This article provides some observations regarding creative meetings based on participant observation along with Mad Men examples.

An fMRI study was conducted with unfamiliar and familiar (strong and weak) brands to assess linguistic encoding and retrieval processes, and the use of declarative and experiential information, in brand evaluations. As expected, activations in brain areas associated with linguistic encoding were higher for unfamiliar brands, but activations in brain areas associated with information retrieval were higher for strong brands. Interestingly, weak brands were engaged simultaneously in both processes.

Every business knows that the best customer is a happy customer. They return again and again, bring their friends and family, and deliver tons of free advertising via word of mouth and social media. But in order to grow that loyal base, you must be keenly aware of your customers' needs and preferences. Drawing on the latest research in the exploding field of positive psychology, Columbia Business School professor Bernd Schmitt offers three unique approaches any business can use to turning a casual customer into a committed fan:

This article presents a consumer-psychology model of brands that integrates empirical studies and individual constructs (such as brand categorization, brand affect, brand personality, brand symbolism and brand attachment, among others) into a comprehensive framework. The model distinguishes three levels of consumer engagement (object-centered, self-centered and social) and five processes (identifying, experiencing, integrating, signifying and connecting). Pertinent psychological constructs and empirical findings are presented for the constructs within each process.

We develop and test an incentive-compatible Conjoint Poker (CP) game. The preference data collected in the context of this game are comparable to incentive-compatible choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis data. We develop a statistical efficiency measure and an algorithm to construct efficient CP designs. We compare incentive-compatible CP to incentive-compatible CBC in a series of three experiments (one online study and two eye-tracking studies). Our results suggest that CP induces respondents to consider more of the profile-related information presented to them compared with CBC.

What is business anthropology and what should it be in the future? My reflections are based upon my reading of others’ work and my own experience as an observant participant in marketing research and advertising. My current practice is that of a Principal at a marketing research firm, with which I have been affiliated since 2006. For 25 years prior, I was an advertising executive, working in the areas of account management and account planning.

Examining theory and practice, Advertising and Anthropology is a lively and important contribution to the study of organizational culture, consumption practices, marketing to consumers and the production of creativity in corporate settings. The chapters reflect the authors' extensive lived experience as professionals in the advertising business and marketing research industry. Essays analyze internal agency and client meetings, competitive pressures and professional relationships and include multiple case studies.