Marketing

Marketing research and advertising strategic planning offer viable and financially attractive career options for anthropologists because many businesses seek deep understandings of consumer lifestyles and brand use. As professionally trained anthropologists operating in the corporate world, we see a bright future for anthropologists, but we believe that there are merits in broadening the typical anthropological approach to incorporate additional theory and methods from other social and behavioral sciences, particularly psychology.

Consumers learn quality of many durable products through word-of-mouth information while firms launch new and improved products frequently in these markets. This paper examines firm incentives to invest in R&D to compete for patents in markets where consumers rely on word-of-mouth information and have expectations about the new products before launch. When its loss due to a possible entry is above a threshold, an incumbent has more incentives than a potential entrant to invest in R&D for patents.

The silver lining effect predicts that segregating a small gain from a larger loss results in greater psychological value than does integrating them into a smaller loss. Using a generic prospect theory value function, we formalize this effect and derive conditions under which it should occur. We show analytically that if the gain is smaller than a certain threshold, segregation is optimal. This threshold increases with the size of the loss and decreases with the degree of loss aversion of the decision maker.

As high-tech markets mature, replacement purchases inevitably become the dominant proportion of sales. Despite the clear importance of replacement, little work examines the separate roles of adoption and replacement. The analysis is complicated by the fact that a consumer's decision to replace a product is dynamic because high-tech markets undergo both rapid improvements in quality and falling prices.

Long-term brand value depends on how well a firm understands and recognises the potential of a brand, as well as how well a firm capitalises on that brand potential in the marketplace. Realising this potential, in turn, depends on maximising long-term brand persistence and growth. Brand persistence comes from current customers maintaining their spending on the brand; brand growth results from current customers increasing their spending and from new customers being attracted to the brand in the future.

Health is a major component of well-being and quality of life (QOL) and an increasingly costly one. We examine the role of employers for promoting QOL. A meta-analysis examines the impact of fifty well-being programs, which address six health issues and use seven marketing approaches. The analysis indicates that well-being programs and marketing approaches significantly improve employee health and depend on company size and employee gender. Results, based on sixty studies, show there is significant opportunity to efficiently tailor corporate health programs.

We report the results of a large-scale field experiment performed in the context of the national launch of a new cosmetic product. The manufacturer launched this new product using three promotional tools in parallel: full-page advertisements in fashion magazines, free standing inserts (FSI) in Sunday newspapers, and a viral marketing campaign. Each promotional tool featured an identical discount coupon for the new product, but with different redemption codes across promotional tools.

Donald E. Sexton, PhD, a professor of marketing at Columbia University and president of The Arrow Group, Ltd., discusses one key way to link marketing activity to financial performance.

Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand"s design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments. The authors distinguish several experience dimensions and construct a brand experience scale that includes four dimensions: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral.