Chiara Mauri

Card loyalty. A new emerging issue in grocery retailing

In the 1990s all the largest grocery retailers have introduced loyalty cards with the specific goal of acquiring consumer knowledge. The use of loyalty cards as a knowledge tool has become so critical that retailers offer customers rewards in return for card subscription and continuous use, because knowledge accumulates only if consumers keep on using the cards they have subscribed. These cards have opened a rich debate in marketing literature, which is still going on. All the analyses of card data have however assumed that consumers are card loyal, that is they use the card they have subscribed. Is card ownership and use tangible evidence of consumer loyalty? The paper offers a framework for testing the feasibility of this fundamental assumption. The framework is applied to the loyalty card database of an Italian supermarket to answer three questions: 1. Who are the heaviest users of the card? 2. Is their shopping behavior different from that of light users? 3. Who are the key cardholders? Answer Tree (SPSS package) is the technique used to operate the empirical analysis.

An empirical study of consumer behavior related to private labels and national brand promotions

One day while in the store, Bernard grabs his usual Dominicks cream cheese off the shelf. I notice and point out that the national brand of Philadelphia cream cheese is on sale and less expensive. Bernard looks at the two products and actually hesitates for a while to switch to the national brand. His hesitation makes it clear that his preference is not based solely on price. (Chang Coupland 2005, 115). Recent research has proved the existence of interesting and significant interactions between consumer purchase behavior related to national brand promotions and private labels, traditionally investigated as separate phenomena. Following this path, our work investigates the behavior of consumers concerning the purchase of private labels and the purchase of national brands sold on monetary and non-monetary promotions. The empirical research has been conducted in Italy, a country with a relatively low, but increasing, penetration of private labels. A sample of consumers has been interviewed in person, and data were analyzed in three steps. First, a principal component analysis was run on the three behaviors of interest and their antecedent variables. Second, factors relative to the antecedents were regressed on the factors relative to the dependent variables. Finally, a cluster analysis was operated on the factors related to the three dependent variables to segment consumers. The cluster analysis shows four segments that can be grouped in two macro-segments: consumers who use and who do not use private labels. Since the second macro-segment is larger than the first (56% vs. 44%), retailers who want to improve the performance of their brands could work on their penetration, trying to attract the 56% of consumers who do not use them. As these consumers use sales promotions, monetary and non-monetary, retailers could develop original promotional strategies, specifically targeted to each segment. Avenues for future research include a multi-country survey and separate investigations of individual promotion techniques, which have shown very distinctive characteristics.

The employability of marketing graduates in the era of digitalisation and globalisation

Disruptions and challenges generated by increasing levels of digitalisation and globalisation are having a profound impact on the labour market and on career opportunities available to marketing graduates. This new paradigm crosses different industries and traditional marketing professions and stimulates the debate around the job readiness and employability of graduates. This study provides insights into the nature of this phenomenon by comparing firms’ requirements to the education programs offered by Italian universities at post-graduate level. By exploring the topic of marketing graduate employability, this study provides key recommendations for universities to be at the forefront of producing graduates equipped with the right skillset to start their career in the marketing function.

Place branding: a cross-road between academics of many disciplines and practitioners. Call for "a" articles written by marketing academicians!

branding literature, both published in 2002: the book Destination Branding, edited by Morgan, Pritchard and Pride, and the special issue “Nation Branding” of the Journal of Brand Management (vol. 9, issue 4). The authors of the first book are two academicians and one practitioner (Pride); the editor of the special issue, who is neither properly a practitioner (being qualified as “one of the UK’s best-known international marketing thinkers”, p.1) nor an academician, writes in his Foreword: “To be plunged back in the world of academia after nearly 18 years in the world of ‘practice’ has reminded me sharply of both its attractions and its limitations”. Of the nineteen contributors to the special issue, roughly half are academicians, many are practitioners, a few are politicians (one is a minister); of the academicians, approximately half are professors of marketing, while the others work in history, in arts, in tourism. Actually, the topic was anticipated almost ten years before 2002, when in 1993 two books were published: Marketing places: Attracting Investment, Industry, And Tourism To Cities, States and Nations, written by Kotler et al., and Product-Country Images: Impact and Role in International Marketing, edited by Papadoupoulos and Heslop. The fact that Kotler appears as a contributor on the topic is in itself a clear signal that place marketing and branding are significant fields, and had already developed a body of knowledge that could be packaged in a book for larger dissemination1. PLACE BRANDING: A CROSS-ROAD BETWEEN ACADEMICS OF MANY DISCIPLINES AND PRACTITIONERS. CALL FOR “A” ARTICLES WRITTEN BY MARKETING ACADEMICIANS!

I bambini e le marche. "Per vincere, emozionarsi, lievitare nell'aria, perché hanno un'anima"

Da decenni il dibattito sui bambini, la pubblicita e le marche coinvolge studiosi, operatori politici, responsabili di istituzioni educative e sociali. Nuove indagini ampliano continuamente l’orizzonte di conoscenza e rivelano aspetti inattesi che stimolano la ricerca scientifica a rivedere i paradigmi dominanti e a sviluppare metodi di studio a misura di bambino. In questo articolo gli autori esplorano come i bambini ri-elaborano e commentano la pubblicita delle marche che amano di piu. L’analisi empirica di 28 collage realizzati da gruppi di bambini rivela che i bambini hanno una chiara consapevolezza e persino una preferenza per i significati simbolici delle marche e della pubblicita, aprendo la strada per una riflessione piu critica sul fenomeno.