Laurent Flores

The branding Impact of Brand Websites: Do newsletters and consumer magazines have a moderating role?

ABSTRACT The internet offers both growth and loyalty opportunities for brands. To this end, in recent years, companies have accelerated the development of their websites, including richer and more interactive content as well as relationship tools such as email newsletter and consumer magazines. Using the example of a leading French manufacturers website, the present research demonstrates that visitors satisfied with their overall website experience are more inclined to revisit and recommend the site and in turn develop more positive attitudes toward the brand as well as higher purchase intent. These relations are stronger for consumers that are members of the website email newsletter program and those that receive the brand consumer magazine.

Creating technology‐based merchandising ideas for hair coloring through weak signals, concept optimization and mind‐set segmentation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a concept‐response segmentation used to identify different customer “mind‐sets”. Based on this segmentation, in a merchandising situation, one can interact with the customer to identify the segment to which the customer belongs and in turn offer the proper product and merchandising.Design/methodology/approach – The study deals with the creation of new hair products, using both ideation by brand Delphi™ and by experimental design of ideas with conjoint measurement (IdeaMap.Net). It ends with the creation of a merchandising product for hair coloring based on concept segmentation. First the internet was used to facilitate the acquisition and prioritization of new ideas. Then the experimental design of ideas was used to identify which perform well in the body of test concepts.Findings – Three segments were identified: Segment 1 (54 percent) wants easy to use, high technology, and reliable products. Segment 2 (25 percent) wants to give, and get information ...

Selecting ideas for new product development : comparison of monadic test and adaptive concept screening under the G theory framework

Purpose – New product concept screening, i.e., selecting a few viable innovative concepts from numerous candidates, involves high stakes and is complicated and resource intensive. Over the years, there has been heated debate about the relative merit of monadic (sequential) tests vs that of preference-based paired comparisons. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This study proposes the Generalizability Theory as a framework to assess and compare the performance of traditional monadic test with the Adaptive Concept Screening (ACS) in terms of their testing results and psychometric quality. Findings – Using 50 yogurt concepts and two independent groups of respondents, the results indicate that ACS requires a significant smaller sample of respondents to achieve a necessary minimum G coefficient for decision making. Moreover, ACS offers a more discriminating and reliable solution for early stage concept screening as manifested by a higher G coefficient and greater percentage o...

Arthritis Websites — Deconstructing the Messages to Identify Strong versus Weak Performers

The study shows how the medical marketer can understand the current market and jumpstart creativity through a deconstruction exercise. That is followed by conjoint measurement, which identifies strengths and weaknesses of the deconstructed elements. Text elements were created by deconstructing messages appearing in current websites, thus providing a competitive assessment. Visual elements were taken from appropriate stock photographs. Respondents evaluated short concepts created by systematically varying subsets of text and visual elements dealing with arthritis. On a total panel level, no elements performed very well or very poorly. Greater differentiation and patterns emerged from segmentation based upon the pattern of utility values. Four concept response segments emerged: Segment 1 (interested but not differentiating beyond basic interest), Segment 2 (seeking a healthy life), Segment 3 (seeking a social and support network), and Segment 4 (seeking to treat an actual condition). Segments 3 and 4 both s...