Mark I. Alpert

A Customer-Oriented Approach for Determining Market Structures

A framework for market analysis based on customer perceptions of substitutability-in-use is presented. An empirical application in the financial/banking services market is used to illustrate that w...

Comparative Analysis of the Relative Effectiveness of One- and Two- Sided Communication for Contrasting Products

An apparatus for the hydroautomatic sprinkling of land areas with hydrants which rise and lower which comprises a cylinder whose piston is displaceable by the water from one pipeline through either a long stroke or a short stroke depending upon the engagement of a guide with a selected groove in the piston to open a gate permitting water from this line to pass into a selected one of a group of hydrants, to drive the sprinkler upwardly and permit sprinkling. When pressure from another line is admitted to the opposite side of the cylinder the gate is closed.

Fitting Branch Locations, Performance Standards, and Marketing Strategies: A Clarification

A RECENT article by C. Joseph Clawson offered a model for fitting branch locatio s, performance standards, and marketing strategies to local conditions.1 The model presented has great potential utility for financial institutions, sales quota determinations, and related applications. However, some major methodological shortcomings of the statistical analysis described in the Clawson article must first be remedied both to provide a more valid test of the model and to make more accurate determinations of the values or quotas it predicts.

Optimal Heterophily: Aid to Effective Communication

The significant conflicts which disrupt the orderly process of our lives, which inhibit the functioning of our society and the continuity of our culture are, for the most part, traceable to communications difficulties. This is not a particularly insightful observation. It has been made numerous times by numerous others. What is remarkable about the current condition of our discontent as individuals and as a society is that a knowledge of the cause of conflict is insufficient to bring about appropriate corrective actions. Perhaps the explanation for this apparent anachronism lies in the realization that communication is such a pervasive feature of society that it is taken for granted as readily as the knowledge that we are social animals. At the organizational level effective communication is essential to effective management. The efficient functioning of the business enterprise is contingent upon managements ability to foster an environment conducive to maximal individual commitment and effort toward the achievement of organizational goals. Effective communication facilitates the achievement of organizational objectives by promoting consensus, compliance and cohesion among the organizational members. Myers and Reynolds offer perhaps the most accurate assessment of the significance of communication in the context of enterprise competition:

A comparative analysis of student-teacher interpersonal similarity/dissimilarity and teaching effectiveness

AbstractInterpreting classroom teaching as an interactional process fitting the classic communication paradigm, perceived student-teacher interpersonal similarity/dissimilarity (homophily/heterophily) was explored as a possible construct for deciphering the determinants of teaching effectiveness and for gauging teaching effectiveness. Students in 20 undergraduate marketing classes (combined N = 930) provided teacher and self-profiles along 54 five-point bi-polar scales. Self- and teacher profiles were factor analyzed, yielding five factors accounting for 46 percent of total variation in image evaluations: empathy, competence, conventionality, stage presence, excitement. Five conceptual and statistical models for analyzing the relationship between perceived teacher-student homophily/heterophily along the five dimensions of interpersonal distance and teaching effectiveness were examined. The model which interpreted teaching effectiveness to be a function of students’ perceptions of teachers on the five imag...

Subject-anticipated versus experimentally-derived measures of influence: Advertising implications

Three representative communication sources were selected from thirteen pictured sources using hierarchical grouping analysis. Slides of the three sources were shown sequentially to a sample of 192 male undergraduate business students, who were asked to indicate their perception of each in terms of twenty-one image and two anticipated influence (believability and convincingness) scales arrayed in five-point semantic differential format. Subjects then indicated their extent of agreement with one of three prescaled statements concerning commercial airlines randomly attributed to each source (experimentally-determined measure of influence). Anticipated and objective influence were found to vary across sources. The relative effectiveness of the three sources was found to differ when subject-anticipated and experimentally-determined influence measures were used.

Psychological market segmentation: an empirically derived typological approach.

Traditional approaches to psychological market segmentation were evaluated and an alternative two-stage model described. The first stage of the model adopted a holistic perspective in the empirical derivation of a personality typology while the second stage involved evaluation of variation in the purchase decision importance of product attributes across Stage I personality types. 88 male undergraduates completed the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule and test instruments which measured the determinance of various product-attributes in selection of a place of residence. Product-attribute determinance varied significantly across the empirically derived personality types.

Pridit Is a Useful Technique for Detecting Consumer Fraud When No Training Sample Is Available

Marketing researchers and managers often face situations with incomplete information for decision-making. For example, when information needed for classification into strategic customer groups is lacking because of a disclosure social desirability bias. Consumers misbehaving through fraud are unlikely to self-disclose those actions. This is an increasing global problem for services and retailers. Detection of consumers misbehaving can be methodologically more difficult than studying other customer behaviors, since there may be no known observable dependent variable from surveys or observation for training standard statistical models.