Randolph J. Trappey

Assessing Relationships among Strategic Types, Distinctive Marketing Competencies, and Organizational Performance

Abstract The multi-item scale developed by Conant, Mokwa, and Varadarajan (1990) for assessing Miles and Snow’s (1978) strategic typology is applied in a multi-industry, cross-sectional study of 93 Finnish enterprises. To replicate and extend the findings of previous reports, three principal hypotheses are examined: (1) prospector, analyzer, and defender strategic types more often exhibit higher levels of distinctive marketing competencies than reactors; (2) distinctive marketing competencies are associated positively and strongly with organizational performance; (3) a weak association exists among the strategic types and organizational performance. The results support al three hypotheses. The importance of distinctive marketing competencies in serving as intervening variables between strategic types and organizational performance is illustrated.

Consumer Responses to Interactive Advertising Campaigns Coupling Short-Message-Service Direct Marketing and TV Commercials

ABSTRACT As a direct marketing tool, electronic Short Message Service (SMS) is likely to surpass internet-based advertising before the end of 2006. This article profiles heavy and light consumer acceptors of SMS direct advertising texts and SMS direct marketing prompts to watch TV programs. The article includes empirical findings of practitioner campaign evaluations of SMS-TV direct marketing campaigns in U.K. and U.S. markets. The results support the view that younger consumers higher in social class are the most willing to accept SMS direct advertising text and respond favorably to SMS-TV integrated marketing communications. The article closes with a call for true experiments to validate consumer acceptance and use of SMS-TV interactive, commercial, communications via split-run testing.

Customer Thinking and Brand Choice

Research on consumer automatic-unconscious and strategic-cognitive processes in associating brands with evaluative attributes (i.e., best quality; best value; slowest service) offer valuable tools for marketers wanting to understand the primary associations (i.e., the drivers) a brand owns in the minds of customers. A few such drivers connect to the brand that the consumer identifies as her primary choice. With the research methods described in this book, advertising and marketing strategists also learn which, if any, consumers retrieve their brand automatically-unconsciously in connection for important evaluative attributes.

The Role of Human Cognitive Ability (g) in Consumers’ Automatic and Strategic Processing of Brands

Notwithstanding a number of widely held claims to the contrary, it is held in the main by scientists, academicians and practitioners that a single measurable factor corresponding to human general intelligence does exist. The factor — Spearman’s g, is a gauge of human cognitive ability generally assessed with standardised IQ and other psychometric tests that have been developed in over a century of research and testing. Such tests of human cognitive ability, irrespective of substance or structure, time and again provide evidence that the g factor influences all aspects of human cognition. For a comprehensive review of the discovery of g, cognitive abilities, testing and competing theories to g, see Carroll’s (1993) work.

Learning How Linkage Advertising and Prior Experience Affect Customer Behaviour

Linkage advertising is the literature and related materials given to customers who respond to advertisers’ offers of these materials (Woodside, 1994). Linkage advertising “links the up-front advertising to the sale with additional arguments and benefits which the up-front advertising [i.e., the print or broadcast advertisement that includes the linkage offer] didn’t have space or time to include” (Rapp and Collins, 1987). In the United States in the 1990s most advertising expenditures include allocations for creating and sustaining direct links with customers, including such actions such as linkage-advertising, learning and referring to customers by their names in a database marketing programs, and creating “frequency marketing” customer clubs (Cappo, 1992; Frequency Marketing, 1993).

Automatic-Unconscious Process Models of Primary Choice

In the globally integrated consumer oriented societies of 21St Century, there are three realities all marketers must eventually come to terms with when advertising and marketing a brand: • Customers have very limited attention spans; • They devote little time or effort to processing information about brands or stores; and • They have access, desire, or ability to retrieve easily only a few bits of information about brands or stores included in their long-term memories (see Olshavsky and Granbois, 1979; Kassarjian, 1981).

Automatic Thinking and Store Choices by Near and Distant Customers

Holden and Lutz (1992) propose that the reason consumers evoke different brands from long term memory into working memory is that different associates (e.g., benefits, attributes) have stronger links to some brands than others.

Modelling Bank Loyalty

Financial service institutions today recognise that customer commitment is a notion that can no longer be treated casually in today’s banking environment. More than ever, customer retention is regarded as a critical component of long-term profitability and survival in the financial services sector. Competition within the banking sector has caused financial services institutions to introduce permanent measures aimed both at maintaining and retaining profitable customer relationships. Yet keeping customers appears to be more and more difficult as the industry continues to change at an increasing rate. Much of the revolution is technology driven, and Internet banking will continue to play a key role in a plethora of new products, services and brands aimed simultaneously at wooing new customers and retaining existing ones. Consequently, insight into brand switching behaviour amongst financial services customers is central to understanding how retention can be affected in the new economy.