Journal of Business Research

Brand communities represent highly valuable marketing, innovation management, and customer relationship management tools. However, applying successful marketing strategies today, and in the future, also means exploring and seizing the unprecedented opportunities of social network environments. This study combines these two social phenomena which have largely been researched separately, and aims to investigate the existence, functionality and different types of brand communities within social networks. The netnographic approach yields strong evidence of this existence; leading to a better understanding of such embedded brand communities, their peculiarities, and motivational drivers for participation; therefore the findings contribute to theory by combining two separate research streams. Due to the advantages of social networks, brand management is now able to implement brand communities with less time and financial effort; however, choosing the appropriate brand community type, cultivating consumers' interaction, and staying tuned to this social engagement are critical factors to gain anticipated brand outcomes.

Four criticisms against using socioeconomic and demographic (SED) factors in consumer behavior are reviewed: dissatisfaction with models of consumption behavior developed by economists and sociologists, obsolescence of SED factors in mass consumption societies, poor predictions produced by SED factors, and a grass-is-greener attitude held by consumer researchers. The insights offered substantially hurt the validity of these criticisms. Strategies for better theory and research in consumer behavior using SED factors are described.

PIP 58 expectant couples were counseled about family planning postpartum and husbands and wives were asked to rank preference of methods. Husbands preferred IUDs (12%), the pill (7.6%), or diaphragms (8.2%). Wives preferred diaphragm (10%), foam (8%), jelly (8%), and IUDs (6%). The process of discussion was then charted. It was found that wives were more influential than husbands in the joint ranking process, which put IUDs 1st, followed by diaphragms and jelly. As discussion progressed, side effects became more important and the condom was selected as a compromise more often than any other method. It is suggested that marketing attempts for condoms emphasize the lack of side effects as well as promote the advantages to men.

Practicing managers, systems analysts, and operations researchers need a systematic description of physical distribution (PD) as it currently exists. This article portrays the structure of PD as seen by practitioners in a variety of different firms. First-order and second-order factor analyses were conducted on the importance ratings assigned to 58 activities by 182 managers to develop a set of five areas portraying the field: internal materials movement, information-system operations, facilities planning, traffic management, and external materials movement.

This article investigates nostalgia in post-socialist Russia from a consumer behavior perspective. The research includes the following components: 1) an overview of nostalgia and nostalgia proneness as a personality trait among Russians in the context of recent societal changes, 2) an analysis of four categories of nostalgia (personal, interpersonal, cultural, and virtual) and themes in nostalgia experiences provided by Russian respondents, and 3) a discussion of specific stimuli and advertising content in the Russian marketplace designed to evoke individual and collective nostalgia. The major nostalgia themes—specifically, the break-up of the Soviet Union, nature, and food—identified in the Russian responses are related to advertising and marketing elements for Russian products. The article also discusses the implications of consumer nostalgia for marketing and advertising strategy in the post-socialist Russian economy.

This study utilizes a conflict theory lens to examine when work-related conflict, specifically cognitive and process conflict, is beneficial to family firm performance. The paper further discusses family-member exchange and generational ownership dispersion as moderators of the relationship between conflict and family firm performance. Contrary to expectations, cognitive conflict is negatively related to family firm performance. However, as predicted, family-member exchange and generational ownership dispersion are significant moderators of the conflict–performance relationships. First-generation firms experience greater performance when cognitive conflict is encouraged. Family-member exchange increases the positive effect process conflict has on performance.

This study uses non-parametric methods to examine the difference in trading behavior between Chapter 11 bankruptcy firms and non-bankruptcy firms traded on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)/American Stock Exchange (AMEX) exchanges. It documents new evidence about the anomaly of insider purchases rather than sales prior to Chapter 11 bankruptcy announcements. Insiders of Chapter 11 bankruptcy firms purchase significantly fewer shares than insiders of the control firms before the bankruptcy announcement. Although insider trading volume declines long before the announcement, the decline is statistically significant only during the 3-month period before the announcement. The study, however, finds no significant difference in trading behavior between insiders of firms that ceased to trade on and those that continue to trade on the NYSE/AMEX within 5 years after the bankruptcy announcements.

This study utilizes the Miles and Snow typology within the context of firms in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We specifically examine (1) the impact of constituent influence on management's choice of strategic archetype (prospector, defender, or reactor) and (2) whether successful emergence from Chapter 11 is more likely when managers propose prospector strategies which focus on marketing and product innovation, defender strategies which focus on cost efficiency, or reactor strategies which have no clearly defined orientation. Results of the study suggest that when firms are in distress, external constituents influence them not to pursue reactor strategies. Further findings indicate that firms with prospector strategies and well-defined marketing plans are most likely to emerge from Chapter 11.

This study considers the role of corporate reputation and its relation to quality, perceived value, and loyalty in an online context. This milieu potentially challenges the relevance of the reported findings from the more traditional retail marketing situations. In this respect, a number of important questions are raised concerning how perceived value and quality impact on online loyalty and the effect corporate reputation has on this process. Research was conducted among customers of two diverse online vendors, one dealing in books and the other in shares. Findings from the two samples suggest that corporate reputation has a direct effect on online loyalty and provides an important mediating effect for perceived value and aspects of quality in terms of their impact on online loyalty.

Sales of a brand are determined by measures such as how many customers buy the brand, how often, and how much they also buy other brands. Scanner panel operators routinely report these “brand performance measures” (BPMs) to their clients. In this position paper, we consider how to understand, interpret, and use these measures. The measures are shown to follow well-established patterns. One is that big and small brands differ greatly in how many buyers they have, but usually far less in how loyal these buyers are. The Dirichlet model predicts these patterns. It also provides a broader framework for thinking about all competitive repeat-purchase markets—from soup to gasoline, prescription drugs to aviation fuel, where there are large and small brands, and light and heavy buyers, in contexts as diverse as the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and Australasia.Numerous practical uses of the framework are illustrated: auditing the performance of established brands, predicting and evaluating the performance of new brands, checking the nature of unfamiliar markets, of partitioned markets, and of dynamic market situations more generally (where the Dirichlet provides theoretical benchmarks for price promotions, advertising, etc.). In addition, many implications for our understanding of consumers, brands, and the marketing mix logically follow from the Dirichlet framework. In repeat-purchase markets, there is often a lack of segmentation between brands and the typical consumer exhibits polygamous buying behavior (though there might be strong segmentation at the category level). An understanding of these applications and implications leads to consumer insights, imposes constraints on marketing action, and provides norms for evaluating brands and for assessing marketing initiatives.

One-hundred Tax Court cases concerning Section 162(a) (2) were subjected to several multivariate PROBIT and discriminant analyses to determine which factors best define the location of a “tax home.” In each case, the government disagreed with the taxpayer and contended that the “tax home” was either nonexistent or was located in elsewhere. Various sensitivity analyses were performed to test model specifications regarding linear or quadratic functions, discriminant or PROBIT models, and temporal stability. A seven-variable linear discriminant model achieved an 88% Lachenbruch U classification accuracy and exhibited high stability with regard to the three sensitivity analyses. Implications for taxpayers, practitioners, legislators, and researchers are discussed.

This research considers employee perceptions of the interorganizational relationships that exist between three types of marketing research organizations. Significant findings from this study support previous work in the field of ethics and point out the importance of the relationships between opportunistic behavior, ethical climates, and ethical profiles in different types of marketing research organizations.

How well have marketable securities performed as a hedge against inflation?The question is a very old one to which many writers have addressed themselves. The evolutionary nature of financial markets, financial theory, and financial instruments requires continued reevaluation of previous investment decisions. The purpose of this study is to review the performance record of 14 risk classes of securities, which range from long-term government bonds through five different classes of common stock. The average annual investment relatives adjusted for price-level changes are compared for various periods during which the price level is essentially stable, rising, and falling.

The manuscript reports on an integrative assessment of exporting research published in 821 academic articles during the period 1960–2007. Such an undertaking is deemed necessary due to the voluminous, multifarious, and fragmented nature of knowledge in this crucial field of international business. The study includes an analysis of each article on four major grounds (i.e., research design, scope of research, research methodology, and thematic areas), aiming to obtain a holistic picture of and identify trends in the subject. The content analysis reveals that:(a) the vast majority of exporting studies adopted a cross-sectional, field-oriented, and survey approach, while there was a steady increase of research with a formalized and causal character; (b) research into exporting had gradually shifted outside North America, involved multiple industries, and used exporters as the unit of analysis; (c) recent exporting studies have employed probability sampling designs, larger samples, construct validation procedures, and advanced analytical methods more extensively; and (d) export performance was the most widely examined topic, attracting continuous attention over time. Several conclusions are derived that can contribute to the field's theoretical and practical advancement.

Using a simple version of the dividend cash flow (DCF) model of stock valuation, the cost of equity for public utilities is often inferred to be equal to the sum of the dividend yield and the expected rate of growth in dividends. Witnesses who employ this approach generally extrapolate past growth patterns into the future and then assume that investors expect these trends to continue; no effort is made to actually assess the expectations of investors. This approach to estimating the cost of equity for public utilities is criticized for the failure to develop testable hypotheses as an inferential basis for testing the statistical reliability of estimates of the cost of equity. This article demonstrates an alternative to the traditional approach, based on the premise that reliable estimates of the cost of equity are derived only within a methodological framework that produces testable hypotheses. The Gordon model of share valuation is formulated in such a way as to show that there is a systematic and predictable relationship between the ratio of market price to book value of common stock and a firm's normal or expected return on equity. This relationship suggests an econometric model that not only tests the Gordon model of share valuation but produces at the same time, inferences concerning the cost of equity. Using this approach, year-end estimates of the cost of equity for electric utilities are determined for the 16-yr period from 1961 to 1976.