Mark D. Uncles

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at UNSW Sydney

This paper traces the evolution of the marketing discipline within the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, the home of Australasia’s pioneering university-based marketing school. It contrasts how marketing has evolved in Australasia compared to North American and European schools. The early emphasis on industry engagement and practice and...

Dashboards are commonly used to inform data‐driven decision‐making by multiple stakeholders within and across businesses. The purpose of this article is to show how a comprehensive marketing model, the NBD‐Dirichlet, can be used to construct coherent and integrated dashboards. This is demonstrated using an example that offers practical guidance to...

Higher education is a service industry – a terrific success story by most measures of industrial success. Across the globe, ever-rising numbers of students are enrolled in programs. In this essay, a marketing perspective is used to examine changes in higher education, with a focus on the identification of new opportunities. Where students are regar...

Purpose Multisensory stimulation is integral to experiential consumption. However, a gap persists between recognition of the importance of multisensory stimulation and the research techniques used to study the effects of such stimulation on consumption experiences. This article draws on sensory anthropology to narrow the gap. Design/methodology/a...

We measure how the impact of positive and negative word of mouth (PWOM, NWOM) is related to the receiver’s intention to purchase brands, using shift in the intention to purchase as the measure of impact. We distinguish between currently used and other brands and find that PWOM has more impact, and NWOM less impact, when these forms of advice are on...

This paper is concerned with the way in which positive word of mouth (PWOM) about brands spreads their usage. We find that brand users, who have heard positive comments on their brand, offer nearly twice as much PWOM as users who have not heard such comments. We identify a transmission mechanism that underpins the production of PWOM; specifically,...

Purpose: This paper aims to respond to the commentaries by Nejad, and Rand and Rust on the paper “Improving Agent-Based Models of Diffusion”. Design/methodology/approach: Evidence on the nature of word of mouth was reviewed and related to the views expressed by the authors of the commentaries. Findings: The authors of this paper remain concerned ab...

Purpose This paper aims to review the validation of assumptions made in agent-based modeling of diffusion and the sufficiency (completeness) of the mechanisms assumed to operate. Design/methodology/approach One well-cited paper is examined. Findings Evidence is presented that casts doubt on the assumptions and mechanisms used. A range of mechanis...

Factors that occur before word-of-mouth (WOM) production are examined, using an influential typology established by Mangold et al. (1999). We conduct two surveys, each covering four service categories, and measure the factors associated with both positive and negative word of mouth. We ask respondents to report on both giving and receiving word of...

With a focus on highly skilled professionals who have moved and resettled in different countries for reasons related to work, the aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of the role of consumption practices in managing the temporal dimension of global mobility. Two related datasets are used: in-depth long interviews with globally mobile profe...

Negative information normally has more impact on attitude and cognition than positive information, but there is evidence that positive word of mouth (PWOM) usually has more effect on purchase intention than negative word of mouth (NWOM). We explain how this apparent inconsistency may come about when measures of attitude and intention are used as in...

Marketing managers increasingly need to understand how consumers use and interact with digital media, such as the web, social networks, mobile phones, digital readers, search engines and so forth. The focus of this paper is web participation and the complexities involved in measuring usage and interaction with the web, particularly when relying on...

Three surveys, each covering two categories, were used to investigate the decay in WOM output after product experience. The categories were restaurants, fashion stores, hotels, holiday destinations, mobile phones and films. Data were gathered in the UK and Thailand, resulting in a total of 548 usable responses. Word-of-mouth (WOM) output decays rap...

In some product categories, older consumers (aged 65+) tend to be more brand loyal, have smaller consideration sets and defer purchase more than younger consumers. This conservative behaviour may arise, in part, because older people are more socially isolated and thus receive less social influence relating to product options. In this multi-study re...

In this study, cross-case analysis of the employer brands at four firms is undertaken to examine, empirically, how employer branding processes interact with anticipated and actual employment experience to produce conditions for employer brand success or failure. Activities and processes underpinning the employer brand are derived from the employer...

Purpose – This paper aims to extend a widely used stochastic model of purchase loyalty to include covariates such as demographics, psychographics and geodemographics. Potentially, this allows covariates to explain variations in brand performance measures (BPMs) such as penetration/reach, average purchase frequency, sole buying, share of category re...

Replication is central to normal scientific investigation. This fact is widely accepted in business disciplines. However, many researchers are uncertain how to build replication into their own research designs and this may explain why they do not routinely adopt this practice. The purpose of this paper is to re-state the importance of replication;...

When respondents are asked to report on past behaviour, their responses may be affected by an unknown level of measurement error. This casts doubt on the findings from retrospective surveys. There is evidence that measurement error is a function of the interval between an experience and the time when the experience is reported. In this study, the v...

Do the audiences reached by different media touchpoints match category user profiles? Does a second media touchpoint help reach a new audience? To provide answers, the current study analyzed 16 touchpoints across 23 data sets. Audiences reached by television, gift-packs, in-store displays, and outdoor advertisements closely matched category user pr...

Are referred customers more valuable than customers recruited through advertising/promotion? This question is answered using data accumulated from surveys covering the satisfaction, recommendation, retention, spending and mode of acquisition of customers. The database comprises 6578 records and covers 15 product/service category groupings. Overall,...

Web users are now a mixture of consumer and web designer. As such, the context within which we are socialized about the web - as both male and female users - moderates the relationship between what we think we know about it and its usability to complete tasks. With online survey data from 2077 web users, we empirically examine the relationship betw...

It has been claimed that the user profiles of directly competing brands seldom differ. This surprises many in marketing, leading to some doubts about the validity of the claim. In the empirical generalization tradition, the authors: re-examine the previous claim using newer data; consider the scope of the claim in terms of brands in emerging mark...

It has been claimed that the user profiles of directly competing brands seldom differ. This surprises many in marketing, leading to some doubts about the validity of the claim. In the empirical generalization tradition, the authors: • re-examine the previous claim using newer data; • consider the scope of the claim in terms of brands in emerging ma...

Purpose As one rewinds the clock to the early days of the twenty‐first century, it can be quite surprising to realise how much the consumer landscape has changed from what it is today. This paper aims to introduce the special issue and attempts to take stock of the last decade and reflect on the transformation of key areas of the changing marketpla...

Findings show that awareness of global alliance benefits is reasonably high among business travellers. There is, however, variability in awareness levels and some uncertainty about the precise benefits on offer. Most respondents do not see major differences between the benefits offered by the two main alliances, Star and Oneworld. A sizeable minori...

Market orientation (MO) research is beset with conceptual and measurement difficulties. Researchers freely acknowledged these difficulties, but all too often fail to modify their research designs. Modifications to standard MO research designs would help to advance our understanding of the relationship between MO and business performance. More radic...

Chinese marketing is evolving, and this is having a dramatic influence on the incomes and spending patterns of consumers. Set against these longer-run trends, the contribution of this paper is to examine the year-on-year persistence of brand purchasing and behavioural brand loyalty in packaged goods markets in China. Revealed preference data for tw...

The volume and impact of positive and negative word of mouth (PWOM, NWOM) are investigated in relation to the market shares of brands. We find that the volumes of PWOM and NWOM are closely related to market share. By contrast, the average impact of instances of PWOM and NWOM shows no direct relationship with market share. When the direct influence...

Heterogeneity lies at the heart of the issue of whether marketing academia is losing its way. On the one hand, critics point to research studies that address trivial themes and non-problems. Giving grounds for optimism, on the other hand, are the hundreds of research studies that investigate significant managerial problems in ways that are rigorous...

The transformation of retailing in China is described, with reference to past developments (Retrospect) and emerging trends (Prospects). Retail practice is considered by looking at supply-side structural changes and changing patterns of consumer demand. Convergence towards international norms is evident, but so too are signs of distinctiveness and...

The astounding growth and expansion of Starbucks is outlined, both on a global scale and within Australia. The focus then shifts to the abrupt closure of three-quarters of the Australian stores in mid 2008. Several reasons for these closures are described and examined, including that: Starbucks overestimated their points of differentiation and the...

Some important issues in marketing require the use of retrospective surveys. But, despite the lack of suitable alternative methods, retrospective survey-based research tends to be given short shrift by journal editors and is treated harshly in review processes. The goal of this paper is to acknowledge justifiable criticisms, see to what extent thes...

All of us patronize shopping malls and retail outlets, buying goods and services for our own consumption and for gift-giving. By engaging in these activities we are in a good position to reflect on our personal experiences, but what in general is known about retail customers and what changes are becoming apparent? Corporate and academic analysts ar...

Over the last decade, firms large and small have begun overtly branding themselves as employers as well as purveyors of goods and services. Drawing on an investigation of employer brands in practice, we examine how market segmentation is being used implicitly by managers and how established techniques for market segmentation can be applied more ext...

Reported is a formal investigation of store patronage in urban China. Using consumer panel data for sales of packaged goods through store types and named store chains, patterns of sales, loyalty and duplication are examined. Observed patterns are benchmarked against predictions from the NBD-Dirichlet model. Findings are generalized across six produ...

A systematic, analytical study is presented of patterns of patronage across store types (including hypermarkets, supermarkets, grocery stores and free/wet markets) in urban China. Using consumer panel data collected from a cumulative sample of almost 5000 households, results are generalized across 8 major cities (from the North, South, East and Wes...

Based on the analysis of data gathered from industry experts, a typology of the characteristics of successful employer brands is presented. Depth interviews were carried out with senior industry participants from the fields of internal marketing, human resources, communications, branding and recruitment. Transcripts were analysed using formal inter...

The notion of savvy consumers increasingly appears in the e-marketing and e-management literatures, usually in discussions about the importance of consumer-centricity. A synthesis of the literature identifies six broad characteristics of these savvy consumers: they are enabled by competencies in relation to technological sophistication, interperson...

Purpose – The goal of this paper is to examine how broadcaster brand images are affected by programming decisions. Design/methodology/approach – Two sets of experiments were undertaken with regular viewers/listeners of TV and radio stations. Subjects were presented with scenarios describing program success (failure) and program congruity (incongrui...

A central theme in brand choice is the modeling of the drivers of repatronage behavior. The work reported here focuses on a particular service context—airline repatronage. The distinct problems of model specification in this context are discussed. Various models of airline repatronage are estimated using random effects probit modeling. It is found...

Purpose – Aims to review, update, and extend the understanding of country-of-origin (COO) effects in China. This involves examining the nature and extent of the COO effect amongst urban Chinese consumers and the impact of COO on actual purchase behaviour. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire is used to collect COO information from a sample...

Marketers are becoming more aware of the growing importance of older consumers. In this paper the brand purchasing behavior of these consumers is investigated. The procedure uses Juster-scale purchase probabilities of brand choice as inputs to a Dirichlet model, enabling brand performance measures to be analyzed across age groups (< 40 years, 40–59...

Retail customers have to make many choices, such as those listed in Figure 1. These choices are influenced by past experiences, consumer lifestyles, and basic needs and wants, as well as situational and mood-based factors. All these factors are undergoing change, and the pace of change is increasing, so that it is only natural to feel that the worl...

Service network expansion and rationalization is a major aspect of business planning in large multi-site organizations. In this paper an approach is presented to provide decision-support for managers engaged in network expansion and rationalization. The approach rests on the analysis of spatial data. Particular attention is drawn to the value of ge...

Policy-makers and retailers are keenly watching and debating developments in Chinese retailing. As a contribution to the debate we present a method for investigating retail performance. Our focus is on sales performance and the components of performance in the context of store-type patronage (e.g., the number of customers patronizing hypermarkets,...

In a new purchasing environment (e.g., where a consumer moves to a new city), do consumers tend to keep buying the first brand that they try? If so, a behavioral primacy effect might be at work. Behavioral primacy exists when consumers tend to repeat-buy the first brand that they purchased more often than other brands that are bought in the same pu...

Purpose Aims to examine the proposition that consumer sales promotions are more effective when they provide benefits that are congruent with those of the promoted product. This proposition is considered at the ethnic‐group level (i.e. do differences in cultural values at this level have an impact on sales promotion effectiveness?). Design/methodol...

There is growing recognition of the role employees play in the development and success of a company's brand. This is encapsulated in the notion of employer branding. Based on a review of previous studies, the internal and external effects of employer branding are conceptualised. A critical assessment of the conceptualisation shows that while it has...

An empirical generalisation is a relationship between two or more variables that has been observed across a range of conditions. By knowing that an observed relationship holds under a range of conditions (and that it does not hold under other conditions) it is possible to use knowledge of the relationship for practical purposes, such as making rout...

User-directed technologies such as the Web are becoming more prevalent. To understand the usage of these technologies the characteristics of users need to be studied. The focus here is on one user characteristic: consumer knowledge content. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, four scales are developed to measure common declarative, comm...

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 show...

Dirichlet benchmarks are being applied very widely. There are also broader implications. Some of these implications are clarified in response to P.K. Kannan's commentary. In particular, we comment on extensions to non-packaged-goods markets, the role of more complex models, lack of strong brand segmentation, consumer attitudes and variety seeking.

Many claims have been made concerning the benefits of airline global alliances, often from the viewpoint of airline operators. By contrast, the focus of this paper is an empirical study of the perceptions of consumers. Studied first are the perceptions that business travelers have of the benefits of global alliances. Results show that a sizeable mi...

Customer loyalty presents a paradox. Many see it as primarily an attitude-based phenomenon that can be influenced significantly by customer relationship management initiatives such as the increasingly popular loyalty and affinity programs. However, empirical research shows that loyalty in competitive repeat-purchase markets is shaped more by the pa...

A new taxonomy of differences between consumers is presented. It is argued that there are at least five generic types of differences between consumers: preferences for product benefits, consumer interaction effects, choice barriers, bargaining power, and profitability. Recognition of these distinct types of consumer heterogeneity has implications f...

An investigation of the effects of consumer evaluations on family brand image, as a result of extension congruity/incongruity and success/failure. All possible combinations of these variables are examined within a broadcaster-branding context (specifically radio and television). Quasi-experimental studies show that program successes and failures ca...

Research productivity is a sign of the intellectual vigour of marketing as an academic discipline. However, there are at least three impediments to research productivity: inadequate training, sub-optimal concentrations of research activity, and competing commitments. Initiatives to enhance research productivity must address these issues. This is po...

Using a survey administered to a homogeneous group of Arabs, Asians and Westerners in the U.A.E. an investigation is made of the intentions-behaviour link. The focus is on the intention of consumers to buy local or international brands. Five questions are addressed: are Arabs more concerned about country-of-origin, do they have a greater purchase i...

Understanding why people accept or reject electronic technological developments has proven to be one of the most challenging issues in information systems research. This issue is also of growing concern to marketers due to the increasing adoption of electronic technologies by the marketing discipline. Therefore this study used existing scales from...

Patterns of behaviour among executive airline travellers are described. Evidence shows that: (a) airlines are chosen habitually by executive travellers from among small individual split-loyalty repertoires; (b) competitive brands are seen as closely substitutable; and (c) route/schedule convenience emerges as the crucial driver of choice. In certai...

Advice on academic publishing is offered for those just starting their research careers. Themes include: how to link teaching, administration and consulting to research; the benefits and challenges of co-authorship; how to develop a publication strategy; ways to develop a publication portfolio and how to target journals; and how to deal with commen...

The equilibrium structure of packaged goods markets in Japan resembles that in Western economies: brands compete against each other in largely unsegmented markets, with the extent of consumers’ brand-switching and divided loyalties between brands largely predictable from the differing market-shares of brands. Presented is an analysis of brand loyal...

(1) Students writing their theses need to address specific research questions, and take clear positions with respect to these questions. (2) They should strive to present, validate and discuss their own research contributions, and in so doing demonstrate how they have made distinct contributions to knowledge. (3) An appropriate structure for this p...

Brand managers face many challenges (including questions of brand strength, world-class culture, “glocal” branding, seeded marketing channels, “service smart” integration, brand architecture and brand organizing). A framework is presented for thinking about the challenges and how to deal with them. This process, called “brand chartering”, has three...

The movement of shoppers through a city can look chaotic when studied at the individual level. However, statistical analysis shows that aggregate patterns exist for major grocery shopping trips, patterns of movement largely depend on access to a car and how much is bought; for minor shopping trips, location/ convenience tends to be the main conside...

Two questions in brand management are: what advantages flow from corporate/banner branding, and how can corporate/banner brands and product sub-brands ‘partner’ one another? These questions are examined by introducing and discussing the concept of brand architecture. Through examples, it is demonstrated why the leadership skills that are required t...

Many empirical regularities in the buying behavior of consumers have been linked together into a comprehensive model, the Dirichlet. In this paper we list some of the well-established regularities, show how they are theoretically intertwined, and illustrate how this approach to modeling can assist the marketing analyst.

‘Branding — the Marketing Advantage’ is a new video package from BBC for Business. It is offered as a flexible training resource for those who are looking at the issues confronting brands and brand managers in the late 1990s. This is an exemplary package which will find a ready and appreciative audience, particularly among those who are looking for...

Various aspects of how shoppers patronize grocery stores are regular and predictable, so much so that the pattern of buying at a particular store can be interpreted against known patterns at other stores, and against a very general model, the NBD-Dirichlet. For the grocery manager this means using scanner-panel records to assess patronage against a...

In a systematic check across 34 US product categories, two standard measures of brand-loyalty are found to be closely predictable from the Dirichlet model of buyer behaviour in most cases. This means that market share is generally the dominant factor, but that there are also certain submarkets and isolated deviations. The general role of replicatio...

The role of private labels in consumer choice is studied by considering two issues: do private labels affect the way people buy within a store, and do they affect the way people choose between stores? The revealed behaviour of consumers is studied, both descriptively and using a very general model of behaviour, the Dirichlet. Some examples are pres...