As places face increased competition for human and capital resources, public managers turn toward corporate-like governance strategies and branding practices to shape places and organizations. However, for better or worse, these organizations begin to resemble highly competitive, private-sector public relations and marketing firms. Place branding is taking hold within many organizations, including city governments, yet very few scholars take a public administration approach when exploring the causes and effects of branding practices. In Place Branding through Phases of the Image, Zavattaro explains how city promotional strategies can take the place of corporate governance structures through phases of the image. She examines how city government entities are undertaking place branding practices, with the realization that relying too much on image rather than a balance between image and substance has serious implications for democratic, collaborative governance. This book creates a workable framework that simultaneously serves as a cautionary tale for building a promotional campaign focused exclusively on image.

"The Place Branding Yearbook 2010" examines the case for applying brand and marketing strategies and tactics to the economic, social, political and cultural development of places such as communities, villages, towns, cities, regions, countries, academic institutions and other locations to help them compete in the global, national and local markets.

'Brand Revolution' offers a radical new approach to brand management. With big brand case studies including L'Oreal and Jaguar, the author draws on her extensive experience as a marketing consultant to put together this highly engaging and practical book for developing, improving and controlling the identity of your brand.

Many firms enter new markets each year in search of growth, but only a handful succeed. A major reason for failure is underestimation of market entry barriers and competitors' reactions to market entry. Thus the objective of this book is to help marketers make more informed market entry decisions. To that end, the authors provide a comprehensive discussion of market entry barriers in both domestic and international markets, as well as strategies for overcoming them.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the origins and nature of barriers, as well as a review of the existing literature on the subject. Chapter 2 concentrates on the differences between barriers in consumer and industrial markets in both early and late market entry situations. Barriers to entry in international markets are explained in Chapter 3. The timing of market entry is discussed in Chapter 4, where it is demonstrated that the nature of barriers changes in response to different stages of the product life cycle. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between exit and entry barriers and makes the case that the fear that market exit might be costly often plays an important role in market entry decisions. Chapter 6 examines the vital role of managerial consensus regarding market entry decisions. Chapter 7 explores profitability and other factors involved in early versus late market entry decisions. Strategies for overcoming barriers are covered in Chapter 8, and the book concludes with two Appendices that provide detailed market entry simulation exercises for domestic and international market.

The ability to sell yourself and your ideas may be the most essential skill for achieving business success. Even so, society demeans selling and salespeople, perpetuating stereotypes that make us cringe. In "Selling with Soul," author Sharon V. Parker attacks those attitudes head-on and explodes the myths about salespeople being unprofessional and driven by self-interest.

"Selling with Soul" counters many of the negative notions of selling by explaining why it is an honorable profession that creates value for all when it is done with empathy for the customer and a firm commitment to principles. Parker helps you learn the skills and attitudes that result in successful sales careers, and she shares the lessons that can result in a successful, balanced life-lessons she learned during a twenty-six-year career in sales.

In this, the second version of "Selling with Soul," Parker includes a review of sales basics, updated with how people buy today. She also shares ideas for finding and keeping new business, and she presents lessons in the soft skills so essential to selling with integrity and empathy: listening, conflict resolution, understanding personal styles, dealing with temptations and compromise, and creating a life consistent with your values.

"Selling with Soul" helps heal the split between job and spirit. It shows how problem-solving, creating value, and treating others with empathy and integrity are the keys to selling-and living-with soul.

Recognize the con artist before you get taken! Schulte exposes dozens of telephone, mail, and computer-based scams, explaining how they work and how you can avoid becoming their next victim.

"... a must for anyone who wants to be informed about ways consumers can be fleeced by phone-room sharpies". -- Chicago Tribune

Though many still think that we live in an information economy, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the driving force in 21st-century capitalism is not information, but image. Through studies of food processing, real estate development, tourism, movies, and labor performances, he examines how businesses endow products with evocative meaning.

It has become common wisdom that we live in a postindustrial information society in which data and calculation underlie wealth. But now that information is as routinely produced as industrial or agricultural goods, businesses are discovering that they best achieve competitive advantage by producing what consumers most dearly seek--personal meaning. The 21st-century economy produces just that: not merely information, but evocative images; not just commodities, but meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg shows, foods now appeal through their sensuality and nostalgia; houses and stores draw customers through their exoticism; people sell their labor through the deliberate performance of the self for the market; and tourist destinations offer up carefully crafted thematic experiences. Whereas farms, factories, and information processors once stood at the core of the economy, now movie studios do, producing the product valued above all, meaningful content, from which downstream firms acquire the themes that animate desire.

Now that meaning pervades production, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry once reserved for the humanities make sense in the study of the economy. Drawing on art history and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a mode of cultural analysis adapted to the study of commercial production. Through comparative studies of diverse economic sectors, ranging from food processing to tourism, Sternberg carries out an iconographic analysis of the new economy. This is a provocative study for scholars, students, and professionals dealing with marketing and consumer research, culture and media studies, socio-economics, and economic geography.

This book explores all relevant aspects of net scoring, also known as uplift modeling: a data mining approach used to analyze and predict the effects of a given treatment on a desired target variable for an individual observation. After discussing modern net score modeling methods, data preparation, and the assessment of uplift models, the book investigates software implementations and real-world scenarios. Focusing on the application of theoretical results and on practical issues of uplift modeling, it also includes a dedicated chapter on software solutions in SAS, R, Spectrum Miner, and KNIME, which compares the respective tools. This book also presents the applications of net scoring in various contexts, e.g. medical treatment, with a special emphasis on direct marketing and corresponding business cases. The target audience primarily includes data scientists, especially researchers and practitioners in predictive modeling and scoring, mainly, but not exclusively, in the marketing context.

The international fragmentation of economic activities - from research and design to production and marketing - described through the lens of the global value chain (GVC) approach impacts the structure and performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) agglomerated in economic clusters. The consolidation of GVCs ruled by global lead firms and the recession of 2008-09 exacerbated the pressures on cluster actors that based their competitive advantage on local systems, spurring an increasing heterogeneity, both across and within clusters, that is still overlooked in the literature. Drawing on detailed studies of different industries and countries, Local Clusters in Global Value Chains shows the co-evolutionary trajectories of clusters and GVCs, and the role of firms and their strategies in organizing manufacturing and innovation activities in the context of ongoing technological shifts. The book explores the tension between place-based variables and global drivers of change, and the possibility for territories containing such clusters to prosper in the new global scenario. By adopting insights from the GVC framework and management studies, the book discusses how the internationalization strategies of firms create opportunities as well as constraints for adaptive upgrading in clusters. This book is of interest to both researchers and policy-makers who are interested in the dynamic sources of competitive advantage in the global economy.

A colourful history of advertising. The process of producing goods and services is relatively easy to recognize as socially beneficial. But television ads? Telemarketers? Jingles? Junk mail? It is popular to view these commercial activities as inherently wasteful or manipulative, marginally informative or entertaining, at best. The most vociferous critics marshal economic and sociological data to argue that advertising dilutes culture and moral values, encourages conspicuous consumption, defrauds the public, and promotes dangerous products and behaviours. In Selling the Dream, John Hood takes the provocative stand that advertising images and sales pitches are actually part of the goods and services themselves, delivering an essential component of the consumer's experience. As such, they are inextricably linked to the basic tenets of the free-market system, and, in the boldest of terms, Hood argues that commercial communication is morally consistent with the principles of a democratic society, including freedom of choice, competition, and innovation. Tracing the history of advertising from Ancient Roman times to the present, through the first American newspaper ad in 1704, P.T. the modern consumer society, Hood offers a colourful account of advertising in its cultural context. Moreover, he addresses such controversial issues as the promotion of harmful and immoral products (such as tobacco and alcohol), marketing to children, the role of advertising in service industries such as health care and education, and the impact of the Internet and other new media on the conduct of commerce. In the process, he offers a compelling perspective on advertising and its essential role in business, communication, and popular culture. Advertising is a ubiquitous part of our consumer culture. It draws from business, economics, politics, and history to present a colourful picture of advertising in context and argues that advertising is an essential ingredient of competition, innovation, and free-market economic growth. Deals with controversial issues, such as advertising immoral products and advertising to children.

An increasing number of products and services are not differentiated by inherent features, but by the vendors, particularly their reputation and marketing commu- cation. Consequently, a positive reputation provides competing vendors with a virtually inimitable competitive advantage. Contemporary research concerning antecedents and consequences of reputation in the domain of marketing is dominated by branding and line extension issues. Organizations' communication efforts and the relation of reputation and the c- munication media are not fully understood; nor have they been challenged up to now. Moreover, customers' perception of reputation is clearly embedded in their cultural context. However, contemporary marketing research restricts both conceptual and empirical considerations to Western-type cultures. Frequently, even the differences in Western-type cultures are neglected. Considering these shortcomings in contemporary marketing research, Dr. Christine Falkenreck investigates the opportunities and limits, and also the potential bene?ts and dangers of transferring a vendor's positive reputation to product categories never produced or offered by the considered vendor. Embedding the empirical investigation of both reputation management and reputation transfer in a coherent theoretical framework, which is grounded in the Commitment-Trust theory, is her merit. She derives and validates an integrated model that appears to be valid in all cultures considered in her study. The results of this analysis contribute substantially to our understanding of reputation measuring and managing. These results are not restricted to academic interests and they provided practitioners with a variety of new insights. Thus, this thesis will ho- fully be widely discussed in both academia and management practice.

Women buy the weekly shopping, home insurance, household appliances, soft furnishings, holidays and more. CEO's and Marketers need to acknowledge that women really are the Boss when it comes to buying. They also need to understand the many psychological and behavioral characteristics of women that affect their relationships with brands. This book identifies the key biological and brain differences between women and men, then defines more effective marketing approaches based on these insights.

We are currently at the beginning of a great business phenomenon: The Hispanic Gold RushTM of the 21st century. Organizations are certainly trying to do all the right things to leverage the potential that the Hispanic market offers. However, in spite of their massive investments of effort and resources, many businesses experience only limited success and are not gaining the loyalty they expect from Hispanic consumers. How to Win The Hispanic Gold RushTM explains the reasons why many organizations have had little success in marketing to Hispanics in the U.S. Practical tools are conveyed to help businesses better direct their resources so they may succeed in this challenging marketplace. Demographic data about the Hispanic population is presented, together with valuable information about cultural and motivational traits that are unique to Hispanics--and that determine their purchasing decisions. In addition, it describes four potential steps organizations can take to effectively increase their penetration of this important ethnic group.

The future success of many companies in the United States and Europe is becoming more dependent on effectively developing and expanding markets in new emerging and partially developed countries. Few companies, however, know how to do it well, if at all. Their success rate is low, while the cost of failure remains high. Caslione and Thomas provide insights, knowledge, special tools, and the experience that will show executives how to take hold of these challenges. Through case studies of companies in a wide cross-section of industries, the authors highlight the processes necessary to develop successful market entry, sales, and distribution strategies for their companies in emerging markets around the world.

Global business strategy can no longer be focused on only one country or region; the risks are too great. Only when a truly global company develops a holistic and global perspective and implements proven strategies can the success in the new global economy be achieved.

This book presents the most up-to-date account of research based on the Behavioural Perspective Model of consumer choice. The accumulated empirical results, which draw on behavioural economics, psychology, and marketing, are summarized, after which the philosophy of science that underpins the model is explored. Foxall's contribution to the debate about the explanation of consumer choice, intentional behaviourism, is both expounded and critiqued, and the resulting synthesis is explored in relation to its relevance to marketing management, public policy on environmental matters, the adoption and diffusion of innovations, and further research in consumer behaviour and marketing. This is a major contribution to consumer research and marketing theory.

Building brands in emerging markets is akin to navigating a minefield. One misstep and the entire enterprise may blow up in your face with your brand consigned to the grave yard of marketing casualties How is branding in an emerging economy different from the same exercise in a mature economy? What are the peculiar challenges brand managers face when they find themselves in socially complex and rapidly changing emerging markets? The Seven Dimensions of Branding articulates the fundamental elements of the branding process, with specific reference to Africa's largest emerging market, Nigeria. Drawing on the author's more than two decades of helping local and international brands, the book gives you an insight into the peculiar challenges of creating and building successful brands in Africa and explains why global brands are not emerging from this vibrant continent. The Seven Dimensions shows how the universal principles of branding may be successfully applied in emerging economies.

Introduces the key terms, concepts and practices to provide a firm foundation for undergraduate students. It discusses contemporary technologies used in marketing alongside established practices to develop an understanding of the positive effects of marketing balanced with critical discussion about it's contribution to the wider aims of society. International in approach, it highlights a range of real life practices through examples and short case studies. It includes: * Marketing as an idea and a practice. * How to understand and reach customers, researching and choosing segments * Marketing functions-providing value from products, services, pricing and distribution to branding and communications. * Responsible marketing and contemporary technologies To help support their learning, readers have access to a range of online resources including chapter-by-chapter multiple choice questions which will enable them to assess how well they have grasped individual chapters. The text also features a range of supplementary readings, in text exercises and cases/examples to help bring concepts to life.

This is the sixth volume in a series presenting the latest research in the field of applied business strategy.

This is the 13th volume in the series on "Research in Marketing."