The goal of this book is to help business managers and academic researchers understand the means-end perspective and the methods by which it is used, and to demonstrate how to use the means-end approach to develop better marketing and advertising strategy. The authors discuss methodological issues regarding interviewing and coding, present applications of the means-end approach to marketing and advertising problems, and describe the conceptual foundations of the means-end approach.
This book is of interest to academic researchers in marketing and related fields, graduate students in business, marketing research professionals, and business managers. It is intended as a reference book containing ideas about the means-end approach and its applications.

Gendering Theory in Marketing and Consumer Research showcases state-of-the-art scholarship on gender in the field of marketing and consumer research. The book presents seven original contributions by a group of internationally renowned academics, who take up the task of theorising gender and gendering theory in new ways, accommodating recent intersectional, material-discursive, and practice-oriented theorisations. Connecting the study of marketing and consumer behaviour to different theoretical perspectives on gender, the contributors explore and critically examine the gendered nature and dimensions of contemporary marketplace activity. Through innovative conceptual development and insightful empirical analyses, the book offers important scholarly contributions to the literature on gender, marketing, and consumer research, and advances our understanding of gender as lived experience and socially regulated performance. It also frequently employ an intersectionalist perspective, theorising gender as only a part of one's subject position, which is constituted by mutually reinforcing categories. The book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in the implications and contemporary manifestations of gender as a cultural category in the marketplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Taste is a core concept for the social sciences and an orienting notion in everyday practice. It is of equal relevance to academics and laypeople alike. Theorizations of taste are frequently multi- disciplinary, bringing an opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas and concepts. At the same time, a reader, challenged by the diverse body and dispersed nature of theories on taste, needs guidance navigating the literature and framing areas of interest. Until now, those interested in an academic perspective on the concept have had to traverse a wide range of literature. This is the first book that assembles a range of writings on taste from across disciplines to provide the reader with a sense of the emerging and expanding boundaries of this field of study. Taste, Consumption and Markets offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of taste, with an emphasis on how taste shapes boundaries, subcultures, and global culture, complemented by an introduction that provides a scaffold for the reader and a concluding section that reflects on the past, present, and future of research on taste. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to the sociology of taste and consumption and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of consumer studies, consumption ethics, sociological perspectives on consumption, and cultural studies.

This major reference book provides an authoritative analysis and survey of consumer research and economic psychology. It provides an international, in-depth overview of the present state of knowledge and theory which will be indispensable to students, researchers and practitioners. The Companion presents over 100 specially commissioned entries on important topics in consumer research and economic psychology from behaviourism and brand loyalty to trust and the psychology of tourism. Leading scholars in the fields provide stimulating insights into the area as well as summarising existing knowledge. Readers will find entries both on new topics that have rarely been considered in the framework of consumer research or economic psychology and on topics that have long been considered important in these disciplines. The book will ably meet the needs of undergraduate and graduate students in business administration, economics, marketing and psychology, as well as informing researchers and practitioners in those disciplines.

Series Information:
Routledge International Studies in Money and Banking

Consumer Value is one of the few books which attempts to define and analyse exactly what it is that consumers want. The theme of 'serving' the customer and customer satisfaction is central to every formulation of the marketing concept.
The major types of value are identified and related to one another through an innovative framework based around the following eight concepts:
* efficiency
* excellence
* status
* esteem
* play
* aesthetics
* ethics
* spirituality
With an international range of contributors and a highly individualistic approach, this book is guaranteed to provoke controversy.

As shoppers, what factors influence our decision to purchase an object or service? Why do we chose one product over another? How do we attribute value as part of the shopping experience?
The theme of 'serving' the customer and customer satisfaction is central to every formulation of the marketing concept, yet few books attenpt to define and analyse exactly what it is that consumers want. In this provocative collection of essays, Morris Holbrook brings together a team of the top US and European scholars to discuss an issue of great importance to the study of marketing and consumer behaviour.
This ground-breaking, interdisciplinary book provides an innovative framework for the study of consumer value which is used to critically examine the nature and type of value that consumers derive from the consumption experience - effiency, excellence, status, esteem, play, aesthetics, ethics, spirituality.
Guaranteed to provoke debate and controversy, this is a courageous, individualistic and idiosyncratic book which should appeal to students of marketing, consumer behaviour, cultural studies and consumption studies.

Series Information:
Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research

Consumer research has traditionally focused on issues of epistemology in the collection and analysis of data. As a consequence, the crisis in representation which has radically reshaped understanding in the social sciences, has, so far, had very little impact on consumer research. This book redresses the balance with an investigation of representation and constructions of 'truth' in consumer research. Subjects covered include:
* construction of the researcher and consumer voice
* quantitative tools and representation
* advertising narratives
* poetic representation of consumer experience
* the crisis in the crisis concept
* consumer-oriented ethnographic research.
The essays are written by experts from Britain and the United States and draw on a broad range of theoretical approaches.

How do customers decide what products and brands to buy? With the rise of sophisticated advertising and marketing research methods in this century, business leaders have spent billions of dollars attempting to answer this perplexing question. Occasionally, analysts emerge with suggestive trends, but ultimately with little hard evidence to support any definitive "laws" of customer choice.

Now, in this much-anticipated major work, Eric Marder reveals how universal patterns in survey responses lead not only to general principles in marketing but to empirically verifiable laws of human nature itself. Drawing on forty years of applying his pioneering experimental design techniques to marketing research surveys, Marder presents a global theory of choice behavior, supported by original data reported here for the first time from thousands of massive real-life experiments based on millions of interviews. His dramatic findings about pricing, optimal marketing tactics, product evaluation, the relative role of product and image, and advertising effectiveness will make this book required reading for the entire marketing community. Of special interest to social scientists and survey research practitioners will be Marder's powerful research designs and techniques, including the unbounded write-in scale for measuring desirability (attitude) and his methodological analyses of the relationships among beliefs (perceptions), desires, choice, and behavior.

In the Preface, he writes: "At the core of the theory are three laws of choice behavior the Law of Congruence, the Law of Primacy, and the Law of Persistence. These laws are both general and self-evident. At first glance, they are so self-evident that you might say: 'I have known this all along.' My reply is: 'Of course you have known it all along. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing, between the passive knowing that allows us to persist in actions that are inconsistent with what we know, and the active knowing that helps us change the way we do things.' I believe that knowing the laws of choice behavior-really knowing them -- changes the way we do things. My crass but stringent criterion has been that a good theory should enable someone equipped with it to make more money than someone who isn't. I believe my theory has passed this test."

In recent years the study of consumption has become one of the most important areas of knowledge in the social sciences. In business studies and marketing, the nature of consumer research has undergone a profound change. Postmodern perspectives which challenge and undermine previously held notions of consumer identity, belief and decision-making have radically altered our understanding of consumer practice and marketing theory. This volume is a collection of essays by exponents of postmodern consumer research from Europe and America. Topics covered include: chronicle, composition and fabulation in consumer research; postmodern approaches to pluralism in consumer research; marketing in cyberspace; poststructuralism in marketing; and semiotics in marketing and consumer research.

In recent years the study of consumption has become one of the most important areas of knowledge in the social sciences. In business studies and marketing, the nature of consumer research has undergone a profound change. Postmodern perspectives which challenge and undermine previously held notions of consumer identity, belief and decision-making have radically altered our understanding of consumer practice and marketing theory.
Consumer Research: Postcards from the Edge is a collection of cutting-edge essays by leading exponents of postmodern consumer research from Europe and America. Topics covered include:
* chronicle, composition and fabulation in consumer research
* postmodern approaches to pluralism in consumer research
* marketing in cyberspace
* poststructuralism in marketing
* semiotics in marketing and consumer research.
Original and ground-breaking, Consumer Research: Postcards from the Edge is an invaluable resource for all those interested in new directions in business and marketing.

Every marketer knows the stories of Lord Lever and Steve Jobs, has probably read Al Ries and Jack Trout, and seen the works of Bill Bernbach and John Hegarty. What's interesting about these 'Masters of Marketing' is that they are all men. In Katy Mousinho's and Giles Lury's Wonder Women are the stories of some of the women who have had a tremendous influence on the marketing industry, like Brownie Wise, who transformed Tupperware and Mary Wells Lawrence, who founded the advertising agency Wells, Rich, Greene. There are interviews with the co-founder of Dunnhumby, the data behind the Tesco Clubcard - Edwina Dunn OBE, Senior Vice President, Arla Foods Denmark, previously the only female country CEO in Carlsberg - Helle Muller Petersen and many more. Mousinho and Lury pull together the findings, not only to celebrate their success, but to provide insights for the future of marketing and the great marketers, women and men, to come.

This is a user-friendly textbook that covers qualitative, quantitative and social media methods, providing tourism, hospitality and events students and course leaders with an accessible guide for learning and teaching marketing research. The book contains essential information on how to conduct research on visitor trends, experiences, preferences and lifestyles, shedding light on customer preferences, product changes, promotional efforts and pricing differences to ensure the destination is successful. It offers guidance on how to write, conduct and analyze the results of surveys, or use qualitative methods such as focus groups, interviews, projective techniques and observation. It also illustrates how social media can be used as a new means to determine visitor preferences by analyzing online data and conversations. Other content includes suggestions and examples on turning research data into actionable recommendations as well as advice on writing and presenting the final report. Integrated with a wide range of case studies per chapter, this short and accessible textbook is essential reading for all students wishing to gain knowledge as to what visitors want from the travel, hospitality and/or event experience.

This is a user-friendly textbook that covers qualitative, quantitative and social media methods, providing tourism, hospitality and events students and course leaders with an accessible guide for learning and teaching marketing research. The book contains essential information on how to conduct research on visitor trends, experiences, preferences and lifestyles, shedding light on customer preferences, product changes, promotional efforts and pricing differences to ensure the destination is successful. It offers guidance on how to write, conduct and analyze the results of surveys, or use qualitative methods such as focus groups, interviews, projective techniques and observation. It also illustrates how social media can be used as a new means to determine visitor preferences by analyzing online data and conversations. Other content includes suggestions and examples on turning research data into actionable recommendations as well as advice on writing and presenting the final report. Integrated with a wide range of case studies per chapter, this short and accessible textbook is essential reading for all students wishing to gain knowledge as to what visitors want from the travel, hospitality and/or event experience.

Social Marketing: marketing in the service of societal problems. Does this approach represent dangerous social engineering, or is it the best hope we have to treat what are often regarded as intransigent problems? For both academics and practitioners involved with social marketing, the domain remains in its infancy. Programs and approaches are being developed and implemented by practitioners; academics are defining "what it is," "where it comes from," and "where it is going."
This book incorporates many of the presentations made at the "Role of Advertising in Social Marketing" Conference sponsored by the Society for Consumer Psychology. Professionals from academia, government, and non-government organizations address a highly diverse and interesting set of societal concerns ranging from organ donation to violence in sports, from efforts to promote safe sex and family planning to better understand cigarette smokers and their perceptions. Are marketing's "four Ps"--product, price, place, and promotion--enough to help solve these problems, or does social marketing at the end of the 1990s need to call on other Ps, such as political persuasion? This volume thoughtfully addresses theoretical and empirical issues challenging academics and practitioners alike to find out how to borrow the best of marketing for application in social marketing.

The Chinese electricity sector is the largest in the world, covering well over 20% of the world's electricity supply. While many other countries liberalized their electricity systems in the 1990s, thereby creating competitive wholesale and retail electricity markets, China's move towards liberalization has advanced at a slower pace - until now. Following the China State Council's publication of the No. 9 document on 'Deepening Reform of the Power Sector', this book reflects on the ambitious new round of reforms aimed at introducing competitive wholesale electricity markets and incentive regulation for its power grids. Written in collaboration with Hao Chen, Lewis Dale and Chung-Han Yang, this book provides lessons for China's reforms from international experience, combining a detailed review of reforms from around the world with specific application to China and focuses on how the industrial price of electricity is determined in a liberalized power system.

"Studying Audiences; The Shock of the Real" provides a critical overview of two decades of research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as "a new and exciting phase" in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of "ordinary people" watching television, combining interviews and participant observations with textual analysis of television programs.
In a comprehensive analysis of the origins and achievements of the "cultural studies audience experiment," Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morely's work on "Nationwide," Ien Ang's "Watching Dallas" and David Buckingham's study of "Eastenders" and its audience. Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies were challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a complex activity.

Studying the Audience: The Shock of the Real provides a critical overview of two decades of research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as `a new and exciting phase' in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of `ordinary people' watching television, combining interviews and participant observations with textual analysis of television programmes.
In a comprehensive analysis of the orgins and achievements of the `cultural studies audience experiment', Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley's work on Nationwide, Ien Ang's Watching Dallas and David Buckingham's study of Eastenders and its audience.
Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies were challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a complex activity.

How Your Business Can Use the Science That Helped Win the White House The average conversion rate the rate at which visitors convert into customers across the web is only 2%. That means it's likely that 98% of visitors to your website won't end up converting into customers. What's the solution? A/B testing. A/B testing is the simple idea of showing several different versions of a web page to live traffic, and then measuring the effect each version has on visitors. Using A/B testing, companies can improve the effectiveness of their marketing and user experience and, in doing so, can sometimes double or triple their conversion rates. Testing has been fundamental in driving the success of Google, Amazon, Netflix, and other top tech companies. Even Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had dedicated teams A/B testing their campaign websites during the 2012 Presidential race. In the past, marketing teams were unable to unleash the power of A/B testing because it required costly engineering and IT resources. Today, a new generation of technology that enables marketers to run A/B tests without depending on engineers is emerging and quickly becoming one of the most powerful tools for making data-driven decisions. Authors Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen are cofounders of Optimizely, the leading A/B testing platform used by more than 5,000 organizations across the world. A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers offers best practices and lessons learned from more than 300,000 experiments run by Optimizely customers. You'll learn: * What to test * How to choose the testing solution that's right for your organization * How to assemble an A/B testing dream team * How to create personalized experiences for every visitor * And much more Marketers and web professionals will become obsolete if they don't embrace a data-driven approach to decision making. This book shows you how, no matter your technical expertise.

In recent years, luxury goods markets have faced significant changes that have influenced both the dynamics of the competition, as well as their strategies. The principal changes include the following: new geographical market development, such as in the Far East, India, and some parts of Africa (these countries are added to a list of already relevant countries that are involved in luxury goods consumption, such as the Emirates, Russia, and South America); diffusion of new media and new technologies in communication, which is characterized by a high degree of interaction; the evolution of distribution channels is underway - these channels are moving towards new forms of integration that utilize both physical digital channels. This has forced firms to revise their strategies and implement multichannel marketing strategies to continue to operate in increasingly international markets that are characterized by increasingly more demanding and informed consumers. This book will enable readers to gain a clear insight into how the luxury goods market operates and amongst other things, focuses on: recent internet and social media strategies adopted by luxury companies and their brands; how luxury companies manage their communication and distribution channels to compete in the market and the impact of digital marketing on their competition; the main models of direct and indirect distribution in the digital channels; how consumers react to multichannel strategies; trends, social commerce and CSR and how luxury companies react; identifying the different social media strategies for luxury companies.

Market Research in Action is an examination of various marketing research techniques using a running case study based on a real product. The use of this device shows how research impacts on product development and the product launch, with particular reference to fast moving consumer goods. To demonstrate other marketing research techniques the author has added additional cases introducing a selection of techniques to show how these techniques are developed or used in different arenas, for instance while dealing with service products or marketing in a retail, international and B2B marketing environment.

This book demonstrates that marketing scholarship has much to contribute to our understanding of consumer vulnerability and potential solutions. It brings to the fore ways in which so-called vulnerable consumers navigate various marketplace and service interactions and develop specific consumer skills in order to empower themselves in such exchanges. It does so by exploring how consumer vulnerability is experienced across a range of different contexts such as poverty and disability, and the potential impact of vulnerability from childhood to old age. Other chapters extend focus from the consumer to the organisational perspective or consider more macro issues such as socio-spatial disadvantages. The fundamental aim of many of the contributors is to produce work that can benefit individual and societal well-being. They draw on various methodological approaches that generate both marketing management and policy-focused implications. A series of commentaries are also included to stimulate critical reflection and new insights into consumer vulnerability. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Context and Cognition in Consumer Psychology is concerned with the psychological explanation of consumer choice. It pays particular attention to the roles of perception and emotion in accounting for consumers' actions and their interaction with the desires and beliefs in terms of which consumer choice is frequently analyzed. In this engaging book, Gordon Foxall extends and elaborates his theory of consumer action, based on the philosophical strategy of Intentional Behaviorism. In doing so, he introduces the concept of contingency-representation to explore the ways in which consumers mentally represent the consequences of past decisions and the likely outcomes of present consumption. The emphasis is on action rather than behavior and the manner in which the intentional consumer-situation, as the immediate precursor of consumer choice, can be reconstructed in order to explain consumer actions in the absence of the environmental stimuli required by behaviorist psychology. The result is a novel reaffirmation of the role of cognition in the determination of consumer choice. Besides the concept of contingency-representation which the author introduces, the analysis draws upon psychoanalytic concepts, theories of cognitive structure and processing, and the philosophy of perception to generate a stimulating synthesis for consumer research. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in consumer behavior and economic psychology and to all who seek a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the contextual and cognitive interactions that guide choice in the market place.

The easy way to grasp customer analytics

Ensuring your customers are having positive experiences with your company at all levels, including initial brand awareness and loyalty, is crucial to the success of your business. "Customer Analytics For Dummies" shows you how to measure each stage of the customer journey and use the right analytics to understand customer behavior and make key business decisions.

"Customer Analytics For Dummies" gets you up to speed on what you should be testing. You'll also find current information on how to leverage A/B testing, social media's role in the post-purchasing analytics, usability metrics, prediction and statistics, and much more to effectively manage the customer experience. Written by a highly visible expert in the area of customer analytics, this guide will have you up and running on putting customer analytics into practice at your own business in no time.Shows you what to measure, how to measure, and ways to interpret the dataProvides real-world customer analytics examples from companies such as Wikipedia, PayPal, and WalmartExplains how to use customer analytics to make smarter business decisions that generate more loyal customersOffers easy-to-digest information on understanding each stage of the customer journey

Whether you're part of a Customer Engagement team or a product, marketing, or design professional looking to get a leg up, "Customer Analytics For Dummies" has you covered.