Journal of Marketing

Products, like men, are mortal. They flourish for a time, then decline and die.

While the death of a man is catastrophic in the sense that it occurs at a specific point in time, that of a product tends to be an indefinite process that may continue until its last user forgets that it ever existed and so will no longer try to buy it.

Professor R. S. Alexander presents a thoughtful and practical plan for selecting products for elimination; gathering information about them; making decisions about them; and, if necessary, removing the doomed products from the line.

If “marketing man” is a stilted, undignified, and archaic term for those engaged in marketing work— as the author of this article claims—what can be done about it?

How about a new name for marketing practitioners and teachers?

What is it that really constitutes a store's “image”? How do downtown department stores and suburban department stores differ in imagery?

Here are the highlights of a study of the shopping attitudes of 4,500 women shoppers — the different types of appeal in department stores, the different customer characteristics, differences in shopping behavior, and differences between the imagery of suburban branch department stores and their “parent” stores in the city.

An extensive exchange of letters between Professor J. Hart Walters, Jr., and various Polish economists resulted in a first-hand study of marketing in Poland for almost one year.

Drawing on his first-hand experiences in Poland, as well as documentary sources, the author shows why low costs of doing business in Poland are not always accompanied by a high degree of consumer convenience. As in other Eastern European economies, Polish retailing is relatively decentralized, but many major areas of decision-making are centrally controlled.

Although there is a very limited market for durable goods in Chile, there is considerable competition among retail merchants. Variations in price and finance charges are reported in the present study.

The general pattern of cyclical fluctuations in advertising has become familiar today. But what remains less well understood is how one type of advertising may behave differently from others. A better insight into this subject will help media in reducing business instability and to assist advertisers in planning effective advertising strategies.

This article demonstrates how differently advertisers of different types of products and of various sizes react to business fluctuations.

In the Soviet Union's planned society where the means of production and distribution are government and Party monopolies, commercial advertising would appear to be superfluous. Official Soviet policy has always spurned advertising as economic waste and has at times denounced advertising and other “bourgeois capitalistic” devices as competition, production differentiation, and installment buying.

Why, then, is commercial advertising “catching on” in the Soviet Union and changing established marketing practices?

This article traces and evaluates the rise of this surprising new development in the leading Communist state.

Every year hundreds of thousands of graduates of American colleges and universities enter business, with almost no knowledge of international business relationships. How can marketing educators help to correct this deficiency?

The author of this article has a very practical suggestion, based on the development of a different type of course in basic marketing.

How can marketing managers develop sound alternative marketing strategies and forecast their relative effectiveness?

Simulation techniques may be the answer. Although these techniques and the methods of analysis may not be familiar to most marketing men, their potential usefulness is demonstrated in this article.

Determination of the cost implications of alternate field procedures and sample designs has been a thorny problem for those conducting field surveys.

This article shows how computer simulation can provide a fast, accurate, and inexpensive solution to these kinds of problems.

Repeated interviews with the same households are often conducted in surveys. Does this repeated interviewing affect the behavior and reports of the respondents?

The answer has important implications for survey design. This article provides some evidence on the effects of repeated interviewing in a household expenditures survey.

Is industrial marketing research really as simple and straightforward as it is made out to be? Is there more to it than just “freewheeling” interviews with a few hand-picked respondents? Why is there so little published about industrial marketing research? Why is methodology so lacking in industrial marketing research?

Here are some answers to these questions by a Dutch marketing specialist.

There are many situations that make one kind of sales organization preferable to another, but what is the industrial buyer's preference? Does it matter to the industrial buyer whether a salesman is a manufacturer's representative or a direct company man?

The results of a survey in the electronic components' industry indicate some possible answers.

Prospects easy to approach and who provide the most pleasant company are not necessarily those most likely to purchase.

A method is described here for determining whether salesmen are spending disproportionate effort on the approachable prospects.

This is a pointed criticism of an article in a recent issue of the JOURNAL OF MARKETING that described a method used in cutting the refusal rate of respondents.

A recent article by James O. Peckham in the JOURNAL OF MARKETING entitled “The Consumer Speaks” was of considerable interest to many readers.

With real concern over the possibility that the Peckham article might be given too great acceptance, the author of the present article raises several questions about the conclusions reached.

This is James O. Peck-ham's reply to John L. Mason's reply (see the preceding pages, 68–69) to Mr. Peckham's article, “The Consumer Speaks.”