Journal of Marketing Research

Women's time horizons in evaluating product concepts (birth control devices) were varied experimentally. The variations produced changes in the linearity and complexity of the evaluation strategies used, and in the emphasis given to specific factors. Loss-averse and fairly complex evaluation strategies were used by women who made leisurely purchase intent judgments when consumption seemed imminent. Those who made hasty judgments were somewhat more loss-averse and used simpler evaluation strategies. Those who thought consumption was a distant event used simple evaluation strategies that were not loss-averse. The implications of these findings for modeling consumer choice strategies and for predicting choices on the basis of concept-evaluation studies are discussed.

Literature pertaining to the effects of age differences indicates that elderly individuals and younger adults process information differently. Age differences result in a complex set of changes in individuals’ sources of information, ability to learn, and susceptibility to social influence. The implications of these changes are discussed in terms of marketing practice, theory, and methodology.

Several estimation procedures are outlined for testing the common assumption that the distributions of purchase probabilities for a brand are independent of product class purchase frequency. Empirical data for 15 brands in three product classes were used for testing. The results indicate an important departure from independence for many brands. A frequency dependent Dirichlet distribution is proposed and appears to provide an improved description of how purchase probabilities are related to product class purchase frequency.

Young college women who are “independent” and who express profeminist attitudes are shown not to react significantly differently to women's roles in advertisements from women who are not “independent” and do not express profeminist attitudes, or from an intermediate group called “neutrals.” Some implications for advertisers are discussed.

Test-retest correlations often are reported as measures of the reliability of copy testing procedures with little or no attention to the conditions under which such an interpretation is meaningful. Some checks are suggested for assessing the consistency of test-retest data with certain requirements which should be met if a test-retest correlation is to serve as reliability index. Ambiguities and shortcomings of many available reliability estimates are discussed.

A Delphi procedure is used to develop and calibrate dimensions of marketing models which may be expected to relate to the likelihood that a marketing model will be accepted by marketing managers. The resulting framework, calibrated with 10 reference models over four Delphi iterations, is used to analyze four additional models.

The effects of price and advertising expenditures on new-product sales are examined across four test-market experiments. All experiments involved two levels of advertising expenditure tested across cities and two or three price levels tested across stores within city. Mean sales results over a 24–week period are reported for each treatment combination. Analysis of variance results are interpreted as supporting a negative price main effect, a positive advertising main effect, a negative price-advertising interaction, and significant but variable time effects. Assessments of these results in terms of design adequacy and their implications for alternative theoretical explanations are offered.

Two common assumptions about advertising-selling interactions are challenged by a field experiment. The generality of “advertising paves the way for selling” is questioned by results showing selling-before-advertising to be more effective than advertising-before-selling. “Salesmen are born not made” is questioned because the easily learned “labeling” technique markedly increased selling effectiveness and its interaction with advertising.

Despite continuing research effort, little success has been achieved in the use of personality and personal characteristics to predict the performance of salesmen. From an empirical study, a set of personality variables and personal characteristics that appear to have value in the selection of industrial salesmen are identified. A synthesis of theoretical and empirical research appropriate to the selection problem is reported, and some suggestions are made to guide future research in industrial selling.

The influence of attitudinal similarities on the dyadic interaction of salesmen and their prospects was examined with particular attention to the unsold prospect. Unsold prospects differed significantly from salesmen and sold prospects on all variables, and perceived role congruence was found to be the major discriminator of unsold prospects.

A considerable amount of social science research suggests an individual's initial perception of and reaction to another individual are affected by the physical attractiveness of the other person. The authors attempt to assess whether this general finding applies to people's perceptions of advertisements. Specifically, they assess the impact of attractiveness of male and female models on subjects’ evaluations of ads, and seek to determine whether the reactions depend on the sex of the ad reader or on the type of product being advertised.

Several authors have suggested evaluation of marketing research information by Bayesian analysis. This suggestion is based on two assumptions: (1) the marketing manager is able to supply valid inputs for the analysis and (2) the essence of the evaluation problem can be captured in the Bayesian analysis framework. This note is a review of recent studies into behavioral decisionmaking that challenge these two assumptions.

Important conceptual-definitional and empirical issues previously have been raised with regard to information overload in the consumer context. The primary purpose of this rejoinder is to highlight points of agreement and disagreement and thus bring closer a resolution of the issues.

An industrial goods manufacturer, The Hansen Manufacturing Company, has successfully measured the sales performance of its industrial distributors by a method based on the determination of territory sales potentials. This note illustrates why and how the method was developed and applied for Hansen.

An objective procedure is advanced by which to transform customer dot distributions into well-defined and bounded market areas.

In the presence of multicollinearity in data, the estimation of parameters or regression coefficients in marketing models by means of ordinary least squares may give inflated estimates with a high variance and wrong signs. The authors demonstrate the potential usefulness of the ridge regression analysis to handle multicollinearity in marketing data.

Refusals and not-at-homes generally are assumed to be independent sources of bias in survey research. The validity of that assumption was studied empirically and a typology of interaction for the two sources of error is presented.

Bass and Wittink cite Wallace's “weaker” criteria to justify pooling data that fail to meet the conventional homogeneity test. They did not, however, actually conduct the test. If they had, they would have found pooling to be inappropriate even under the weaker criteria.

The likelihood ratio test is presented as a natural method to test for the presence of “always buy” and “never buy” consumers. The purchase sequence lengths and sample sizes required to estimate the proportions of these buyers are determined by the use of simulated data. The method also is applied to two sets of well-known data. The empirical findings show that although more than half of the consumers never bought a given brand, the specific addition of a spike at p = 0 to provide for “never buy” consumers did not provide a superior fit over the no-spike model. The method also applies to advertising reach and frequency models used to estimate or detect the presence of “always read (watch)” and “never read (watch)” individuals.

Study findings suggest that a modified rank order procedure may be superior to the anchor point procedure in gathering data for nonmetric multidimensional scaling studies. The rating scale method proved to be significantly faster than the anchor point method, yet it did not yield significantly less accurate results.

Response rates, item omissions, response patterns, personality characteristics, and job performance were tested for relationships to anonymity on questionnaires mailed to the salesmen of a national organization. No significant differences were found between the identified group and the anonymous group.