Four research traditions on the effects of advertising are identified, and one of them—the tradition of macroeconomic studies—is carefully differentiated from the other three. A review of this macro tradition is undertaken to retrace the kinds of questions raised about the macro effects of advertising, evaluate the statistical procedures used to ascertain the causal nature of macro advertising relationships, and specify the ideal research design for studying advertising macro effects. Moving toward the implementation of this design, the authors present and interpret the findings from the first stage of their work. Emphasis is on the relevance of macro studies for public policy makers (legislators, regulators, and courts), whose decisions affect the life of the advertising institution, and for those advertisers, agencies, and media that can understand and apply the implications of the information provided by macro studies.

The marketing literature has overlooked the problem of designing optimal organizational structures for marketing management. The study of this problem is crucial and pressing. Some relationships are proposed between the information generated by the market environment and the ability of the organization of a marketing department to process this information. Insights and opportunities for future conceptual and empirical work are provided.

The study of some psychological processes has become the main focus of consumer research; consequently, there has been a tendency to overlook the societal context in which consumers operate. The Authors focus on several characteristics of societies which affect individual consumers, and suggest new research directions which delineate the domain of a sociology of consumption and its potential contributions to private and public policy makers.

Based on testimony presented to the Federal Trade Commission in 1971 by corporate executives, the following conclusions can be drawn: that extreme uncertainty envelops advertising management decisions in every firm; that regulators and other government employees do not appreciate the presence of this uncertainty nor do they understand the mechanisms that cause it; and that regulations are failing in their attempts to guide advertising management.

In this detailed discussion of Kelvin Lancaster's Consumer Demand: A New Approach, the author shows how Lancaster's analysis of consumption technology is probably the first instance of economic theory generating "heterogeneity" with behavioralists.

Biometrics and psychometrics have developed a variety of methods to derive empirically clusters or types of variables, objects, or subjects. These empirical classificatory methods have been applied to data at one point in time---they have been used for static analyses. An extension is presented to the case of dynamic analyses, that is, the empirical identification of subjects with different time changes in one or more observed characteristics and their grouping based on sufficient similarity of time changes. Two management applications of the extension are given, the first dealing with behavioral, and the second with behavioristic, data.

This article presents a new method of empirical classification, shows how it is used to develop a consumer typology, and tests the sensitivity of the typology to various changes in assumptions, operations, and procedures. These operational effects are considered from the viewpoint of their significance in typology generation and for the long-run potential of classification methods and procedures in marketing and market segmentation.

Although there has been a growth in the amount of social science dealing with consumers, for the most part sociologists have not been concerned with the study of the AGGREGATE behavior of consumers. Here is a discussion of some of the ways that sociological theories and methods may contribute toward the prediction and explanation of aggregate consumption behavior.