The present study develops and tests a conceptual model of consumer response to different types of price-matching characteristics (i.e., refund depth, length, and scope) across consumer segments with varying levels of price consciousness. A computer shopping simulation results show that a deep refund is interpreted as a signal of low prices by nonprice conscious consumers. However, price conscious consumers are found to associate deep refunds with increased prices, an unintended outcome for the retailer. The effects of price-matching characteristics on search and purchase behavior were also found to vary across more and less price conscious consumer segments.

The study investigates the effect of two characteristics of price-matching guarantees—the depth of refund offer and the scope of competitors eligible for price matching—on consumer perceptions of price-matching guarantee believability and value and consumer intentions to patronize the retailer. The results show that large refund offers built consumer patronage intentions by enhancing perceptions of the value of the price-matching guarantee, while simultaneously exerting a negative impact on patronage by reducing believability of the price-matching promise. The competitive scope also affected the patronage intentions by influencing the perceived value of the price-matching policy.

How different types of shopping trips influence consumer search and purchase behavior has long been of interest to marketing practitioners and scholars. The reliance of retailers on price specials to influence economic performance means gaining knowledge about linkages between shopping trip type and the consumer response to price specials is important. The present study examines how major shopping trips, fill-in shopping trips, and shopping primarily for price specials are associated with consumer specials search, purchases of price specials, coupon redemption, and retailer shopping basket profitability. The results show consumers visiting the store primarily to purchase price specials were more likely to read flyers and purchased more advertised price specials than consumers on other types of shopping trips. Major and fill-in shoppers were equally responsive to the retailer's promotions. The results also indicate retailer profitability was lowest for specials shoppers and highest for fill-in shoppers.

The typical Hi-Lo grocery retailer offers consumers thousands of price specials each week to build traffic and influence economic performance. Retailer reliance on price specials may engender heavy cross-category specials purchasing by shoppers. Retailers contend that high cross-category specials purchasing can damage profitability because many of the specials presented to consumers have reduced gross margins. The present study measures the level of cross-category specials purchasing in a Hi-Lo grocery market and develops and tests a model of the determinants of cross-category specials purchasing using shopping basket level data, information from surveys of shoppers, and retailer promotions. The results of the study show about 39% of all items purchased on a shopping trip were on special and that about 30% of consumers surveyed were highly sensitive to price specials, purchasing more specials than regular priced items on their shopping trip. The findings indicate that the consumer search behaviors, such as reading flyers, significantly affected the level of cross-category specials purchasing as did the demographic variable - household income. The study concludes with a series of practical implications for managers to help them gain profitable shopping baskets and set of implications for researchers interested in developing new insights on cross-category specials purchasing.

Category management (CM) is a recent retail management initiative that aims at improving a retailer's overall performance in a product category through more coordinated buying, merchandising, and pricing of the brands in the category than in the past. Despite tremendous retailer and manufacturer interest in the process of CM and its rapid adoption in the industry, much uncertainty exists about the consequences of CM for channel members. The present study focuses on how a shift to CM by a retailer affects its equilibrium prices, sales, and profitability in a competitive retail setting. On the basis of an analysis of a model of two competing national brand manufacturers that supply two competing common retailers, the authors find that one retailer's adoption of CM increases its average unit price of the category and reduces its sales volume and revenues. However, this retailer can still enjoy an increase in its gross margin profits as competing manufacturers' wholesale prices fall in the process. Also, the CM adopter's profits are greater than those of a symmetric competing retailer that follows the traditional brand-centered management of a product category when the interbrand competition is high but interstore competition is low. Applying the intervention analysis methodology, the authors empirically test several of these analytical findings, employing a unique data set that contains information about a supermarket chain's weekly average unit prices and sales of the laundry detergent category before and after this product category was moved to CM by the retailer. The propositions that adoption of CM will lead to higher retail prices and lower sales are upheld in this empirical study. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for practitioners and researchers, the limitations of the study, and directions for further research.

This article focuses on preannouncing and how consumer preferences are affected by new product preannouncements from competing firms. Elaboration likelihood, the discounting principle, and uncertainty effects are used to suggest how consumer preferences may form as a result of competing preannouncements. Undergraduate students participated in experiments that tested competing premmouncements in multiple product categories. Preferences for the product preannounced first versus the product preannounced second depended on initial reactions to the first preannouncement, information amount, and statements that engender or reduce uncertainty about product performance (p<0.05). Results offer preliminary insights on how preannouncements may be developed to encourage brand preference.

For products and services ranging from software to the latest motion picture, the use of new product preannouncements (NPPAs) has become commonplace. In the weeks and months (and perhaps years) before the release of a new product, a company may share information with various groups, including customers, competitors, and producers of complementary products. These prelaunch communications serve various purposes—for example, building interest for the new product, obtaining feedback from customers, or encouraging consumers to delay purchases until the new product becomes available. Despite the key role that NPPAs play in the successful release of new products, however, almost no research has been conducted to explore the proper timing for such communications.Bryan Lilly and Rockney Walters provide a starting point for these investigations, by describing the elements of an NPPA and presenting a model of the factors that influence NPPA timing. Drawing on existing research and interviews with managers from firms in a wide range of industries, they offer insights into the nature and the timing of NPPAs, and they provide recommendations for improving the effectiveness of NPPAs.Their conceptual model lists four sets of factors that affect NPPA timing: expected reactions of competitors; product‐related factors, such as the product's complexity and innovativeness; buyer‐related factors, such as the length of the buying process; and firm‐related factors, including final determination of the product's feature set. The relative strength of these effects depends on the objectives and the audience for the NPPA. For example, a late NPPA—that is, one close to the product's release date—effectively shields a new product from rapid competitive responses. On the other hand, an early NPPA allows channel members and customers to gain familiarity with complex or innovative products.Their findings suggest that early NPPAs are most appropriate for complex or highly innovative products as well as those that carry high, but avoidable switching costs for buyers. Late NPPAs are recommended if the firm expects sales of the new product to cannibalize those of existing products. Late NPPAs are also appropriate if a product's feature set is not yet frozen. To improve the effectiveness of NPPAs, managers must clearly define their objectives and carefully match the timing and the content of the NPPA to the target audience.

Our study relates product category price elasticities to factors associated with the product being promoted and the product's promotional history. Examining product category elasticities is relevant because category management techniques are playing an increasingly important role in the promotional and merchandising activities of retailers and packaged goods manufacturers. We developed and tested a cross-section model using 52 weeks of scanner data and company records from a large supermarket chain. We hypothesized that brand market share, shelf space allocation, and product type (national brand or store brand) would have a positive impact on product category elasticities, whereas brand price, frequency of promotion, frequency of product display, and the bulkiness of the brand would have a negative effect on product category price elasticities. We found product-specific factors, such as brand market share and price, had a significant impact on category elasticity, whereas most of the promotion-related factors, including the frequency and magnitude of price specials, did not affect category elasticities. Our results offer retailers and manufacturers the opportunity to influence category sales through recognition of brand-level differences.

Packaged goods manufacturers develop and introduce several different types of new products including innovations, "me-too" prodcuts, and line extensions. The authors build a theoretical model to help understand the retailer new product acceptance process for different types of new products. Factors influencing retailer acceptance of new packaged goods were identified and tested. Statistical comparisons of factors were performed across different types of new products and within a particular type of new product to develop a relative ranking of the most influential factors. The results show that many of the factors affecting retailer acceptance of different types of new products are under the control of the manufacturer. The results also show that the retailer new product acceptance process varied significantly from one type of new product to another. Implications for theory and practice, and directions for future research, are discussed.

Previous research has found that dissatisfied consumers choose to seek redress, engage in negative word-of-mouth behavior, and exit (i.e., vow never to repatronize the retailer) based upon the perceived likelihood of successful redress, their attitude toward complaining, the level of importance they attach to the defective product, and whether they perceive the problem to be stable or to have been controllable. The authors extend previous research by modeling consumer complaining behavior as a complex, dynamic process, hypothesizing that once a consumer seeks redress, negative word-of-mouth behavior and repatronage intentions are dependent (primarily) upon the consumer's post-complaint perception of justice. As hypothesized, perceived justice was found to be the main determinant of complainants' negative word-of-mouth behavior and their repatronage intentions, and was found to mediate the effects of likelihood of success, attitude toward complaining, product importance, and stability and controllability on complaining behavior. The model fit the data very well, explaining 49.1 percent of the variance of negative word-of-mouth and 68.5 percent of the variance of repatronage intentions. These findings point to the importance of customer service/customer satisfaction, especially since the cost of keeping a current customer satisfied is much less than the cost of attracting a new customer.

This article develops a conceptual model to help explain the strength of competitive reactions to new product introductions and presents the findings from a preliminary empirical investigation of this model. Being able to explain the strength of competitive reactions to new product introductions is important, as such reactions often determine a product's success or failure in the marketplace. To explain these reactions Oliver Heil and Rockney Walters investigate competitive market signals associated with new product introductions and the reactions of competing firms to the signals. The authors empirically test the hypothesized linkages among three market signals-hostility, consequences and commitment-and competitive reactions using primary data collected from a large number of US corporations. The empirical results show that the market signaling variables explain a significant portion of the variance in the perceived strength of competitive reactions to new product introductions. The study has implications for managers introducing new products and for researchers studying new product introductions and competition.

The author investigates the impact of retail price promotions on consumer purchasing patterns and the performance of competing retailers. A conceptual framework for retail promotional effects that includes brand substitution effects, interstore sales displacements, and the effects of promotions on complementary goods is developed. The framework is tested with store-level scanner data. Results are generally supportive of the framework and show that retail price promotions created significant complementary and substitution effects within the store. Interstore promotional effects also were detected in several cases as the promotions of products in one store significantly decreased sales of substitutes and complements in a competing store. Implications of the results for retail and manufacturer promotional strategies are discussed and several directions for future research are offered.

It has long been a belief that marketing has a positive effect on quality of life by delivering material well-being. Furthernore, many marketing scholars urge that greater emphasis be placed on marketing in developing countries to improve the quality of life. This conventional wisdom has not been investigated empirically because of inadequate conceptualizations of the relationship between marketing and the quality of life and because of the lack of necessary measurements. In the present study, these conceptualizations and measurements have been supplied, and a model utilizing a satisfaction/dissatisfaction framework has been developed and tested. According to the model, an individual's satisfaction with different domains of life (for example, work life, material possessions) has a significant positive effect on his or her overall satisfaction with life (quality of life). Data obtained from residents of the developing country of Thailand were used to test the hypotheses. Results of the study show that satisfaction with three domains-Family Life, Material Possessions, and Self-development-has a significant positive impact on overall life satisfaction. Additional findings and implications for government, business, and marketing researchers are presented, along with directions for future research.

proposes that who have more knowledge about their buyers give more effective presentations. Addresses this issue by examining the evaluative criteria held by different functional roles represented in the decision‐making unit, how those criteria differ across the various roles, and howknowledge of this can be incorporated into sales training programs to give salespeople more information on their customers and help them be more effective during the sales interaction.