<p> The value of customer loyalty to business sustainability should not be taken lightly. Research shows that loyal customers are more profitable than non-loyal customers. Indeed, this study found that loyal supermarket customers shop more often and spend more when shopping. Retaining customers makes good business sense and costs less than attracting new ones. Negligible switching costs and the quest for value strain the loyalty relationship between supermarkets and their primary shoppers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify how the independent variables of value (price, quality, service, convenience, and assortment) contribute to customer loyalty among supermarket customers. The research design for this study was quantitative non-experimental. Data for the study was collected from an electronic email invite through Survey Monkey. With a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of +/-5%, the targeted sample size was 384, with a final filtered total of 354 usable surveys. Multiple linear regression and Spearman rho correlation techniques were used to determine significance of data collected to customer loyalty. Results from this study indicate that quality has the greatest effect on customer loyalty. However, significant interaction and modifying effects were also detected, indicating that predictors of loyalty should not be examined in isolation. Collectively, data from this study indicated that as quality, service, assortment, loyalty programs, and high quality perishables increased, loyalty also tended to increase.</p>

<p> Dentists graduate dental school ready to practice dentistry, but 85% do not feel prepared by the dental school to open and manage the operations of a general dental practice. General systems theory grounded this multisite case study. The research provides information on 3 solo practitioner dental practices that sustained beyond 5 years in the Washington, DC suburbs. At each operating practice, the dentist who owned the practice and 1 employee that also worked at the practice during the first 5 years were interviewed. The dentist provided marketing documents used during the first 5 years of the practice operations. Data triangulation was used to ensure the trustworthiness of the analysis of the data from the interviews and documents collected. The data collected was analyzed using coding, establishing nodes, and creating mind maps to identify 5 themes. The themes included working hard to provide dental care and relieve pain, marketing to ensure potential patients had the practice contact information when they needed it, learning continuously to improve the practice operations, putting patient&rsquo;s health before practice profits, and minimizing debt. The implications for positive social change for residents of the Washington, DC suburbs include the potential to receive the needed dental care and pain relief they need because dentists who learn from this research will stay late and return to their practice to treat patients who found the dentist&rsquo;s contact information from their marketing. The implications for positive social change for owners of dental practices include building a sustainable dental practice by implementing these research findings that include working hard, marketing, continuous learning, putting patients health first, and minimizing debt.</p>

<p> Business-to-business (B2B) marketing involves several components including the marketing management decision-making process and the buying behaviors of the B2B clientele and the end users. Disregarding customer knowledge management (CKM) and inaccurate analysis of data cost companies billions of dollars per year. The objective of this exploratory single-case study was to develop an in-depth analysis of the problem that some marketing managers have limited knowledge of how to use CKM strategies to improve B2B customer engagement. The dynamic capabilities and technological opportunism theories comprised the study&rsquo;s conceptual framework. Data collection consisted of participant observations, member checking, and semistructured interviews with 4 Dallas-based, managers at various levels of responsibility within a single B2B company. The data analysis entailed using an adaptation of Giorgi&rsquo;s systematic text condensation and inductive coding techniques of reoccurring themes. The themes that emerged indicated a need to improve marketing strategies. These themes included developing a division wide marketing plan, devising a CKM tool, and initiating organization wide CKM protocols and training. Beneficiaries of this research are marketing managers, marketing practitioners, organizational strategy and policy makers, and students of business administration. Implications for social change include specifying the strategies that business leaders need to improve sustainability.</p>

This paper expands the study of automatic processing in the marketing literature. An empirical study was designed to test for automatic inference making due to pictorial or verbal advertisements and prior product knowledge. The theory developed in this thesis suggests that certain factors, high product knowledge and pictorial processing, will result in the accumulation of information in memory. This, in turn, yields easier processing of new information, which signifies a reduction in the attention and effort needed for processing the new information. Finally, the reduction of effort reflects a decrease in the amount of time needed for processing. Therefore, response latencies served as a direct measure of automatic processing in this thesis. Findings indicated that pictures in ads are likely to result in more automatic inference making than verbal information alone. Therefore, automaticity has the potential to explain some of the information processing that occurs in advertising and marketing.

<p> In the 21^st century, prospective undergraduate students decreasingly identified with a particular denomination, and this impacted the marketing of faith-based institutions. These prospects and their parents also were increasingly price-conscious, so the faith-based universities were competing against lower-priced public universities and community colleges. The problem addressed in this qualitative, multiple case study was that marketing executives at faith-based universities who failed to implement marketing performance measurement systems could not adequately measure marketing effectiveness or determine whether marketing activities affected the organization&rsquo;s performance. The purpose of this study was to explore how marketing executives at three faith-based universities in the Midwestern United States were measuring the performance of their marketing activities and how they compared these marketing metrics to indicators of organizational performance. Face-to-face interviews were held with nine participants, who had executive marketing responsibilities at three different faith-based universities. University websites and IPEDS reports were analyzed in order to achieve triangulation. The findings supported the literature that quantitatively measuring marketing performance was difficult. Measures, such as enrollment numbers or dollars raised, could only sometimes be linked to particular marketing campaigns. As was shown in the literature, the faith-based university marketers who had limited knowledge of their marketing performance measurement were unable to justify all of their marketing expenditures and could not necessarily make a case for these marketing activities&rsquo; relationship to the performance of their institution. The emergent themes from the face-to-face interviews all supported the literature, which underscored the importance of using marketing performance measurement to justify budget requests. The findings from the case study and literature showed that faith-based institutions were found to be more at risk to suffer from decreased or stagnant enrollment, because they could not compete with community colleges or public universities on price. By expanding on the results of this study, the self-designed interview questions could be used with other higher education marketing executives. Practical applications of this study and recommendations for future research were presented as they would benefit marketing executives in faith-based higher education as well as those in private and public higher education, in general, and in the business environment.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the antecedents and reinforcements of fairtrade purchase intention and to examine the effect of reporting good fairtrade practices on consumers&rsquo; punishment behavior. A stratified sample of 240 English-speaking, American, adult subjects was collected online. </p><p> First, the Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM) (Foxall, G., 2007) was modified and four manipulations varying luxury/commodity product type and open/closed purchase settings were presented. The results of paired-sample t-tests demonstrated closed purchase settings did not increase luxury purchase intention by itself. A split-plot ANOVA combining closed setting and the participant&rsquo;s fairtrade learning history did not produce significant results, but post-hoc testing revealed a significant effect of positive learning history on purchase intention. Two separate, repeated-measures ANOVA found that utilitarian reinforcement was not affected by purchase setting, but informational reinforcement was significantly increased by the presence of others.</p><p> Second, four manipulations of good/bad press events were presented without/without the firm&rsquo;s fairtrade performance history mentioned in a news article. A two-way, between-subjects ANOVA produced insignificant results for the effect of information on willingness to pay. Importantly, the type of event significantly affected willingness to pay, accounting for 18% of the variation, with positive events generating higher willingness to pay than negative, regardless of whether fairtrade performance information was included. </p><p> This study suggested firms would benefit from including cues for the social reward aspect of luxury fairtrade purchasing in marketing efforts and from preventing missteps rather than bragging about past practices. Future research suggestions included further analyzing the effect of information on punishment of bad corporate actors, investigating the credibility of self-declaration of fairtrade certification versus independent certification labels, and incorporating the effect of culture into the BPM.</p>

<p> The martial arts industry is experiencing a period of immense growth, which has created a highly competitive environment where challenges in attracting and retaining customers cause substantial losses and an inability to compete effectively. Customer memberships are the primary revenue source for firms in the fitness services industry. Understanding buyer motivation is essential for marketing message creation and product development to attract and retain customers. The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory, single-case study was to investigate parent purchase motivation for children&rsquo;s martial arts classes and to document internal buying motives in order to address the problem of acquiring and retaining customers in the commercialized martial arts industry. The qualitative, exploratory, single-case study consisted of seven parents with 6- to 12-year-old children enrolled in a martial arts school in Lakeway, Texas; two instructors working with the children and parents; and two owners of the school responsible for marketing. The data collection methods were semistructured interviews comprising open-ended questions that were audio-recorded. Interviews were analyzed using NVivo^&reg; qualitative analysis software, which was used for coding and identifying themes. The semistructured interviews helped identify 10 themes. Seven of the themes validate and expand upon current themes discussed in the literature. Three new themes&mdash;ease of participation, alternative to team sports, and convenience&mdash;were uncovered. The findings of the study contribute to the theory of planned behavior, as well as other theories used to predict behavior, and may be used to predict purchase behavior. Recommendations for practice include refinements of product offerings and marketing messages and the creation of a new marketing segment, resulting in business alignment with customers and increased ability to attract and retain customers for commercialized martial arts schools, which is one of the largest challenges in the fitness industry. Future research is recommended to replicate this study in other geographies, to use the data gathered in this study to seed qualitative research studies, and to weigh the relative influence of the three types of behaviors influencing intention in the theory of planned behavior.</p>

The objective of this dissertation was to explore the relative effectiveness of color versus black and white magazine advertisements in a set of controlled and specified, competitive environmental conditions. In order to achieve this objective, an experiment was designed which utilized a variation of the portfolio method of testing the relative effectiveness of advertisements. The portfolio employed consisted of eleven advertisements from Business Week magazine, and advertising effectiveness was determined by measurement of advertising awareness utilizing the memory variable of recall. The criterion for awareness was successful recollection of the brand name of the product featured in the test advertisement. The proportions of each sample who correctly remembered the test advertisement were subjected to hypotheses tests concerning difference between two proportions. Also, the nonparametric Spearman rank correlation coefficient was employed to determine if a systematic relationship could be found between the advertising effectiveness of a particular advertisement and the percentage of competing advertisements in color. / In nine of the eleven specified environmental conditions the color version of the test advertisement achieved a higher proportion of correct recalls than did the black and white version. However, in most instances the difference between the two proportions was not found to be statistically significant. In the test for the presence of a systematic relationship between the advertising effectiveness of a particular advertisement and the percentage of competing advertisements in color, visual inspection of the data suggested a systematic decline in effectiveness for either the black and white or color test advertisement as the percentage of color advertisements in the competitive environment increased, but the relationship was not strong enough to attain statistical significance. / The practice of advertising contains many "guidelines" which have not been subjected to analysis with regard to their present-day usefulness. This experiment has explored the adage that "color ads attract more attention than black and white ads." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-02, Section: A, page: 0535. / Thesis (D.B.A.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The present study is an examination of the variables influencing lottery sales in the state of Colorado. Specifically, the present study focuses on the unique influence of newspaper, radio, and television publicity on Lotto sales in the state of Colorado. Also, radio advertising, television advertising, distribution, and jackpot size are included as additional independent variables in the present study. / In order to test the hypotheses in the present study, several time series regression equations are specified and calculated. Recognizing the potential cumulative or carryover effect for each of the independent variables examined, each regression equation is calculated via the Koyck specification, which describes a relationship in which the influence of the independent variables on sales decays geometrically with time. / Finally, the relationships between each of the independent variables and Lotto sales are graphically depicted, and the managerial and behavioral science implications of the results are examined. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-04, Section: A, page: 1463. / Major Professor: Richard W. Mizerski. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

Over the past few years marketers have paid increasing attention to the consumer involvement construct. While many papers have been written on the conceptualization, measurement, and modeling of consumer involvement, confusion still exists on the conceptualization of consumer involvement. An accurate conceptualization of involvement is needed in order to develop theories of involvement, measure involvement, and model involvement. The following paper conceptualizes involvement based on a past literature review of involvement and uses a theory of motivation to suggest what the underlying mechanisms of involvement are. Further, measures of involvement antecedents are empirically determined. Lastly, a LISREL model of involvement is tested with measures of involvement, empirically determined involvement antecedents, and involvement consequents determined from an extensive literature review. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-07, Section: A, page: 2653. / Major Professor: Ronald E. Goldsmith. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.