Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Marketing - Research

Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities.

Death in a Consumer Culture presents the broadest array of research on the topic of death and consumer behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. Organised into five sections covering: The Death Industry; Death Rituals; Death and Consumption; Death and the Body; and Alternate Endings, the...

The collection explores how sentiment and relation are organised internally in consumer markets. While tackling market action sociologically simply by adding a little more soul to economic agents has been widely critiqued for neglecting the ways economic practices necessarily contain sentimental and social elements, questions remain about the way these elements are organised to create market attachment. The contributors explore the tools and techniques used to work with sentiment, aesthetics and relationships in strategies of, for example, website optimization, digital algorithms, personal...

This second edition of Brand Meaning lays out new territory for the understanding of how brands both acquire and provide meaning. The author draws on his experience with leading international companies to propose a compelling framework for the conscious and unconscious ways in which people connect with products and brands. Revised and updated, it contains contemporary as well as classic examples of brand meaning in practice from various countries, and expands on the theory, methods and applications of brand meaning. The book s multidisciplinary approach and concise yet comprehensive...

This second edition of Brand Meaning lays out new territory for the understanding of how brands both acquire and provide meaning. The author draws on his experience with leading international companies to propose a compelling framework for the conscious and unconscious ways in which people connect with products and brands. Revised and updated, it contains contemporary as well as classic examples of brand meaning in practice from various countries, and expands on the theory, methods and applications of brand meaning. The book s multidisciplinary approach and concise yet comprehensive...

The pricing profession has come a long way: from having a pure clerical function back in the 1970s to a more strategic one today, pricing professionals are increasingly accepted as fully fledged members of marketing and finance teams. However, in many of these organizations, pricing professionals are often misunderstood and neglected from a career and talent perspective. Furthermore, the literature is still silent on how to manage and develop pricing teams.

Pricing and Human Capital explores the specific nature of pricing human resources and focuses on how to manage pricing...

Asia is no longer simply the continent to which the world turns for outsourcing and off shoring of production, leaving retailing to Western countries. Asia now contains many of the world's largest markets plus many emergent markets as well. North America is fast ceding ground to China as the world's largest economic power. Europe has been able to make productivity gains from trade, fiscal and monetary harmonization to remain globally competitive while Africa, whose nations practice free trade, is largely ignored both in terms of forgiving debt and providing further credit.

The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vasquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on...

Tony the Tiger. The Pillsbury Doughboy. The Michelin Man. The Playboy bunny. The list of brand mascots, spokes-characters, totems and logos goes on and on and on.

Mascots are one of the most widespread modes of marketing communication and one of the longest established. Yet, despite their ubiquity and utility, brand mascots seem to be held in comparatively low esteem by the corporate cognoscenti. This collection, the first of its kind, raises brand mascots' standing, both in an academic sense and from a managerial perspective.

Featuring case studies and empirical analyses...

Reflecting a growing interest in consumption practices, and particularly relating to food, this cross disciplinary volume brings together diverse perspectives on our (often taken for granted) domestic mealtimes.

By unpacking the meal as a set of practices - acquisition, appropriation, appreciation and disposal - it shows the role of the market in such processes by looking at how consumers make sense of marketplace discourses, whether this is how brand discourses influence shopping habits, or how consumers interact with the various spaces of the market. Revealing food consumption through...

Ethical consumerism is on the rise. No longer bound to the counter-cultural fringes, the concerns and practices of ethical consumerism are reaching into the mainstream of society and are increasingly being adopted by mainstream consumers. Interest in ethical consumption is not limited to those seeking to practise it. This burgeoning movement is drawing the attention of academics, activist organisations, government bodies, journalists, media, celebrities, primary industry, manufacturing sectors, and retailers. Increasing awareness of the ethics of consumption, visibility of the consequences...

This book begins with a review of basic results in optimal search for a stationary target. It then develops the theory of optimal search for a moving target, providing algorithms for computing optimal plans and examples of their use. Next it develops methods for computing optimal search plans involving multiple targets and multiple searchers with realistic operational constraints on search movement. These results assume that the target does not react to the search. In the final chapter there is a brief overview of mostly military problems where the target tries to avoid being found as well...

Written at a time when the needs and influence of the consumer within the economic system were in their infancy, this book offers a valuable insight into the birth of consumer-led economics an integral part of social structure and economic theory.