Editorial

Citation

Leventhal, R.C. (2006), "Editorial", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2006.07723aaa.001

Editorial

The globalisation of the study of the consumer in the marketplace has increased with tremendous speed in this new century. Even though we should not think in terms of an international marketing strategy with a “one size fits all” mentality, commonalities do exist amongst consumers. This allows us to get a better handle on how to approach the marketing of both products and services to the consumer. This idea is once again reinforced by the fact that the articles that appear in this issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing have all been contributed by authors who reside outside of North America and have done research with implications that are applicable on a global basis.

Jones and Mullan studied the more recent phenomenon of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) as it applies to pharmaceuticals. Their study suggests that there is a need to consider consumers’ perceptions of benefits and costs of DTCA when deciding whether to introduce it or remove it. In addition, for older consumers, providing large quantities of information may increase cognitive demands without producing additional benefits.

Van den Brink, Oderkerken-Schroder and Pauwels assess to what extent consumers reveal an effect of strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on brand loyalty. The authors also investigated the moderating role of consumer involvement with a product on the relationship between cause-related marketing and brand loyalty. The authors conclude that consumers perceive significantly enhanced level of brand loyalty as long as the firm has a long-term commitment to this campaign and the campaign is related to a low involvement product.

Rios, Martinez, Moreno and Soriano determine the relative importance of the ecological attribute when other attributes referring to the functional performance of a brand are taken into account and then the further check the effectiveness of environmental labels. Their study confirms the presence of a positive effect of environmental associations on brand attitude, although this effect is smaller than that of other functional attributes.

Phau and Suntornnond investigate how different dimensions of consumer knowledge may affect country of origin cues with an Australian sample. Their results indicated that country of origin cues affect Australian consumers in beer evaluations despite its weak influences. They suggest that brand familiarity and objective product knowledge mediate the extent that consumers relied on country of origin in product evaluation. Furthermore, the authors found inconsistent results between different levels of objective knowledge and its effect on country of origin of manufacture.

In this issue, you will also find a case study that approaches the concept of customer analytics in a most unusual and informational manner. And again, you will find our other informative and interesting sections, Misplaced marketing, Book reviews and Computer currency.

Richard C. Leventhal