Issue #1 (Volume 12 2016)

Purpose: This article proposes and empirically tests the country of market (COMK) effect, which captures the consumer’s responses of home market to a country where the product is marketed.
Design/methodology/approach: Study 1 applies a lab experiment about Chinese consumers’ purchase intention for printers marketed either in the US or China. Study 2 applies country level data to examine the impact of economic development of 22 host countries on the performance of 167 multinational retailers in their home country.
Findings: Study 1 shows that the printers marketed in US attract a higher level of purchase intention than printers marketed in China. This COMK effect is more salient for printers manufactured in China than those manufactured in US. In addition, innovation and design factors corresponding to the host country’s image fully mediate the COMK effect. Results in Study 2 show that a retailer that markets its services in a host country with a higher (lower) level of economic development is likely to generate higher (lower) level of retailing performance in its home country. Furthermore, it is found that COMK effect is diminished as the level of economic development of a vendor’s home country increases.
Research limitations/implications: In addition to the cognitive components of country image (e.g., design and innovation), consumers’ affective components may also influence the COMK effect. Future research could discuss the impact of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer animosity on consumers’ attitude towards the product marketed in other countries.
Practical implications: Strategically, marketing products to a country with a favorable image could benefit vendors from an emerging economy. For manufacturers from developed countries, marketing a product within their own countries may enhance the associated innovation and design images while marketing the same product in an emerging market.
Originality/value: This article proposes and tests a demand side country effect on consumers’ purchase intention for products marketed in other countries. It is in sharp contrast to the traditional country effect which focuses on the supply side effect (e.g., country of origin, country of manufacture, country of assembly etc.)

Whenever respondents must rank-order a large number of items and/or the reliability of their rankings may be questionable, balanced incomplete block designs (BIBDs) represent a more effective means for doing so than either complete rankings or paired comparisons for business and marketing researchers. By providing a type of balancing and replication across items and respondents, BIBDs significantly reduce the number of subjective evaluations each individual must make. But, at the same time, BIBDs allow a limited number of respondents as a group to rank many items. This balancing and replication in BIBDs also reduces standard deviation, which increases the precision of a study. BIBDs, therefore, can improve response rates as well as increase the accuracy and reliability of the data collected. After discussing the general nature of BIBDs and statistical techniques for analyzing preference data collected by BIBDs, three business-related applications are presented to illustrate the benefits of BIBDs. Next, caveats concerning the use of BIBDs are presented. In the last section, advantages of BIBDs are discussed

In this research, the authors explore the influence of the Bass model p, q parameters values on diffusion patterns and map p, q Euclidean space regions accordingly. The boundaries of four different sub-regions are classified and defined, in the region where both p, q are positive, according to the number of inflection point and peak of the non-cumulative sales curve. The researchers extend the p, q range beyond the common positive value restriction to regions where either p or q is negative. The case of negative p, which represents barriers to initial adoption, leads us to redefine the motivation for seeding, where seeding is essential to start the market rather than just for accelerating the diffusion. The case of negative q, caused by a declining motivation to adopt as the number of adopters increases, leads us to cases where the saturation of the market is at partial coverage rather than the usual full coverage at the long run. The authors develop a solution to the special case of p + q = 0, where the Bass solution cannot be used. Some differences are highlighted between the discrete time and continuous time flavors of the Bass model and the implication on the mapping. The distortion is presented, caused by the transition between continuous and discrete time forms, as a function of p, q values in the various regions

In retail, emotion-fueled impulse purchases constitute a large part of everyday consumer purchases. Thus, emotion regulation training could benefit consumers to help to control their impulsive buying. Yet, emotion regulation strategies are not unequivocally associated with positive effects. Since research investigating emotion regulation in consumer contexts is scarce, the goal of this study is to examine whether emotion regulation training could be a valuable tool for consumers to help to limit impulse spending.
Customers at a local supermarket were recruited and randomly assigned to three groups: re-appraisal (n = 50), suppression (n = 50) and neutral (n = 50). The results show that re-appraisal does not differ affect impulse purchasing whilst the suppression group made significantly more impulse purchases and spent more compared to the neutral group. Yet, trait re-appraisal was associated with reduced impulsive purchasing in consumers with higher levels of negative emotions. The findings confirm that suppression appears a maladaptive form of emotion regulation and suggest that re-appraisal training could be a valuable tool for consumers, particularly for consumers with high levels of negative affect