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This paper reviews several concepts gleaned from research on learning as studied both by psychologists and consumer researchers. Several applications of learning theory, attitude change, and image formation are then applied to the field of advertising, not from the usual view of the advertiser but rather from the view of corrective advertising. Further it presents an overview of studies in corrective and counter advertising and attempts to assess the state of the art. Portions of this paper were presented before the Subcommittee on Monopoly, Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, June 6, 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the development of interest in consumer socialization. Major policy and conceptual issues are posed, and research in several areas of study is reviewed. Directions for research are specified in three key areas: consumer socialization processes, content of learning, and permanence of early learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper continues the discussion of the accuracy of recording of the National Consumer Panel which was begun in the previous issue. Results are given of experiments which measured changes in accuracy of recording resulting from controlled changes in total work load, compensation, and training. In addition, a comparison is made between brand share data obtained from a panel and from a recall survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impulse purchasing is an important aspect of customer in-store behavior as discussed in the previous article. The authors of this paper indicate that the concept, as presently employed, has limited usefulness as a basis for marketing decisions. They outline the problems marketers must confront in order to make the unplanned purchasing concept operational for marketing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to a critique of an article that examined the relationship between advertisers and consumers. The author examines the argument set forth in the critique, claiming that in hinges on the use of the word inherent when describing the nature of the conflict between these two parties. The author agrees that in the ideal situation this relationship should not be in such a conflict; however, simply because it is the ideal does not mean that it does not exist. He notes that the intent of the paper was the study the relationship and determine the nature of this relationship based on the evidence that was recorded.

This article examines the effects of inflation and of transitory changes in income on consumer saving and spending behavior in the United States. To judge from the recent pronouncements of the forecasting fraternity, uncertainty about the behavior of consumers is at the heart of differences in view about macroeconomic policy at the present time. The inability of the economic recovery to gather sufficient force to bite into unemployment rates has been widely attributed to continued hesitancy and caution of consumers as reflected in exceptionally high ratios of personal saving to disposable income. And differences of opinion about the probable vigor or sluggishness of the recovery are due in considerable part to differences in judgments about the probable consumer response to the unfolding economic situation. One of the major sources of uncertainty about consumer reactions concerns the way that price inflation, both expected and realized, influences consumer decisions about spending or saving. This paper attempts to mine survey measures of consumer expectations, attitudes, and plans in an effort to determine their usefulness in predicting and explaining consumer behavior. We ask two questions: First, what is the role of these anticipatory variables in models designed to forecast consumer behavior? Second, what are the economic variables underlying the movement of consumer anticipation?

The article presents several abstracts of research papers about population, welfare programs and consumer economics. The first paper "Explaining and Predicting Aggregative Consumer Attitudes," by F.G. Adams and E.W. Green, examines the relationships between the movement of objective economic variables, those likely to influence consumer welfare and expectations, and consumer attitudes. Contemporaneous explanation as well as prediction of the attitudes was sought in a time series multiple regression format. The second paper "The Determinants of Interstate Population Movements," by C. Blanco, reports the results of an empirical study of interstate population movements in the United States during the period 1950 to 1957. A series of multiple correlation analyses was made with a large number of variables thought to be of possible importance in determining population movements. The third paper "Long-Term Labor Requirements and Output of the Educational System," by W.A. Chance, provides a preliminary model for relating projected labor requirements to the output of the educational system in such a manner as to achieve full employment and optimum output levels simultaneously.

This section presents abstracts of research papers which were published in the August 1965 issue of "The Review of Economics and Statistics." The object of the computations described in the paper "The Economic Impact--Industrial and Regional--of an Arms Cut" was to determine what effect a hypothetical reduction in military demand accompanied by a compensating increase in non-military demand would have on the industrial composition and regional distribution of employment in the continental U.S. In the paper "Foreign Assistance and Self-Help: A Reappraisal of Development Finance," the relationship between foreign capital inflows and progress toward self-sustained growth in developing countries is studied as the central aspect of the self-help problem. "Investment in Commercial Construction" focuses on the construction of office buildings and retail stores, which together account for 85% of the total. The basic hypothesis underlying the statistical analysis is that because commercial construction is an investment flow, it can best be explained by factors determining the prospective profitability of investment: expected revenue and cost. "Prediction With Consumer Attitudes; The Time Series--Cross Section Paradox" examines the hypothesis that there are attitudinal effects at the individual consumer level but that they have been obscured by inadequate measurement or mis-specification.

Advertising and market researchers continue to look to the behavioral sciences for techniques and procedures in the hope of explaining, accounting for, describing and classifying consumers and their buying behavior. The use of projective techniques and their fallacies are discussed in this paper. A survey of the literature as well as experience in applying such techniques to consumers reveals their total incapacity and inapplicability to consumers. It is concluded that advertising and marketing would be better advised to expend time and effort on analyzing buying and use behavior rather than "personality", "trait", "attitudinal", "psychographic" or consumer life styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until very recently, the major focus of research in the field of consumer behavior has been on the selection of products, brands and decision choices primarily in the sphere of marketing. The purpose of this paper was to modify a model developed to measure market share to account for the variables that enter into the selection of a political candidate and predict voting behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological analysis of consumers' spending and saving behavior in response to inflation, recession, or increased assets and inventories is shown to result in findings that differ from generalizations presented by traditional economic analysis. The paper indicates the usefulness of the methods applied in behavioral studies of economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents comments on the research paper "An Experimental Study of Attitude Change, Advertising, and Usage in New Product Introduction," which was published in the 1972 issue of "Journal of Advertising." The paper researched attitude change towards a household cleaning product. The authors feel that the study should have made an indication over the direction of attitude change and that the experimental design of the project could have been explained better by the process of counter-attitudinal advocacy.

Studies assessing from consumer panel data the relations between household socio-economic and personality characteristics and brand loyalty for frequently purchased packaged goods have yielded disappointing results. Using a special purpose panel, this study does suggest a relationship between personal characteristics, the shopping process, and loyalty. The paper also introduces a new measure of brand loyalty and describes the use of the AID procedure for exploratory data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple discriminant analyses of consumer owners of thrift deposits in commercial banks and savings and loan associations show that measures obtained by a standard pencil-and-paper psychological test prove to be more effective than standard socioeconomic variables and asset balances in discriminating among consumer groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a series of experiments in which subjects were exposed to series of competing messages and were asked to make choices based on the messages they had received. Choice-making proved to be extremely sensitive to certain properties of the pre-choice message streams. When some messages were delivered more often than others, choices were almost exactly proportional to each message's share of the message stream, up to a point of diminishing returns. In addition, messages proved most effective when delivered near the choice-point and when they were delivered in "flights" or "bursts." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the points raised in the paper by F. Thomas Juster and Paul Wachtel about the consideration of consumers' reactions to inflation. Juster and Wachtel make extensive use of data collected by the Survey Research Center's quarterly surveys of changes in consumer attitudes and expectations. Juster and Wachtel present an index of expected price change derived from the center's data on consumers' price expectations. Consumers' price expectations remained fairly conservative even in years, although complaints about inflation increased greatly. The data presented cast doubt on conclusions about differences in the outcome of anticipated and unanticipated inflation but do not alter the major result of the study. In periods of accelerating inflation, consumers have reduced some forms of their expenditures and increased the amounts saved.

This article presents a response to a critique by Schuchman and Perry of a study on the relationship of persuasibility and self-confidence from the May 1969 issue of "Journal of Marketing Research." The authors argued in the original paper that people with lower self-confidence were easier to persuade. The original authors, in an experiment with nylon hosiery, believed that the results showed that women with low specific self-confidence were more likely to change their perception after seeing a tape with an alleged sales person. This information appeared to be curvilinear, not linear as previously thought. Schuchman and Perry believe that this particular experiment was a fluke, but one of the original authors believes the data from the original experiment is strong enough to be published.

The article presents a section of abstracts relating to marketing, including the articles "An Index to Operating and Financial Ratios," by Robert I. Tebeau; "International Directory of Opinion and Attitude Research," by Laszlo Radvanyi; and "Importance of Distribution to Producers," by A. Edwin Fein.

The article briefs on events and other happenings taking place in the country under a section of "News and Notes" of the journal "Public Opinion Quarterly." The twenty-ninth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research will be held May 30 to June 4, 1974, on the theme of "understanding the United States." In another development, a two-year project now underway at the University of Illinois' Survey Research Laboratory will collate and synthesize present knowledge of consumer behavior gathered from various social science disciplines. The project will solicit papers from experts representing specific disciplines, and these will be reviewed and discussed at a small invitational conference prior to their publication. The Institute for Survey Research at Temple University has completed a mail survey of members of the American Psychological Association's Consumer Psychology division, with the aim of developing a more systematic understanding of ethical problems encountered by consumer psychologists.

In this article, the author discusses both contributions which use of survey techniques and data might make to the legal system and the very difficulties, which stand in the way of their greater utilization. Legal problems involving public opinion questions arise in many different situations and these questions are for the most part questions of opinion among various consumer groups. The major premise of opinion-samplers is that if people are asked the proper kinds of questions on a given subject, their answers will truly reveal their state of mind. The individual questionnaires, sheets of tabulations and all of the other work papers may quite properly be assayed by the court in determining whether the survey has been properly taken and in that process they may very properly be the subject of cross-examination. But to allow that material to go to the jury is, in effect, to ask the jury, too, to pass on the admissibility of the survey evidence and this can only confuse the issue.

The article discusses the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the November 1965 issue of the journal "Review of Economics and Statistics." The first article of the journal is "The Theory of Induced Innovation Along Kennedy-Weizsäcker Lines," by Paul A. Samuelson. The second article of the journal is "Some Extensions and Tests of the CES Class of Production Functions," by Phoebus J. Dhrymes. The third article "Prediction With Consumer Attitudes: The Time Series--Cross Section Paradox," by F. Gerard Adams, examines the hypothesis that there are attitudinal effects at the individual consumer level but that they have been obscured by inadequate measurement or misspecification. The fourth paper "Postwar Stock Market Changes and Consumer Spending," by John J. Arena, presents quarterly estimates of the capital gains and losses accruing to the household sector from 1946 through 1964 and includes such gains in various formats of the consumption function. The fifth paper of the journal "Incremental Income Benefits of Public Education," by Werner Z. Hirsch and Elbert W. Segelhorst, shows that about 40 percent of the variation in income can be explained in terms of following variables: race, sex, years of schooling, education quality in terms of expenditures, occupation, self-employment and supervisory status, informal education, experience in terms of age, migration from the deep south, and size of birth place.

This article presents a response to an article that examined the conflict between advertisers and consumers. The author claims that the article argues that the manner in which marketing and advertising courses are being taught is detrimental to consumers. The author sets forth his own argument that states that in order to effectively market products advertising employees must have the necessary communication skills and consumer knowledge to make products appeal to consumers' wants and needs. If this theory is correct he believes that there is no conflict between consumers and advertisers.

The article presents a series of abstracts of articles published in the field of research and forecasting, including "1980 Projections in an Input/Output Framework," "Consumer Buying Prospects," and "On Official Economic Statistics."

A threshold model of binary attribute satisfaction decisions is developed using Fishbein attitude model components. The model is tested using multivariate probit analysis and is supported by the data. Implications for attitude research and statistical methodology are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of generalization in the marketing of consumer goods. Offered is the scholar Charles Osgood's findings on semantic generalization. Osgood discovered that when people see a similarity between two objects because these objects have a common sign, they are generalizing, because the objects have a similar meaning. These principles may be useful in the market place by reasoning that consumer attitudes toward one product would be transferred to another product with different characteristics simply by assigning the same brand name to both products. Examined is a two-phase study designed to reveal how much influence semantic generalization has in determining consumer attitudes toward consumer products.

A simple model of consumer behavior is used to structure data on environmental change, organizational mobility, and satisfaction taken from studies of Turkish and French élites.¹ Despite the widely different subject matter of the two data sets, a microeconomic formulation proved conceptually fruitful. The consumer-behavior paradigm is forwarded as a means of integrating findings from diverse areas of interest; some of the limitations of the approach are also discussed. The consumer-behavior model promises to be particularly useful in relating economic, political, and organizational change to individual behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Newell, Shaw, and Simon postulates for an information processing theory of human problem solving, decision net models were constructed for two individual consumers' choices of grocery products. The models were tested against actual data, and the resulting predictions were highly accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little progress has been made in building realistic models of consumer's purchase behavior as a function of the dynamic environment in which she makes her buying decisions. This article analyzes, probabilistically, relationships among selected elements of a consumer's purchase decision: brand purchased, store visited, and size of purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic hypothesis of this study is that a meaningful typology of consumer behavior may be segmented along the lines of social character delineated by David Riesman. Under experimental conditions inner- and other-directed subjects indicated a differential preference for specially created advertisements developed to appeal to these two character types. Further, the study analyzed differential exposure to mass media and differential preference for mass media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the effects on retail sales of a newspaper strike? This article discusses the sales effects of the 134-day Detroit newspaper strike of 1964, with respect to the various cities within the Detroit Metropolitan Area. This case history leads to some interesting hypotheses as to The effects of newspaper strikes on individual consumers and retailers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a test to determine the optimal time temperature at which pork and gravy should be processed during canning for the maximum palatibility to the consumer. The test uses a mathematical optimization technique when the variables involved represent consumer preferences. 135 respondents rated preference samples from six different meat packing plants, rating each sample on a nine-point scale from "extremely disliked" to "extremely liked." An equation is derived from the data collected and the confidence limits are described. Some other applications for the test are also discussed.

The article discusses methods of distribution for appliances. The author believes that manufacturers need to know how their products are selling for production and inventory control. Estimates can be made with the help of consumer panels, reporting from dealers on sales and inventories, and warranty cards. There are two methods used to analyze warranty card data; counting each card to determine what was purchased and estimating the percentage of cards not returned with those that were returned. The author believes problems exist with these methods. There can be a considerable lag between the date of sale and the return of the card and an undefinable number are not returned at all. In an attempt to minimize error, he investigates a mathematical model to predict sales volumes.

The article presents the author's response to the essay "Consumer Actions and Nonprofit Co-operation," by Dr. Donald F Blankertz. The author suggests that Blankertz's proposed economic theory, as outlined in the aforementioned paper, is weakened by the fact that his definition of consumption is confused with that of production. It is further proposed that, when Blankertz describes selling as an aspect of consumer behavior, he is extending the concept of consumption to include attributes of business theory. The author also argues that Blankertz's attempts to differentiate between consumers' co-operative associations and conventional business enterprises are in vain.

This article reports on research programs conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research (ISR). The Institute consists of four units: the Survey Research Center, the Research Center for Group Dynamics, Center for Research on Utilization of Scientific Knowledge, and the Center for Political Studies. The ISR research project, Economic Behavior Program, has been directed by George Katona since its development in 1946. ISR collects data through an annual Survey of Consumer Finances, quarterly surveys of consumer attitudes, and the Surveys of Consumer Finances.

In this article, authors collected a very broad array of information, on the behaviour and attitudes of a sample of shopkeepers and these data do provide a complement to the national figures and they enable the people to explore, in a tentative way, at times towards the job and the rewards it offers. Thus, in this paper, one can try to assess more precisely the financial position of small retailers, and also look at broader patterns of economic behaviour; most importantly, one can set these findings in a subjective context--in a complex of economic attitudes and orientations. Potential shopkeepers are attracted, too, by the hope that they will earn a good living from their small remuneration may be, it is true that for a good many recruits, particularly those with few educational qualifications, the income from shopkeeping may be as good as any they have previously experienced and better than that to be had in many of the jobs open to them. Earlier writings has suggested that many shopkeepers survive only by supplementing the shop income in various ways and the responses to the questions confirmed this, for 40 per cent drew income from another source.

From 1958 to 1963 the awareness of unemployment was an important reason for the decline in consumer optimism, according to studies of consumer attitudes toward economic conditions conducted by the Survey Research Center. Their findings provide an Index of Consumer Confidence that has proved to be an effective predictor of consumer spending. The author maintains here that in this uneasiness we had "the ingredients of a self-perpetuating inhibition to economic growth that spells underemployment of our resources, human and material." This article is based on a paper presented to the American Psychological Association in September 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationships among participants' organizational affiliation, the nature of their representation, and the orientation of their attitudes within the decision making process of eight Model Cities health programs. The data were collected by means of content analysis of the Model Cities documents and personal interviews with the participants. Formal representatives of provider organizations are the most likely to have an orientation that can be predicted by their organizational affiliation. Informal representatives of provider organizations tend to act in terms of their own self perceptions and attitudes, which might be consumer or provider oriented. Representatives of consumer organizations are consistently consumer oriented in their perceived roles and attitudes regardless of the nature of their representation. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the selection of representatives in a community decision making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates consumers' attitudes with a view to discovering their implications for the general interchangeability of goods, the process of increasing the utility of goods and the classification of economies dependent primarily on exchange without the use of coin or paper money. Leaving aside the economy based on the extensive use of money and related to complex class structures two widely representative types of economy may be distinguished. The first is characterized by the existence of three groups or categories of goods namely raw materials, implements and personal treasure. In the second type of economy, raw materials are not kept separate from the implements, and there is no class of goods which has value solely as personal treasure. Whatever arrangements are made for the distribution of the raw materials once they are gained, two conditions are preserved. First is that no object belonging to the first group is exchanged for objects belonging to either of the other groups. Second, any object into which raw material has been transformed is disengaged from the primary economic cycle.

Psychology has in the past made a number of contributions to business, especially in the fields of advertising, salesmanship and personnel problems. The factor of human nature is a very important item in all these phases of business. So far as the writer knows the psychological factor in the determination of prices for the various commodities has not yet engaged the serious interest of psychologists. In this paper at least one possible application of psychological methods to the problem of human wants or demands as regards the products of commerce will be suggested. The problem of human wants and desires, or likes and dislikes, is fundamentally a psychological problem and psychology now has at its command rather refined methods of measuring those likes and dislikes. In other words, we have what might be called a hedometer by which the desirability of any thing may be measured for any given group of people.

The article discusses methods for measuring uncertainty in business decisions and reducing uncertainty through market research. In industrial market research, personal judgment plays a very important part and the distinction between credence distributions and objective probability distributions becomes especially important. The paper discusses the application of credence analysis to problems of designing market research surveys. Statistical methods for consumer panels, mailed surveys, and sampling are discussed.

That consumer anticipations are a force to reckon which is not a controversial proposition. Equally, there is great unanimity that it has been economist George Katona's important role to identify the relevance of consumer attitudes and intentions, to place them into a theoretical framework and to develop empirically quantifiable variables for their measurement. Indeed, so much of Katona's professional work has been devoted to these subjects that if a free-association test was to be administered to members of the economics profession, a vast majority would say "Katona" when given the key words, "consumer attitudes and intentions." Such close identification between subject and man is a two-edged sword, and both its drawbacks and advantages are illustrated in his paper, which is designed to restate the theoretical base of the psychological school of economics and offer empirical findings. On the one hand, the paper exhibits Katona's mastery of survey data on consumer behavior and shows his ability to derive subtle and challenging conclusions from this material.

The article presents a discussion related to consumers' sovereignty in the U.S. The author of this article believes that such sovereignity is incomplete and ambiguous. In order to make it operational, a series of highly controversial, partly normative decisions have to be made. Further, the extent to which consumers can be truly sovereign is questionable. In view of this, the concept loses attractiveness. By contrast, a principle which is distinguished from consumers' sovereignty but which has often been treated indistinguishably gains attractiveness. The analysis indicates that the two are likely to be competitive to some extent, so one must examine their preferences between them more closely than one might have done. Consumers' sovereignty was early used in two senses, one descriptive, the other normative. In its descriptive sense it simply signified that the consumer was in fact the ultimate king. It is on the normative usage, as a keystone of welfare economics, that the focus of this paper lies.

This paper presents a normative model of promotional decision making and reviews current literature in the model context. The model emphasizes the long-run impact of promotions and draws upon stochastic buyer-behavior model technology. In particular, a stochastic model is used to predict the level of brand acceptance obtained from a group of new triers attracted by a promotion--consumers with no recent use experience with the brand. This brand acceptance is made a function of the composition of the new-trier group. Finally, attention is focused upon the probability distribution of those attracted by the promotion, conditional on the nature of the promotion. This distribution is used to develop expressions for the expected long-term worth of a new-trier group attracted by a specific promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to an article that examined deceptive advertising in the U.S. The author notes that the article identifies an area that will most likely attract a great deal of attention. He adds that in the majority of cases it is very difficult to determine if advertising is actually being legally deceptive. The author suggests that the research could have used a better respondent and claims that the method of analysis fails to shed the appropriate amount of light on the topic. The author claims that the research would have been bolstered by the inclusion of public opinion, most notably housewives and other dominant purchase makers. He urges researches to conduct the study again with a random sample of the general population.

This paper reports a study of cooperative and conflict behavior in an experimental buyer-seller dyad, focusing on the effect of perceived similarity of characteristics upon cooperative behavior. It was hypothesized that buyer-seller dyads in which the individuals perceive themselves as being alike would achieve more cooperation than those dyads in which the individuals perceive themselves as being dissimilar. The illusion of similarity is an important consideration in buyer-seller interaction. The results from this game, which simulated continued buyer-seller interaction, suggest that better salesmen may be more socially sensitive. The prisoner's dilemma game offers many interesting possibilities as a research tool. Yet despite the game's simple appearance, interpretation of the results can be difficult and is usually not amenable to direct, sophisticated statistical analysis. The game is best used as a vehicle for studying interaction behavior under controlled conditions. A number of variations of the basic experiment can be induced by altering information flows and power relationships in the dyad and introducing groups as dyads. The game is also useful in exploratory laboratory studies, since its structure provides insights into cooperative and conflict situations that should be confirmed in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a section of abstracts related to marketing, specifically focused on the study of consumers, including "1947 Consumer Analysis of the Spokane Market;" "Consumer Attitudes and Habits Regarding Frozen Foods," by F. E. Garrison; and "The Balance Sheet of Advertising."