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The article discusses newspaper readership surveys and evaluates the possibilities for improving readership studies. The author advocates newspaper studies which measure the most popular articles and the most interesting articles. The theory is that by tracking this data and sharing the results with the readers, the chances of increasing circulation and profits rise. Newspapers can succeed with both advertisers and readers by supporting the advertisements which best fulfill the needs of the readers.

The article presents abstracts pertaining to marketing management. They include "New Products of Tomorrow: A 1975 Sampler," by Charles G. Burck, "Alive and Kicking," by Richard A. Donnelly, and "International Paper Sees the Forest Through the Trees," by Eleanore Carruth.

The process for allocating resources to major capital investment projects was studied in two vertically integrated and two diversified corporations. The hypotheses predicting greater decentralization of decision making in the diversified corporations were strongly confirmed. However, the results did not support other hypotheses related to the influence of a financial model on the process. Instead, decisions were guided by product-market strategy and measures of organizational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses newspaper advertising test runs. The idea of testing ads in low to medium circulation newspapers is addressed. Factors impacting total returns include audience size, product appeal, interested market, and advertisement size. The willingness of certain newspapers to accept ads of 300 characters or less is discussed. A graph tracking total return of an ad in comparison to newspaper circulation size is presented. All test runs were conducted in the "New York Daily Mirror" and advertised a laxative product.

The article focuses on growth and development of the newspaper advertising industry. In the early years, newspapers simply sold space on a page and anyone could print whatever they chose. This period, the space era, was followed by the circulation era, reader-interest era and now the market coverage era. The Audit Bureau of Circulation's formation in 1914 played a role in standardizing readership and circulation figures. The critical newspaper market research topics are addressed. To move the industry forward, the author suggests improved research of the paper itself, distribution facilities, competitors' products, circulation characteristics, popular sections and readership data.

People do not separate neatly into the categories of regular readers of a publication and nonreaders: some read issues occasionally. This paper shows that it is important to have data on their regularity of reading. Different models describing this situation have been proposed. The paper suggests another family of distributions which has certain advantages. It shows how regularity can be used to help in choosing publication for a schedule. The advertiser's real concern, even more than in this information, lies in the exposure distribution for all the issues on his schedule of different publications. The piper indicates an analytic method for estimating this joint exposure distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three different aspects of effectiveness of advertising communication. First, how does a specific advertising communication get distorted in the consumer's mind, what are the dimensions of distortion and what factors produce the cognitive distortion. Second, how does advertising influence the consumer choice process? Two mechanisms called persuasion and reinforcement are discussed and the underlying processes of influence and tactics are explored. Third, how does advertising influence consumption behavior? Two mechanisms called reminder precipitation are discussed and the underlying processes and tactics are explored. Finally, the paper discusses a sequential linkage among the four mechanisms of advertising effectiveness and gives opinions on the pervasiveness of advertising through each mechanism. [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]

As it is currently evolving, the complex law of privacy is probably quite different from the perceived "right of privacy." This paper examines the law, and identifies the most vulnerable flanks of the marketing research profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the prospects for research in marketing. In conducting this exploration, it will be useful at the outset to appraise the current state of research in marketing and to make some distinctions among kinds of research activities. Special consideration will be given to what appear to be significant differences between the nature and strategy of fundamental research and the nature and strategy of applied research. The role and the future potentials of each category will be discussed. Finally, an attempt will be made to indicate some opportunities for fundamental research that appear to be of critical importance to the professional development of marketing and to a continually rising trend line of economic performance. The term "research in marketing" is used in this discussion as a deliberate choice. The more familiar phrase "marketing research" as a result of the way it has been used has come to imply concentration of interest on market measurement problems, and this is clearly the area that has commanded the attention of most practitioners and students of marketing. But the scope of this paper is considerably broader, extending to all phases of marketing considered as the essential complement to production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents various abstracts in marketing, including "What Makes Successful and Unsuccessful Executives?" by Burleigh B. Gardner; "Intercity Wage Differences, 1945-46," by L. M. David and Harry Ober; and "Getting and Using Market and Business Data."

Incorporation of marketing strategy in production planning can reduce overall costs and significantly increase profits. In this paper a solution procedure similar to the traditional Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon production smoothing model is used to find a combined marketing and production plan in which advertising promotion is utilised to avoid peak-load production costs by shifting seasonal demand for a product. The solution procedure is applicable to a wide variety of market characterizations, and the technique may also be readily adapted to analyse impacts of various aspects of market behavior on the optimal production schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mathematical model is developed for a marketing situation with two competitors when each competitor has two control variables, viz. price and promotional effort. The model discussed in this paper is an extension of Mills' model [1]. Mills has assumed that each competitor has only one control variable, viz. promotional effort and the profit margins of the two competitors are known. In this paper the profit margins are also control variables. The paper derives conditions under which non-boundary equilibrium solutions exist and the sensitivity of the model for small deviations in the decision variables from their equilibrium values is tested. Mills' results are found to be valid only under certain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-spectral analysis is recognized as a powerful analytical tool for the analysis of time-varying behavior in a number of disciplines. Applications in business have been limited, however, and the potential usefulness of this new approach to time series analysis has received relatively little attention in advertising. The purpose of this paper is to explain cross-spectral analysis and illustrate the use of this new technique in studying the interaction between advertising and sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of individuals used as sources for subjective information. The evaluation is based upon the amount and nature of the individual's relevant experience and the consistency and completeness of the information he provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retail coupons, those small cards or slips of paper that offer the supermarket shopper a few cents off on this product or that, have come of age. They are no longer a nickel-and-dime business. Billions of them are distributed each year by grocery product manufacturers. Millions of dollars worth are redeemed, too, sometimes with tremendous impact on a manufacturer's marketing program. Here are some interesting data about coupons and what makes them so attractive to the contemporary, value conscious shopper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of trust and its interaction with information flow, influence, and control, and reports on an experiment based on the model to test several hypotheses about problem-solving effectiveness. The subjects were managers and the independent variable was the individual manager's initial level of trust. Groups of business executives were given identical factual information about a difficult manufacturing-marketing policy problem; half the groups were briefed to expect trusting behavior, the other half to expect untrusting behavior. There were highly significant differences in effectiveness between the high-trust groups and the low-trust groups in the clarification of goals, the reality of information exchanged, the scope of search for solutions, and the commitment of managers to implement solutions. The findings indicate that shared trust or lack of trust apparently are a significant determinant of managerial problem-solving effectiveness. [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.

Although interest in input/output analysis was expressed as early as 1951, apparently few companies are using this technique. Typical marketing problems related to identification of users, estimates of users' needs, and determination of users' relative growth rates should lend themselves well to input/output technique. An example of input/output application to a market identification problem for a hypothetical firm is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of automation in business has had extended coverage in the business press during recent months. Electronics has also captured the imagination of marketing men, but the areas for automation have not been clearly defined. This article answers some important questions and gives specific results that have been obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of abstracts are presented for articles pertaining to the subject of advertising. They include "How New Study Sharpens Choice of Media," by Richard Manville, "How to Increase Readership of Business Paper Advertisements," by Dik W. Twedt and "Top Executives Tell How to Use Social Sciences in Advertising," by Harold E. Green.

An abstract is presented for the article "The Marketing Design of Life Assurance Proposals," by Gordon Wills.

This paper suggests a procedure which analytically ties a model to predict users' predispositions to purchase different 'brands' in a product-market together with a search process to identify optimal new product ideas. Brands, conceptualized as attribute bundles, are located in a prespecified attribute space. The pairwise preference judgments of each individual in a representative sample drawn from the population of users are analyzed using the authors' LINMAP procedure (LINear programming techniques for Multidimensional Analysis of Preferences) to determine his ideal point and salience weights for the attributes of the space. A distance model of choice is postulated for each user and used to predict his probability of choosing nonexisting products. The models developed for each user are tied to methods for searching the product space to find "best" locations for new products. The proposed procedures are discussed and evaluated in the light of relevant conceptual and empirical research. The paper concludes with a discussion of additional applications of the behavioral framework of LINMAP to other marketing decision areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]