The environmentalism movement has the potential to significantly change marketing in the 90's, not only in Europe, but throughout the developed world. Although the issue has been widely publicised, most recently in reference to the Gulf war, measuring changes in environmental awareness has been fraught with difficulties. Above all, it has been difficult to establish a link between attitudes expressed in surveys and behaviour. GfK, through its subsidiary G&I, has recently reworked its existing environmentalism segmentation. A scale of environmental awareness has been developed and linked to the Euro-Styles life-style typology. The relationship between environmental awareness and age, education and life-style was tested separately, whereby life-style was found to be the most discriminating variable. The typology, introduced into consumer panels across Western Europe, allows the validation of altitudinal research with concrete purchasing behaviour for the first time, and gives interesting insights into environmental awareness itself.
The study presented here is an inventory of how the consumer experiences and evaluates modern marketing. Material presently available regarding this question consists mainly of theoretical treatises, hypothesis and, above all, opinion. Consumer feelings about and reactions to the activities of modern marketing have rarely been the topic of empirical research, at least not in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The aim of this contribution is the evaluation of clustering techniques from the viewpoint of practical marketing application. Clustering techniques (segmentation methods, grouping methods) are procedures that search for and detect natural groupings of objects (eg. persons) which are described by their values on variables. The requirements that must be met by such methods and the criteria for their evaluation which will be discussed have been shown to be important in the repeated application to practical marketing problems.
Fundamentally, consumer typologies are procedures for reducing data, Rather than work with a multiplicity of individual reactions it is preferable to use this matrix as a basis for seeking essential correlations both between variables and between individuals. Our intention here is to deal exclusively with the individuals aspect and to discuss a type construction proposal which uses a new similarity index.
This study deals with the question "Does a relationship exist between image and purchase behaviour (in certain product fields)" or more strictly speaking: "Can the image be used as a variable to forecast purchase behaviour?". The image is defined here as the verbally reproduced subjective impression evoked in the consumer by a stimulus, in our case the brand. Three investigations dealing with aspects of the above question are discussed.
This study deals with the question "Does a relationship exist between image and purchase behaviour (in certain product fields)" or more strictly speaking: "Can the image be used as a variable to forecast purchase behaviour?". The image is defined here as the verbally reproduced subjective impression evoked in the consumer by a stimulus, in our case the brand. Three investigations dealing with aspects of the above question are discussed.