The main arguments of this paper are threefold:- 1. Firstly, that although the concept of global marketing of pharmaceutical products has many attractions, its application should be examined with extreme caution. In particular, that the onus of proof that a global brand can be successfully-created lies with its protagonist. 2. That a major obstacle to the development of global brands (or markets) lies more in substantial national differences in healthcare cultures and policies than in differences in marketing structures. That, while pharmaceuticals companies have excellent systems to track the size and composition of their markets, they devote less attention to the structure within which their markets operate.
Display advertising is expensive. In the U.K. the cost of a single insertion of a full-page, four colour advertisement in the leading farming publications ranges from £1,500 to well over £3,000. Similar levels of cost are involved in other European farming publications. For all these reasons it is, I believe, important that agricultural advertisers should look much more closely at the return from their investment in advertising. The fact that it is less tangible than other investment decisions may make it more difficult to assess, but does not remove the need.
This paper is about the development of a series of techniques to monitor the use, by farmers, of agrochemicals and fertiliser. It describes a system which we believe to be unique, not only to Europe but to anywhere else in the world. The system itself is basically simple and easy to understand. However, its significance requires some knowledge of the agricultural context to which the system has been applied. Since this paper has been prepared for a general conference of European researchers it is a reasonable assumption that many - perhaps most - readers will not be familiar, either with European agriculture or with the agrochemicals industry.
In recent years with growing pressure on profits and (at any rate in the U.K.) state interference in price-fixing, many companies have been devoting more attention to the need to develop procurement policies: skill and foresight in purchasing often being as, or more important a determinant of profitability as marketing ability. Moreover, developments in the food processing industry have focussed attention on the fundamental importance of procurement policies: policies that are very much affected by political, climatic, economic, technical and social changes. Rarely, if ever, has ESOMAR considered the application of research techniques to procurement problems, as a means of helping manufacturers to develop procurement policies which guarantee the input of raw materials essential to their manufacturing and marketing activity. This paper discusses these applications, illustrated with several case histories covering activities as diverse as sugar refining, vegetable freezing, bacon curing, meat processing and the manufacture of potato products.
The paper discusses five aspects of the authors' experience in agricultural marketing research, dealing with: 1) The farmer as a customer; 2) The farmer as a supplier; 3) The farmer as a marketer; 4) The development of agricultural marketing policy; 5) The development of agricultural export markets. While it deals with some of the purely technical problems of conducting market research in agriculture, its main concern is with the relationships between production and marketing in agriculture and the consequential implication for the role of the researcher.
The paper takes the view that increasing affluence in Europe will produce greater opportunities for developing export markets in consumer goods and that those will be attractive to smaller as well as large exporting organisations. It discusses some of the special problems of conducting export market research for smaller companies. It contains a critique of the traditional approach to appraising export markets and contends that this approach is orientated too heavily towards providing a broad general overview of a market and too little towards considering the practical needs of prospective exporters. It takes the view that export market research for smaller organisations must pay a great deal of attention to organisation for production and marketing, since it is these factors that bear heavily upon the feasibility of developing export markets.
The purpose of this present paper is to consider this and related topics in the light of the work that has so far been published. Much of it has conveniently been drawn together by Taylor and Wills in a single volume called "Pricing Strategy", published by Staples Press in 1969. However, it does not pretend to be comprehensive, and there are many other papers on the subject prior to 1969, as well as some published since.
The paper deals with a large scale study on international travel. Although the results have not been tabulated yet, we did a preliminary analysis of the response to a question, addressed to a couple of hundred Britons who had been abroad on holiday in the past three years, asking them to choose three factors that are most important to them in choosing their holiday abroad.