The recent events in Eastern Europe draw a renewed attention to the impact of the environmental and cultural factors in marketing and management. Our marketing and organisational thinking are still dominated by the "country approach" while important restructuring towards a more fully integrated economic space is underway. The evolution towards an economic space also creates the necessity of an evolution towards a psychological space and simultaneously stimulates the creation of that space. The challenge to management is important and marketing research can be a powerful contributor provided their research and researchers understand the full implications of what is happening and what is at stake.
Economic integration is a worldwide phenomenon produced by the development of transport and communication technology. Economic interdependency of countries and continents has never been greater than today. Economic integration in Europe has been underway for a long time, and is accelerating as a result of the political will to undo artificial barriers. Whatever our own personal perception of the present may be, it is truly astounding what has been accomplished in the last twenty-five years. Present economic integration is accelerating due to the 1992 programme which will remove the last barriers towards a fully integrated common market. What does "common market" mean? To many people it seems to mean uniformity within the European space. Obviously within Europe, absence of barriers does not imply similarity. A common or European market simply means that the administrative barriers will have been reduced to the point where the free flow of capital, goods and people will not be interfered with significantly. Countries and governments will continue to exist as highlighted by the discussions around the European Monetary System and the future European political organization. Local legislative differences will continue to exist as well as differences in languages, habits, value systems, tastes as well as discrepancies in the standard of living. Specialization of countries and regions will probably grow - but one should be realistic. Even today in the United States, the federal structure has not done away with a number of administrative distortions between the states. Economic integration, however, is proceeding. Multilingual packaging is frequently used and common brand names and products create a feeling of similarity throughout important parts of Europe. What is the issue? After all, many companies have been operating across Europe or have had a presence in several European countries for some time now. In many cases the European market was seen as the juxtaposition of a number of markets (in reality countries) due to the political organization of the continent. Europe was seen not as one marketing space but as a number of spaces in which the company had a presence.
The purpose of the author is to try to explain, to challenge and to provide a framework for this Conference.
The objective of this Conference was to address the issue of corporate planning and its relationship to research and to provide a platform for an exchange of views between U.S., Japanese and European delegates. This objective has been largely met.
The objective of this seminar is to bring together marketing people, marketing researchers, promotions people, and people from the trade, and to try to establish a conceptual framework by an exchange of their different points of view.
Comment to the papers presented in the first session of the ESOMAR Seminar: "From market research to advertising strategy and vice-versa".
I think that this seminar has provided just that, a stimulus for further thinking and research, I think that many of us, if they have not learned a lot, certainly have been awakened, to a number of aspects of the question which preoccupied us all during our seminar.
I would like to comment on Mr. Lockwood's paper. I appreciate his attempt to base his paper upon published empirical evidence. It is not our purpose here to go through a detailed analysis of every statement made by Mr. Lockwood but I would like to single out a number of them which are indicative of his finking.
The model is essentially a modified and completed, DAG-MAR inspired system containing various psychological measures , questions about actual behaviour, distribution and reading habits (media information). It distinguishes between the analysis of short term effects (i.e. measurement of the current campaign) and the long term effects. It is completed by an analysis of the communication content of the advertising. The model is non-linear. Sampling is done every four weeks and is random, but the model has also been applied to selected target groups.