Associate Professor Of Marketing Research Articles

The Black-Owned Life Insurance Company: Issues and Recommendations

Ongoing societal changes have altered the environment of black-owned life insurance companies. They are abruptly being thrust into direct competition with life insurance companies, a situation for which many of the black-owned companies are inadequately prepared. This new competition is for customers and personnel, especially sales personnel. This paper assesses the situation and discusses three major areas of decision which face the black-owned companies, those involving type of clientele, type of product and type of personnel. Recommendations are made for changes deemed necessary for the survival and prosperity of the black-owned life insurance companies. The black-owned life insurance company constitutes one of the few bastions of black capitalism.' Yet, despite national emphasis on nurturing black capitalism, the black-owned life insurance companies face serious crises. Ironically, the very social changes that promise these companies opportunity constitute the threat to their well-being. The American black is finally becoming part of America, and the black-owned company part of the American economy. This means that the protective cocoon provided by a largely segregated society has been removed from the black-owned insurance company. Already, and increasingly, it will be thrown into direct competition with firms, both for customers and personnel. Jacob M. Duker, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Marketing in the University of Connecticut. Charles E. Hughes, D.B.A., C.P.C.U., is Assistant Professor of Insurance in the University of Connecticut. This paper was submitted in April 19,72. 'Black-owned designates those companies which were founded by blacks, and continue to be dominated by blacks in ownership and management. Forty-three such companies are further identified by their membership in the National Insurance Association. The term white is used to identify firms which are not considered to be black-owned. The response of the black-owned insurance companies to this evolving situation must come in these three major interrelated areas of change: 1. Changes in Type of Clientele.Here, two major decisions are to be made: a. Should black-owned insurance companies attempt incursions into what might be considered the preserve of the companies by selling to prospects? b. Considering the changing educational, economic and social conditions of blacks, at what kinds of black consumer should the blackowned insurance company direct its

Self-Concepts and Television Viewing Among Women

In studies of TV program preference, personality traits have been relegated to the background. This article, in which TV viewing, itself, is considered value-expressive behavior, compares the self-concepts and ideal self-concepts of light and heavy TV viewers and relates them to demographic variables. The author is Associate Professor of Marketing and Communications at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He wishes to thank the Los Angeles Times for permission to publish these data and Professor David McConaughy for his comments on the manuscript.

Ownership and Performance: Stock and Mutual Life Insurance Companies

Stock and mutual life insurance companies exhibit different performance characteristics. The results of a comparison made with samples of 19 stocks and 27 mutuals, which operated under New York regulations between 1952 and 1966, provided evidence of these differences. Two performance measures were utilized: percentage increase in assets over the 15 year period and percentage change in net premium income. With both measures the difference was significant at the .01 level. Although the observed stocks and mutuals differed in size and product mix, the performance differences could be attributed to ownership. The research design utilized control hypotheses concerning company size and benefit payout level in order to ascertain if ownership was the causal factor. Compared with possible determinants of corporate performance, ownership has received little attention in economic literatuLre. Although capital stock corporations dominate the American economy, vast resources and productive capacity are held by co-operatives, foundations, government-owned corporations, and mutual companies. An important difference between these corporate types and the capital stock corporation is the nature of property rights inherent in ownership shares. Shares of capital stock corporations may be purchased or sold without quantity restriction at a market determined price. In these other ownership types there is usually neither a market determined price nor unconstrained transactions in equity shares. In the case of mutual life insurance companies, owners must be policyholders and generally may hold no more than one equity share. Capital stock life insurance companies in 1950 provided 30 percent of all U.S. Richard Spiller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Marketing in California State College at Long Beach. This paper was presented at the 1971 Annual Meeting of A.R.I.A. life insurance in force. By 1969 their share of market had increased to 48 percent.1 This rapid increase relative to mutual life insurance companies competing in the same market suggests possible performance and behavioral differences in the two ownership types. Although some of the change in the relative position of stocks and mutuals may be attributed to the many new stock companies which began operations during these years, there is evidence of behavioral differences in stocks and mutuals. The objectives of this study are to test the hypothesis that performance of stocks and mutuals differ and to consider some possible causal factors underlying any differences. In a more general sense, this is an effort to provide empirical evidence of the effect of alternate ownership forms on corporate performance. In the life insurance industry, mutual companies compete against profit-oriented firms which have the same market opportunities and comply with essentially the same regulations. Both types of com1 Institute of Life Insurance, Life Insurance Fact Book. New York, 1951, 1970.

Household Correlates of "Brand Loyalty" for Grocery Products

TzE relevance of to the formulation of a profitable program of market segmentation has intrigued both practitioners and scholars alike ever since the publication of the pioneering work of Brown' and Cunningham2 in the early 1950's. Its usefulness as a basis for segmentation depends, in part, on the answers to the following questions: To what extent do brand-loyal customers constitute an identifiable market segment? Do they tend to have different rates of consumption for the product under study? Do they have different income levels? Different ethnic backgrounds? Different store shopping patterns? If differences such as these do exist, they would help manufacturers to better understand the process underlying the generation of brand loyalty and would provide a partial basis for the formutlation of their marketing programs. The study reported in this paper consists of an analysis of the relationship between characteristics such as these and household brand loyalty for forty-four grocery products. Since the time of Brown's and Cunningham's work, several studies have been published which have attempted to identify brand-loyal customers in terms of socioeconomic, demographic, personality, and/or selected consumption characteristics.3 With the exception of one study by Farley,4 none of these have been based on an explicit theory of the nature of the underlying process. Farley used Stigler's theory of the economics of information5 as a basis for developing hypotheses as to the characteristics of households that would tend to exhibit greater than average brand loyalty within a product class. He reasoned that the expected gain associated with searching (given that the brands in a product class are considered close substitutes) should be positively correlated with the amount purchased by the buyer. The primary reason for searching in this context would be to find lower prices. Thus, one *Associate professor of marketing, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania. t Doctoral candidate in marketing, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania.

Detection and Correction of Interviewer Bias

In the study reported here, interviewer bias was found to depend at least as much upon the questions being asked as on the interviewer. The authors describe a method for finding and correcting that bias. Robert Ferber is a Research Associate Professor in the Bureau of Economics and Business Research and in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois. Hugh G. Wales is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Marketing Division of the College of Commerce of the same university.