Durable Categories Research Articles

Antisubordination Planning

This article proposes strengthening equity planning by incorporating an antisubordination perspective. An antisubordination approach holds that planning must directly address durable categories of social inequality. Practically, an antisubordination approach requires rigorous evaluation of the impact of proposed policies on historically oppressed groups and the adoption of policies that most ameliorate existing disparities. Recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the Fair Housing Act provide support for an antisubordination approach by recognizing the significance of implicit bias, upholding the ability to bring claims on the basis of a policy’s disparate impact, and confirming that cities can file suit to address shared harms.

Talking about durables

Using a survey of 349 respondents, we investigate the triggers of word of mouth (WOM) in four durable categories and compare this evidence with previous findings for services. For these durables, positive word of mouth (PWOM) is mostly triggered by advertising and customer satisfaction with the product, while negative word of mouth (NWOM) is rare and mostly triggered by the content of conversation and the perception that other persons need advice. This contrasts with previously established findings for services where advertising has little effect on PWOM and dissatisfaction has substantial effect on NWOM. These differences have important implications: they suggest that durable ads should be tested to check that they trigger PWOM and that service providers should pay more attention to the satisfaction derived from the service experience.

Lapsed buyers' durable brand consideration in emerging markets

The acquisition of non-customers in durable categories is costly. A history of positive and negative brand behaviors that include past choice (the positive) ending in defection to another brand (the negative) make lapsed buyers of a brand an intriguing segment of non-customers. This research explores how this mixed brand history affects the re-recruitment of lapsed buyers. Drawing on data from over 3500 cell phone owners of 26 cell phone brands across six emerging markets (China, Brazil, Russia, India, South Korea and Indonesia), the results first reveal that the cohort of lapsed buyers hold more positive attitudes than never-buyers. Further, across 74 brand level regressions, even accounting for attitude affects, lapsed buyers are not less likely to consider the brand in the future than other non-customers, and in 51% of cases, lapsed buyers have significantly higher consideration levels. This result is consistent across the 26 brands, of large and small market share, and local or global brand origin, but stronger for lapsed buyers in more developed cell phone markets such as China, Brazil and South Korea, suggesting that the more experienced the buyer/market, the more past ownership works in favor of the lapsed brand. This research highlights the importance of considering the buyer's full past history with the brand, not just current status, in theoretical models and when modeling brand choice or customer lifetime value for durables in emerging markets. For practitioners, this research suggests value in marketing efforts to reactivate lapsed users in emerging markets, and that brand history creates another barrier for new entrants, with no lapsed buyers, looking to recruit customers.

Nation-State Science: Lappology and Sweden's Ethnoracial Purity

AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

Language and the Many Histories of Brazilian Inequality

There are numerous historical critiques of elitist educational policies in Brazil, as well as studies of the racial and gender dynamics of education, and scholars have routinely lamented the historical lack of access to schooling among the Brazilian poor. But surprisingly few historians have taken on language and education as durable categories of inequality—created, recognized, legitimized, and acted upon over many generations, constitutive elements in Brazil’s constellation of social difference. This is especially remarkable given the rich and repeated emphasis on language, literacy, and education that characterized debates about Brazilian inequality in the century after independence.

Comparative Analysis of Rural and Urban Indian Consumers’Attitude towards Foreign Products

India has been acknowledged as one of the most promising and fastest growing economy of the world. Besides urban and semi-urban areas, rural India has a huge potential. Many foreign brands are dominating particularly in consumer durable category. The purpose of the study is to understand the comparative attitudes of rural and urban Indian consumers towards the foreign products against Indian products. Both rural and urban consumers have rated foreign products very high as compared to domestic products. Rural consumers were found more impressed than their urban counterparts with foreign products in terms of maintenance services, technical advancement, prestige, durability, quality/performance, and wide choice of size and model. No significant differences were observed between rural and urban consumers in terms of ‘good style and appearance’. Indian producers in the coming times are going to face a very strong threat from foreign brands, particularly in consumer durable category.

Accident: a philosophical and literary history

An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton's daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas. Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle's remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle's distinction under-wrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person's essence. For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth's spots of time, create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts - Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema - Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.

Targeting and timing promotional activities: An agent-based model for the takeoff of new products

Many marketing efforts focus on promotional activities that support the launch of new products. Promotional strategies may play a crucial role in the early stages of the product life cycle, and determine to a large extent the diffusion of a new product. This paper proposes an agent-based model to simulate the efficacy of different promotional strategies that support the launch of a product. The article in particular concentrates on the targeting and the timing of the promotions. The results of the simulation experiments indicate that promotional activities highly affect diffusion dynamics. The findings indicate that: (1) the absence of promotional support and/or a wrong timing of the promotions may lead to a failure of product diffusion; (2) the optimal targeting strategy is to address distant, small and cohesive groups of consumers; and (3) the optimal timing of a promotion differs between durable categories (white goods, such as kitchens and laundry machines, versus brown goods, such as TVs and CDs players). These results contribute to the planning and the management of promotional strategies supporting new product launches.

Towards Dimensionalizing Warranty Information: The Role of Consumer Costs of Warranty Redemption

Firms routinely offer warranties, often as attempts to differentiate their offerings from those of competitors. Despite this practice common to virtually every consumer durable category, extant research has been inconclusive regarding the effect of warranties on quality judgments. One potential limitation of these prior investigations is the failure to model a key element of a product warranty—consumer‐side transaction costs associated with warranty redemption. In this article, we introduce the role of consumer‐side transaction costs associated with warranty redemption and examine the joint impact of warranty length and warranty redemption costs for brand names of varying strength on consumers’ judgments of product quality. Two experiments show that warranty length signals security but not quality, and that perceived quality increases as consumers’ warranty redemption costs decrease, provided that the warranty length is short. Different dimensions or aspects of warranties have different effects on perceived quality. The implications of the results for understanding conflicting findings in the warranty‐quality literature are discussed.

Observable and unobservable determinants of replacement of home appliances

Despite the dominant role of replacement purchases in many consumer durable categories, the research in this area has not been extensive. Only in the last few years has the economic theory made progress towards a more rigorous analysis of the dynamic nature involved in replacement decisions. As a consequence of this, applied researchers have switched from conventional discrete choice models to new econometric techniques (e.g. duration analysis) that allow for richer relationships between socioeconomic variables, characteristics of the durable good, and the likelihood of its replacement over time. Our study focuses on two home appliances taken from the ‘Residential Energy Consumption Survey’ (RECS). Based on a duration model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity across households, we conclude that household demographics and product features (both observable and unobservable) in general have statistical power to explain replacement decisions over time.

Does an absence of brand equity generalize across product classes?

A previous study viewed brand equity as a price premium measured by the increment that a brandname contributes to the price of a product when controlling for its quality (as determined by an assessment of the relevant attributes, features, or characteristics). Using two samples of data drawn from Consumer Reports and the Crutchfield Catalog this earlier research found a striking absence of brand equity thus defined across a variety of product categories in the general area of consumer electronics. These findings raise the important question of whether this apparent absence of brand equity in the case of consumer electronics generalizes to other product classes. The present study uses the approach developed earlier to investigate this question in the context of five nondurable and durable categories: popcorn (N = 51), coffee ( N = 82), recording tapes ( N = 84), colas ( N = 27), and automobiles ( N = 96). Again, with minor exceptions, the results cast serious doubt on the viability of brand equity in the markets for consumer products.

An empirical analysis of consumer durable replacement intentions

Despite the dominant role of replacement purchases in many durable categories, previous research has not emphasized modeling replacement behavior. In this paper, we develop a descriptive model for replacement intentions based on variables associated with product and household characteristics, and empirically estimate this model with cross sectional data for a set of home appliances. Results indicate that the perceived condition of the currently owned unit and its age are significantly related to replacement intentions. Whether or not a spouse is working and expected future household financial situation are also significant explanatory variables. Implications and directions for future research are also discussed.