Purpose -Latent constructs represent the building blocks of marketing theory. The purpose of this paper is to provide marketing researchers with a practical procedure for writing construct definitions. Design/methodology/approach -The paper reviews important contributions to construct definition in the literature from marketing, management, psychology and the philosophy of science. The authors expound construct definition in both practical and theoretical spheres to motivate the proposed procedure. Findings -A six-step procedure for construct definition and redefinition in marketing is developed. The proposed procedure addresses important aspects of definitions including the level of abstraction, scope, nomological relationships, explanatory and predictive power, ambiguity, vagueness, and preventing construct proliferation. Research limitations/implications -While techniques for developing measures have received a great deal of attention, those for the earlier step of construct definition have not. Researchers will benefit from more precise definitions through improved model specification, better measures, and more reliable determination of the direction of causality. The role of the individual researcher's linguistic skill in construct definition must still be determined. Practical implications -Marketing practitioners can also use the procedure to define latent constructs for which they must develop measures. Originality/value -The literature on construct definition is fragmentary, scattered across disciplines and occasionally even arcane. It is further often descriptive of what a good definition looks like rather than prescriptive of how a good definition can be developed. The six steps are simple, broadly applicable, based on both theory and practical experience, consist of relatively few discrete steps, and feed directly into the modern measure development paradigm in marketing.
Trade shows continue to be second only to personal selling in business-to-business promotion. Exhibitors around the world seek to attract the proper attendees into their booths (stands), but design advice for accomplishing exhibitor goals is lacking. Designs intended to appeal to attendees indiscriminately only crowd booths with nonbuyers. Given the diversity of exhibitor goals, attendee motives and potential booth designs, exhibitors need to carefully weigh competing design elements. The theoretical underpinnings of retail atmospherics, service escapes and prior trade show research are juxtaposed with observations from a very large international industrial trade show. A variety of observations and interviews with marketing managers provide data from small to large exhibitors. A framework is proposed linking various design elements to specific exhibitor goals and attendee roles.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.