In this article, the authors introduce attitude toward global products (AGP) and attitude toward local products (ALP) as generalized attitudinal constructs and address the four issues these constructs raise: (1) How are AGP and ALP related to each other? (2) What is the motivational structure underlying AGP and ALP? (3) Is the proposed theory culturally circumscribed, or does it generalize across countries? and ( 4) What are the managerially relevant implications of these consumer attitudes? To answer these questions, the authors propose and empirically test an integrated structure for AGP and ALP and their antecedents, organized around the powerful motivational concept of values. They test their theory using a unique data set involving 13,000 respondents from 28 countries in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, thus allowing for a global investigation of a global issue. The study findings provide managers with strategic direction on how to market their products in a globalized world.

This article is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation, written when he was a doctoral student at Tilburg University. The authors thank the anonymous JMR reviewers for their extremely useful and constructive comments. In addition, they thank AiMark for providing the data and gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Flemish Science Foundation (Grant No. G.0116.04).

Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been of long-standing interest to the field of marketing. Unfortunately, the construct has not always been well understood by marketing researchers. The authors provide a review of the SDR literature organized around three key issuesthe conceptualization and measurement of SDR; the nomological constellation of personality traits, values, sociodemographics, and cultural factors associated with SDR; and the vexing issue of substance versus style in SDR measures. The authors review the current "state of the literature," identify unresolved issues, and provide new empirical evidence to assess the generalizability of existing knowledge, which is disproportionately based on U.S. student samples, to a global context. The new evidence is derived from a large international data set involving 12,424 respondents in 26 countries on four continents.

With the growing interest of consumer researchers to test measures and theories in an international context, the cross-national invariance of measurement instruments has become an important issue. At least two issues still need to be addressed. First, the ordinal nature of the rating scale is ignored. Second, when few or no items in the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) exhibit metric and scalar invariance across all countries, comparison of results across countries is difficult. We solve these problems using a hierarchical IRT model. An empirical application is provided for susceptibility to normative influence, using a sample of 5,484 respondents from 11 countries on four continents. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the key metrics in marketing and is considered an important segmentation base. This paper studies the capabilities of a range of models to predict CLV in the insurance industry. The simplest models can be constructed at the customer relationship level, i.e. aggregated across all services. The more complex models focus on the individual services, paying explicit attention to cross buying, but also retention. The models build on a plethora of approaches used in the existing literature and include a status quo model, a Tobit II model, univariate and multivariate choice models, and duration models. For all models, CLV for each customer is computed for a four-year time horizon. We find that the simple models perform well. The more complex models are expected to better capture the richness of relationship development. Surprisingly, this does not lead to substantially better CLV predictions.