Marketing universals are defined as consumer behaviors within a segment and toward a particular product category that are invariant across cultures. Using several definitions of culture and three different criteria for universality, the authors evaluate whether the use of brand, price, retailer reputation, and physical product appearance as signals of quality are marketing universals for consumer electronics products. Using a sample representing 38 nationalities, they find that there are few differences in the use of quality signals across cultures for a high priority segment of consumers. They draw conclusions for the adaptation versus standardization debate and argue that certain behaviors are likely to be universal, whereas others are not. Understanding such differences is essential to designing international marketing strategies.

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Despite their obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an equal impact on every industry, nor on all firms in that industry. Using recent time-series developments, we introduce various measures to quantify the extent and nature of business-cycle fluctuations in sales. Specifically, we discuss the concept of cyclical volatility, and derive a dynamic comovement elasticity between the economy as a whole and the cyclical fluctuations in various performance series. To further enhance our understanding of how consumers adjust their purchasing behavior across different phases of the business cycle, two other notable features related, respectively, to the relative size of the peaks and troughs and the rate of change in upward and downward parts of the cycle, are explicitly considered. Of specific interest in this respect are the notion of deepness and steepness asymmetry. We apply these concepts to a broad set (24) of consumer durables, for which we analyze the cyclical sensitivity in their sales evolution. In that way, we (i) derive a novel set of empirical generalizations, and (ii) test different marketing theory-based hypotheses on the underlying drivers of cyclical sensitivity. Consumer durables are found to be more sensitive to business-cycle fluctuations than the general economic activity, as expressed in an average cyclical volatility of more than four times the one in GNP, and an average dynamic comovement elasticity in excess of 2. This observation calls for an explicit consideration of cyclical variation in durable sales. Interestingly, the combined evidence across all durables suggests that asymmetry is present in the speed of up- and downward movements, as durable sales fall much quicker during contractions than they recover during economic expansions. Finally, key variables related to the industry’s pricing activities, the nature of the durable (convenience vs. leisure), and the stage in a product’s life cycle tend to moderate the extent of cyclical sensitivity in durable sales patterns. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2004business cycles, sales evolution, consumer durables, time-series econometrics,

The paper proposes a new methodology called the "coupled-hazard approach" to study the global diffusion of technological innovations. This coupled approach addresses several methodological challenges arising from the global nature of the considered diffusion process and the intricacies of the type of innovations studied. First, a global diffusion process is typically composed of two conceptually different, yet inter-linked, processes: (1) diffusion across countries, and (2) diffusion within each country. Second, due to network externalities and/or the presence of central decision makers, technological innovations often exhibit diffusion patterns that cannot be captured by traditional models. In particular, within-country adoption often occurs in "blocks" or "packets" of various size (with sometimes the whole country adopting at once), which prevents the use of S-shaped (Bass-type) diffusion models. Finally, technological innovations may complement or substitute existing ones, which raises the issue of how the size of the installed base of the old technology affects the new diffusion process.The "coupled-hazard approach" is well-suited to address all three issues. Beyond the capability of describing discontinuous diffusion patterns, the method explicitly recognizes the conceptual difference between the timing when a country tries or "pilot tests" the new technology, called "the implementation stage" by Rogers (1983) and the timing of when the innovation is adopted on a national or ubiquitous basis within the country (referred to by Rogers as "the confirmation stage"). In addition to testing the separate influence of exogenous and endogenous country characteristics on these two stages, it also allows us to assess their interrelationship. To illustrate the method, and in order to generate substantive insights, we apply the approach to the global diffusion of digital telecommunications networks across over 160 countries.

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