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The concern in this article is with laggards, the persons who are last to adopt an offering. Two measures were used to identify laggard food buyers of new grocery products. Then various univariate tests and a multivariate test, discriminant analysis, were used to help distinguish correlates of laggards and their behavior.

Change seems to be a modern constant. The response of American marketing institutions to seven different contemporary forces-ranging from inflation and shortages to activist pressures-are examined. They clearly illustrate the opportunistic perspective of US marketing institutions.

Creative generation and evaluation of problem solving alternatives is a necessary function of progressive management. Yet much that is called “creative” is the result of routine combining and sorting of stated elements according to standard design principles. This mechanical creativity should be the function of computers and clerks, freeing executives for those non-systemized functions which require the exercise of human intuition. The firm able to acquire or identify creative personnel and couple them with mechanical facilities capable of performing the routine aspects of creativity will have a real and marketable competitive advantage.

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