No abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the healthy lifestyle consumer by examining demographic, personal value and psychographic antecedents.Design/methodology/approachA cluster analysis was used to divide consumers into healthy and unhealthy lifestyle segments based on their diet and exercise behavior. A logistic regression analysis was then run on these segments to test the impact of 17 hypothesized antecedents.FindingsResults indicate that people who maintain a healthy lifestyle tend to be female, older, more educated, place less importance on the value of “excitement”, have a greater tendency to plan ahead and tend to experience less role overload.Research limitations/implicationsOne limitation is that the response rate of the mail survey used to collect data was only 28.8 percent. Another limitation was that the specific types of diet and exercise behavior used to classify respondents into clusters did not encompass the full range of diet and exercise options available to all consumers.Practical implicationsThe financial impact of the healthy lifestyle consumer on a number of industries is documented. A demographic profile of the healthy lifestyle consumer was obtained which should assist companies seeking to target this segment. The significance of two time‐related psychographic predictors suggests that companies looking to expand the market for healthy products may want to focus on ways of making their products/services more convenient to time‐pressured consumers.Originality/valueThis paper represents one of the first attempts in the marketing literature to study the healthy lifestyle segment.

This study explores factors that influence the development of a “privacy concern” in adolescents and whether the development of such a privacy concern leads to the adoption of behaviors that can help teens protect themselves from risks associated with divulging private information when using the Internet. Results of the analyses indicate there are a number of predictors significantly associated with the development of a privacy concern in adolescents. Furthermore, results of the analyses suggest that heightening adolescents' concern for their privacy will lead to a greater likelihood that they will use a number of different privacy‐protecting behaviors.

Previous research in new product development has examined the role of organisational structure and marketing and technical skills and activities in encouraging successful innovation. This study examines the role played by organisational structure in supporting the marketing and technical/production activities in new product development, and direct and indirect effects of all of these antecedents on new product success. The goal of the study is to observe which factors lead to product success and to determine how they interconnect. Implications for new product management are provided in the concluding section.

A study was conducted of 69 analysts evaluating 267 early‐stage new product development (NPD) projects in a major global chemical company over a 10‐year time span. Positive correlations were found between profits resulting from NPD project analyses and the degree of creativity of the analysts evaluating those projects. Creativity can be reliably measured with standard psychological instruments, such as the MBTI® Creativity Index. Analysts with MBTI Creativity Indices above the median for the group studied identified opportunities providing 12 to 13 times more profit than those with MBTI Creativity Indices below the median, when both groups were rigorously trained and coached in “stage‐gate” business analysis methods. NPD requires breakthrough creativity because the first ideas for commercialization are almost never commercial until they have been substantially revised through a thought process involving branching. It is therefore most productive to preselect innovative, creative people for the early stages of NPD, and then teach this group the business discipline required in stage‐gate NPD processes. The results show that by utilizing these principles, both the overall speed and productivity of typical NPD processes can be increased approximately nine‐fold, or nearly an order of magnitude when compared to today's typical linear stage‐gate processes.