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This paper sets out to explore how the principles developed by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (1890‐1962), a gifted British evolutionary biologist, geneticist and statistician, can be applied in today's retail environment to estimate new customers becoming visible through your loyalty or database marketing program – customers whom we like to call “faux‐new” customers. Here, we have used the word “faux” to mean “fake” or “false” – customers who look new in the next month (because we did not observe them in the first month), but are indeed customers (because they made a purchase before the first month, a month for which we do not have data). That is, there are “faux‐new” customers and “actual‐new” customers whom we will observe in the second month.

The paper uses data and statistics from numerous loyalty‐marketing programs to support its conclusions. It investigates a technique discussed by R.A. Fisher in counting species and applies the technique toward counting customers. It showcases the Poisson distribution assumption in modeling customer frequency of purchases.

The study found the technique to be robust against a large real‐world data set: the technique was predictive despite some dubious assumptions.

When statisticians and marketers attempt to estimate new customer growth rates, they must be careful. It is tempting to estimate the monthly growth in your customer base by observing the number of customers in July, and then observe the number of “new” customers in August. In this case, however, the results would be overestimated. Many customers who transacted in August but not in July are not actually “new” customers – they are “faux‐new” customers. They could very well have transacted in April (assuming that one does not have the luxury of observing months before July). To estimate the actual number of new customers, it is necessary first to need to strip out the number of customers that were estimated “zero‐purchase,” or “faux‐new,” customers in July.

This paper explores innovative statistical techniques for marketers and business analysts who estimate customer growth based on multiple periods of customer transactions.

This paper aims to review current advances in the development of cybernetic systems with particular reference to management applications.

A general review and survey of selected research and development topics is adopted.

The paper illustrates the multi‐ and trans‐disciplinary nature of cybernetics, systems and the management sciences with a view to further research and development activity.

The choice of reviews provides an awareness of the current trends in these areas of endeavour.

The reviews are selected from a global database and give a studied assessment of current research and development initiatives.

During the last two years, the first experiments in digital interactive TV have been carried out, and full digital services are due to become available in many European states and elsewhere in the world within the next few years. These services will create a range of novel marketing opportunities, and Formula One Grand Prix would appear to offer significant potential in this respect. This paper reviews recent developments in the digital TV marketplace, focuses on how these may impact on Formula One, and suggests that production‐car manufacturers who also supply engines for the sport should now seriously consider taking advantage of the emerging medium.

In the face of increasing resource insecurity, environmental degradation and climate change, more governments and businesses are now embracing the concept of the circular economy. This chapter presents some historical background to the concept, with particular attention paid to its assumed opposite, the ‘linear’ or growth economy. While the origins of the circular economy concept are to be found in 1960s environmentalism, the chapter draws attention to the influence of the then ‘new’ sciences of ecology and ‘cybernetics’ in shaping the public environmental discourse of the period. It also draws attention to the background of the present linear economy in postwar policies that encouraged reconstruction and a social and economic democratisation across the West, including an expansion of mass-consumption. It emphasises the role of the 1960s counterculture in generating a popular reaction against this expansionary growth-based agenda, and its influence in shaping subsequent environmentalism, including the ‘metabolic’ and ecological economic understanding of the environmental crisis that informs the concept of the circular economy. Reflecting upon this historical preamble, the chapter concludes that more attention should be paid to the economic, cultural and social contexts of consumption, now more clearly the main driver of our global environmental crisis. Without now engaging more directly with the ‘consumption problem’, the chapter argues, it seems unlikely that the goals of the circular economy can be met.

Based on ethnographic data and a textual analysis, this chapter highlights the process of “therapization” of Buddhism in Western countries, with a specific emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism in France. Referring to the paradigm of “political economy of health”, as developed in recent medical anthropology, it attempts to explore the relationships between two concepts – economics and health – that had previously been considered separately, in the context of Western Buddhism. Further, this chapter's aim is to expose a potential application of theoretical economic models in an anthropological approach of Buddhist diffusion and appropriation in the West.

Jean-François Richard is the Director of Marketing for Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), a major organizer of sporting events in Europe, including the Tour de France: in this interview, we learn more about the Tour de France and the different events organized by ASO.

Reflects on the development of the concept of a learning organisation as a tool for business success. Argues that, unlike many management ideas, organisational learning is not a “fad” but is increasingly accepted as a vital strategy for organisational survival and development in a continually changing environment. The learning organisation is seen as an aspiration for a continuous process with the potential to energise people for very long periods of time, rather than providing a quick‐fix solution. Whilst creating sustainable knowledge which can be valued as an asset on the balance sheet it also makes organisations more productive, profitable and more humane places to work.

It has long been realized that market-based development tends to impact Third World rural communities by increasing stratification between those who are able to take advantage of increasing opportunities and those who are less fortunate (for instance, Kottak, 1999). An extreme example of this was the early impact of the Green Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. It more than tripled the productivity of rice in parts of Asia, but on the village level it often had a less benign effect on the wealth gap and the retention of assets by the very poor.¹ Less extreme cases are represented in this volume by Eric Jones and Ueli Hostettler. Both describe instances in which increasing contact with the outside was the main element impacting on rural communities rather than technological innovations in agriculture. They differ, however, in that Jones approaches the subject synchronically by using central place theory and network analysis, while Hostettler’s contribution is decidedly historical in character.

Dynamic advertising, including television and online video ads, demands new theory and tools developed to understand attention to moving stimuli. The purpose of this study is to empirically test the predictions of a new dynamic attention theory, Dynamic Human-Centred Communication Systems Theory, versus the predictions of salience theory.

An eye-tracking study used a sample of consumers to measure visual attention to potential areas of interest (AOIs) in a random selection of unfamiliar video ads. An eye-tracking software feature called intelligent bounding boxes (IBBs) was used to track attention to moving AOIs. AOIs were coded for the presence of static salience variables (size, brightness, colour and clutter) and dynamic attention theory dimensions (imminence, motivational relevance, task relevance and stability).

Static salience variables contributed 90% of explained variance in fixation and 57% in fixation duration. However, the data further supported the three-way interaction uniquely predicted by dynamic attention theory: between imminence (central vs peripheral), relevance (motivational or task relevant vs not) and stability (fleeting vs stable). The findings of this study indicate that viewers treat dynamic stimuli like real life, paying less attention to central, relevant and stable AOIs, which are available across time and space in the environment and so do not need to be memorised.

Despite the limitations of small samples of consumers and video ads, the results of this study demonstrate the potential of two relatively recent innovations, which have received limited emphasis in the marketing literature: dynamic attention theory and IBBs.

This study documents what does and does not attract attention to video advertising. What gets attention according to salience theory (e.g. central location) may not always get attention in dynamic advertising because of the effects of relevance and stability. To better understand how to execute video advertising to direct and retain attention to important AOIs, advertisers and advertising researchers are encouraged to use IBBs.

This study makes two original contributions: to marketing theory, by showing how dynamic attention theory can predict attention to video advertising better than salience theory, and to marketing research, showing the utility of tracking visual attention to moving objects in video advertising with IBBs, which appear underutilised in advertising research.