a first-order process).

Quantitative marketing has been gaining importance during the last decade. This is indicated by the growing number of model- and method-oriented studies published in leading journals as well as by the many successful applications of quantitative approaches in pricing, advertising, new product planning, and market segmentation decisions. In addition, market research has clearly benefitted from applying advanced quantitative models and methods in practice. Some 60 researchers – among them worldwide leading scholars – offer a broad overview of quantitative approaches in marketing. They not only highlight diverse mathematical and methodological perspectives, but also demonstrate the relevance and practical consequences of applying quantitative approaches to marketing problems.

The advent of e-commerce and the rise of hard discounters have put severe pressure on traditional retail chains. Boundaries are blurring: traditional brick & mortar players are expanding their online operations and/or setting up their own discount banners, while the power houses of online retail are going physical, and hard discounters get caught up in the Wheel of Retailing. Even successful companies cannot sit back and rest, but need to prepare for the next wave of change. In the face of this complexity, it is all the more important to take stock of current knowledge, based on insights and experience from leading scholars in the field. What do we know from extant studies, and what are the ensuing best practices? What evolutions are ahead, and will current recipes still work in the future? This Handbook sheds light on these issues.

Applying Social Cognition to Consumer-Focused Strategy, a book in the Advertising and Consumer Psychology series sponsored by the Society for Consumer Psychology, focuses on the most important recent developments at the interface of social cognition and marketing, and develops integrative theoretical frameworks with rich practical implications. More specifically, the chapters offer a novel and thought-provoking perspective on consumer-focused strategy--or the effects of marketing stimuli and activities on an integrated system of consumer processes and responses. Divided into four parts, this book: *offers new perspectives on consumer information processing, selective or one sided information processing, and attribution theory; *discusses how asking questions in focus groups, surveys, and experiments leads consumers to create opinions that would not have occurred to them otherwise; *advances a new approach for modeling uncertainty and a new framework for thinking about uncertainty; *summarizes recent developments concerning the Implicit Association Test and their implications for branding strategy; *develops a new approach for analyzing the effects of intention on behavior and unplanned purchase behaviors; *discusses the devaluation effect and shows both how implementation intentions can be used to increase new product consumption and also how promotion versus prevention regulatory focus influences consumer preferences; and *focuses on consumer information processing and persuasion. The text is intended for advanced graduate students, academics, and practitioners who embrace cutting-edge paradigms and methodologies in social-cognitive consumer research.