PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

This is the 42nd edition of the International Research Conference in Marketing organized by the Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management (IAE Aix), Aix-Marseille University. The conference, better known as the “La Londe Conference”, is devoted on a biennial basis to Marketing Communications and Consumer Behavior.

The tradition is that the conference be chaired by a pair of outstanding researchers and we express our very sincere thanks to Professor Margaret C. Campbell, the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, and to Professor Elizabeth Cowley, the University of Sydney Business School, who honor us in accepting to chair the conference. They did a remarkable job at all levels of preparation of the conference, and especially concerning the evaluation and selection of the papers. Organizing a conference under their scientific leadership was a real pleasure.

Another tradition of the La Londe Conference is to invite an outstanding speaker for the keynote address. Many thanks to Professor Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University for having accepted our invitation. It is a real honor to hear Professor Ariely on “Some Experiments in Kenya”.

Very special thanks also to the members of the scientific committee who guaranteed the overall quality of the conference and to the ad-hoc reviewers who accepted to offer insightful and helpful comments enabling both selection of papers and paper improvements. 80 manuscripts were submitted this year and 40 were selected for presentation at the conference.

A selection of the conference papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Behavior, thanks to the support of Professor Klaus Wertenbroch, INSEAD, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marketing Behavior (JMB).

An international meeting of this nature cannot take place without the financial support of the Aix-Marseille University, the Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management, and the CERGAM Research Center. Many thanks for the support and contribution. Thanks to Jeanette Theokritoff, our dynamic administrative officer, to Lorène Bour for her assistance, and to Pierre Richaud for his help in all creation and printing tasks. Many thanks also to our student team members Mohamed Didi Alaoui, Fabien Pecot, and Ali Raza for their invaluable help with the conference proceedings and program as well as other organizational tasks.

Finally and very importantly, thanks to the participants, a good proportion of them loyal to the La Londe Conference. We appreciate this loyalty which results from the fact that emulation and exchange of ideas are the keywords in La Londe, alongside a positive and cool atmosphere, good wine, good food and the relaxed Mediterranean spirit.

Thanks to all for building a successful and exciting La Londe conference experience.

Dwight Merunka