IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v29y1983i10p1167-1184.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An Econometric Study of Recruitment Marketing in the U.S. Navy

Author

Listed:
  • Dominique M. Hanssens

    (University of California, Los Angeles)

  • Henry A. Levien

    (United States Navy, San Diego)

Abstract

Since the abolishment of the mandatory draft the U.S. Navy, along with the other services, has engaged in aggressive marketing strategies in order to attract a sufficient number of qualified individuals to volunteer enlistment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of these efforts, primarily advertising and personal selling, within the general framework of the recruiting environment. The study uses insights into the recruiting process, provided by the Navy Recruiting Command, along with principles of economics and marketing to develop an econometric model of recruiting performance. The parameters of the model are then estimated on a monthly data base for the 43 Navy Recruiting Districts, from January 1976 to December 1978. The objective of the model is descriptive, i.e., it quantifies the effects of various environmental and marketing variables on three measures of recruiting performance: nationally generated leads, contracts for the delayed-entry program and direct-shipment contracts. The enlistment contracts refer to nonprior service males between 17 and 21 years old. The environmental variables in the models include economic factors such as unemployment rate and civilian income, sociodemographic variables such as urbanization, the proportion of blacks and high-school seniors in the target market, and local youth attitudes toward the Navy, and time-related factors such as seasonally and the GI Bill. The marketing efforts are national advertising expenditures in seven media, local advertising expenditures, recruiter strength and recruiter aid expenditures. The econometric models reveal that both environmental and marketing variables had significant impact on variations in recruiting performance over time and across recruiting districts. The specific response effects for leads and contracts are reported in the "discussion of results" section. The "conclusions" section integrates several of these results along three dimensions: (1) the relative influence of environmental versus marketing variables on recruiting performance, (2) differences in the response structures for leads, delayed-entry and direct-shipment contracts, (3) the relative effectiveness of media advertising and personal selling.

Suggested Citation

  • Dominique M. Hanssens & Henry A. Levien, 1983. "An Econometric Study of Recruitment Marketing in the U.S. Navy," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 29(10), pages 1167-1184, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:29:y:1983:i:10:p:1167-1184
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.29.10.1167
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.29.10.1167
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.29.10.1167?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christensen, Garret, 2017. "Occupational Fatalities and the Labor Supply: Evidence from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 182-195.
    2. Duncan Fong & Wayne DeSarbo, 2007. "A Bayesian methodology for simultaneously detecting and estimating regime change points and variable selection in multiple regression models for marketing research," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 427-453, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:29:y:1983:i:10:p:1167-1184. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.