Client-Agency Relationships

Abstract

The increasing occurrence of client turnover and agency switching among client/agency relationships is of concern to advertising agencies throughout the world. It is proposed that small firms could provide a substantial alternative client base for agencies in order to dampen the impact of uncertainty. This study investigates the perceptions held by owner/managers of small firms toward agencies within New Zealand. We identified two groups of respondents–those who perceived agency contribution to store performance as high and those who perceived it to be low.Significant differences were found between the two group' response ratings on advertising agency services, agency attributes and selection criteria. We conclude by discussing the managerial implications of this study and provide directions for future research in this area     

Seeking Competitive Advantage in a Deepening Crisis

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Export Processing Zone firms in Zimbabwe have responded to the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. The study investigated how exporters are responding to dissipating competitive advantages. Data was collected from a sample of 30 firms. It was analysed through factor analysis to extract constructs considered competitive advantages or disadvantages. Results show competitive advantages pursued are centred on three key factors, i.e., production, pricing, and product. Competitive disadvantages are in the area of product quality and pricing. The two competitive disadvantages are developing a contagious effect on the remaining advantages, thus, deepening the firms into the crisis.     

Market Orientation,Competitive Strategy and Firm Performance

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the mediating effects of a firm's competitive strategy in the market orientation-performance relationship. Based on a sample of 371 manufacturing firms in China, evidence was found that the three dimensions of market orientation exert different effects on competitive strategy and performance. Among them, customer orientation has the strongest association with competitive strategy and market performance. This lends credence to a componentwise approach on the study of the relationship between market orientation and performance. The results of structural equation analyses indicate that the mediating effect of competitive strategy is mainly revealed in innovation strategy, the most vital factor in creating superior value for the company in the emerging market. Limitations of this study and implications for future studies are discussed.     

The Impact of Firm Capabilities and Competitive Advantages on Import Intermediary Performance

ABSTRACT

Import intermediary firms, domestic firms that serve U.S. industries by linking domestic wholesalers/retailers and foreign distributors/manufacturers, handled a whopping U.S. $1.85 trillion of commodity good imports in 2006. This study focused on these important firms by assessing the role of capabilities and competitive advantages as key determinants of import intermediary performance. The empirical results showed that market interpretation, sourcing, and service capabilities, overall, positively affected cost, product, and service competitive advantages. These competitive advantages, in turn, positively affected their relationship performance with business partners. Results, however, also indicated some interesting negative associations among sourcing capabilities, service advantages, and relationship performance with foreign partners, raising questions about extant firm performance theory.     

Issues of Competitiveness

Abstract

This article investigates the forces that constrain Taiwanese-based corporations from improving quality and introducing and marketing new products. A total of 182 executives from the service and manufacturing sectors participated in the study. The results indicate that Taiwanese-based firms are optimistic about their competitive market position and about their respective industries. Furthermore, executives of these firms prefer to compete in regional and global markets. Absence of pride in a job well done, ineffective performance evaluation systems, and excessive government regulations were found to be the most important factors that may prohibit improvement in product quality. The results also reveal that various factors may hinder the development and marketing of new products. They are inattentiveness to consumer needs, top management's lack of attention to world competition and global opportunities, deterioration of the competitive spirit among employees and managers, absence of a flexible manufacturing strategy, volatile business environment, and too much focus on immediate results.     

Exporting and Firm Size

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which small U.S.-based exporters experience problems and difficulties in their export operations not faced by larger U.S.-based exporters. Subsequently, we focus upon the differences between small and large firms with respect to three general areas: the perceived difficulty of various export activities; the perceived helpfulness of various agencies/organizations to export operations; the perceived helpfulness of various actions the federal government has taken or could take with regard to exporting. In areas where we have found significant large-versus small-firm differences we try to provide explanations. Finally, we offer both general and specific recommendations directed at overcoming the problems we have identified in order to facilitate exporting, particularly by small firms.     

How professional service firms compete in the market: an exploratory study

Abstract

This study investigates how professional service firms (PSFs) compete in the market. Drawing on strategic marketing literature, a managerial rather than customer perspective is adopted. The study investigates the competitive positions sought by professional service providers and the specific marketing activities actually undertaken to achieve these positions. Thirty-seven depth interviews with senior management from a range of PSFs indicate that firms seek to differentiate themselves by developing long-term relationships, providing better service quality and greater value, and developing brands with strong reputations. Organisations typically seek such interrelated competitive positions simultaneously. A list of marketing activities used by the PSFs to achieve these competitive positions offers practical insights into the specific activities needed to achieve the various competitive positions sought.     

Stimulating Government Technology Commercialization: A Marketing Perspective for Technology Transfer

ABSTRACT

Federal legislation in the United States mandates that technology developed by federal government agencies must demonstrate socioeconomic benefits to justify the expenditure of funds as part of their fiduciary capacity. The mandate is operationalized by requiring federally funded agencies to seek socioeconomic benefits for the nation by developing programs designed to transfer government sponsored or developed technologies to the private sector. This mandate has led to substantial increase in the amount of technology transfer efforts by agencies, with limited results. Challenges include both the recruitment of firms to participation in technology transfer programs and weak efforts by recruited firms to fully commercialize products. This article posits that a marketing exchange approach to technology transfer will facilitate successful technology transfer and commercialization. A conceptual framework is presented from which to view government technology transfer efforts.     

Analysis of Relative Growth Rates Between Domestic and International Earnings of U.S. Based Publicly Traded Restaurant Firms

ABSTRACT

This study explores the relative growth rates in earnings of public restaurant firms for a 20-year period from 1981-2000. No significant differences were found in sales growth between multinational and domestic restaurant firms. However, multinational firms significantly outperformed domestic firms in growth of operating income and pre-tax profitability. Multinational restaurant firms also had significantly lower negative growth in domestic earnings when compared to domestic firms. The results imply that multinational restaurant firms are more efficient than domestic firms in converting sales into profits.     

Competition and competitive groupings: An exploratory study in information technology markets

The focus of the research is upon the means by which firms can both create and sustain a competitive advantage. The paper addresses the relationship between shifting patterns of competitive rivalry and the emerging structure of a volatile, but growing branch of the Information Technology Industry. The concept and existence of competitive groups of firms is explored from three perspectives: those of the research analyst, the competitive suppliers and the customers of the service. The first perspective draws upon and applies previous work in the field of strategic groups, mobility barriers and company competences; the second perspective is operational, based upon the perception of the competitive environment by practising managers; the final perspective draws upon field research into customer organisation rooted in the notion that differentiation by suppliers will only be manifest in competitive advantage when it matches customers needs.

Different patterns of competition are identified and strategic management choices are highlighted in a product market undergoing turbulent development with the onset of telecommunication networks for the transmission of computerised data bases.     

Location Advantages,Firm Advantages,and Export Success in the Latin American Automotive Parts Industry

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of location advantages and firm-level advantages on the propensity of Latin American firms to export. An empirical test based on Latin American firms in the automobile parts industry suggests that firms in more competitive Latin American country environments are more likely to export than those in less competitive country environments. Also, older and larger firms are more likely to export than are younger and smaller firms, and businesses that are subsidiary companies are more likely to export than are independent companies. Implications for managers and policy makers are presented.     

The Rainmaker in Today's Professional Service Organizations

ABSTRACT

Professional service firms have relied heavily in the past on a small number of rainmakers-people who have influence and bring business into their firms. In today's competitive marketplace, everyone in the organization must be involved in the practice development process. This paper, based on a series of interviews with accounting professionals, identifies the roles and responsibilities for practice development inherent at every stage of the professional accountant's career path. Additionally, the roles and responsibilities of marketing professionals in professional service firms are also considered.     

Client Perceptions of the Customer Orientation of Advertising Agencies

Abstract

A national random sample of advertisers evaluated the customer orientation of their advertising agencies. The respondents also rated the importance of various agency attributes for agency selection, as well as their level of satisfaction with the performance of their current advertising agencies. Client perceptions of the customer orientation of advertising agencies was found to be significantly related to clients' satisfaction with agency performance. The importance of customer oriented selling behaviors by advertising agencies are discussed.     

Sales Training in a Dynamic Market

Abstract

The Singaporean hotel industry is examined, with particular emphasis on me differences between global and local sales force training. Empirical evidence indicates that there is a wide divergence between global and local practices. It appears that global firms perceive that sales training leads to greater sales force performance and view sales training as being part of their strategic marketing plan. Global firms also employ a more formal training curriculum, focus on “soft” competencies, and have an established training culture. Conversely, local firms rely upon “on-the-job training (OJT)” and appear not to understand that sales training programs can be a source of competitive advantage. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Strategies,technologies, and organizational learning for developing organizational innovativeness in emerging economies

Innovativeness is an important organizational capability for competitive advantage sustainability in the dynamic environment of Asia's emerging economies. Drawing upon dynamic capability theory, this study develops a research model of organizational innovativeness development for firms in emerging economies. The proactive strategic orientations reflected by entrepreneurship and technology oriented strategy provide important visions for organizational innovativeness. Further, the utilization of knowledge management systems and organizational learning are identified as intervention processes that translate these strategic orientations into real innovation capability. A survey involving 114 firms operating in China was conducted for hypothesis testing. The empirical results provide strong support and advance the knowledge of organizational innovativeness development for firms in Asia's emerging economies.     

The Internet,Strategy and Performance: A Study of Australian Export Market Ventures

ABSTRACT

This study examines the impact of the Internet, firm-specific characteristics, market characteristics, and export marketing strategy on export marketing performance. The unit of analysis was an individual product/market export venture. Data were gathered via a self-administered mail survey of 315 Australian firms involved in exporting. The findings indicate that, when the Internet was used for communication purposes and to provide the firm with a competitive advantage, it had a significant impact on export marketing performance. Firm-specific characteristics and export marketing strategy also had a significant impact on export marketing performance.     

Creating and marketing Distinctive Competency in Small Public Accounting Firms

ABSTRACT

Small public accounting firms face fierce competition on a crowded and homogeneous playing field. A framework is available to help accounting firms stand out from the crowd and gain a competitive advantage. Distinctive competencies are skills, activities or capacities that a business is uniquely good at in comparison to its competitors. This article discusses the various kinds of distinctive competencies and the primary competencies suitable for small public accounting firms. The discussion includes the requirements for creating a competitive advantage, steps to creating distinctive competencies, and marketing implications. The conclusion includes suggested research needs.     

Modeling strategic group dynamics: A hidden Markov approach

With competition playing a critical role in market-based strategic planning and implementation, identifying and understanding competiton and competitive dynamics has become critical. In this vein, the strategic groups perspective has emerged as a powerful means to understand such competitive phenomena. Empirical approaches to model competitive dynamics within the strategic groups framework, however, have been piece meal as researchers typically resort to distinct sequential analysis by time period. To overcome the limitations of these simplistic approaches, we develop a hidden Markov model to study strategic group (competitive) dynamics. In this approach, we explicitly account for competitive dynamics over time by modeling strategic group memberships as latent states that follow a first-order Markov process. Thus, we explictly model the notion that firms adopt their strategy for the next time period based on their current strategy and respective outcomes. We illustrate the model with longitudinal data from COMPUSTAT on 63 public banks from the tri-state region of NY-OH-PA. The results show the proposed model to be superior to a number of viable alternative approaches that have been suggested in the literature. We find the existence of three strategic groups: the leveraged group has low current assets compared to current liabilities, high debt to equity, and high total borrowing to assets. The lending group consists of the largest banks that focus on lending with high ratios of gross loans to securities and gross loans to deposits. The balanced group has the largest number of banks where the values of the financial and product ratios are intermediate compared to the leveraged and lending groups. The asymmetries in the switching probabilites are also evident as there seems to be a higher probability of switching into the balanced group than switching out of this group. The switching probabilites are symmetric between the the leveraged and lending groups.     

How Knowledge Management Capabilities Help Leverage Knowledge Resources and Strategic Orientation for New Product Advantages in B-to-B High-Technology Firms

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Current understanding of how new product development (NPD) teams use knowledge management capabilities to acquire, disseminate, and apply knowledge resources to achieve competitive advantages is limited by a lack of compelling theory supported by empirical evidence. This study provides a theoretical framework and empirical validation for how an NPD team manages knowledge resources and strategic orientation to enhance its knowledge management capabilities, which, in turn, lead to business-to-busienss (B-to-B) new product advantages.

Methodology/approach: A total of 100 sets of data was collected from B-to-B firms in U.S. high-tech industries. In order to validate the proposed hypotheses, we estimated the main effects using path analysis in AMOS, and tested for interaction effects using interaction term regressions.

Findings: Our findings show that the two dimensions of NPD knowledge management capabilities—acquisition and application—are important but differential drivers of product quality superiority and product differentiation. In testing whether NPD management capabilities matter for two product advantage constructs, we confirmed that product quality superiority can be enhanced by both NPD knowledge acquisition and application capabilities, whereas product differentiation can be increased strongly by NPD knowledge acquisition capabilities.

Research implications: Our research confirms the importance of strategic orientation as a driver of NPD knowledge management capabilities, which enhances understanding of how strategic factors operate under a resource-based view. Our results further provide direct empirical support for the knowledge-based view of firms, in that an NPD team’s abilities to manage and deploy knowledge-based resources by acquiring and applying NPD knowledge lead to competitive advantages, for outcomes of quality superiority and differentiation.

Practical implications: Our findings have relevance for managers in three ways. First, NPD knowledge acquisition and application capabilities have differential impacts on product quality superiority and differentiation. Second, in exploring NPD resource factors as antecedents, managers should manage levels of NPD market intelligence, resource tacitness, and NPD resource deployment differentially to directly improve NPD teams’ acquisition and application capabilities. Third, managers should not underestimate the importance of market and technological orientations in enhancing NPD knowledge management capabilities. Market orientation drives both NPD knowledge acquisition and application capabilities; technological orientation drives NPD knowledge application capabilities. Originality/value/contribution of the paper: An NPD team’s knowledge management capabilities generally, but differentially, mediate the relationships of knowledge resources and strategic orientation factors with new product competitive advantage. However, simply enhancing NPD knowledge management capabilities is not a panacea for developing product competitive advantage in B-to-B settings, because of their differential effects.     

Customer service—the missing dimension in marketing management

Although several writers have drawn attention to Customer Service as a vital ingredient for success in marketing there is still confusion over what is, how to measure it and hence how to manage it. Yet examples continue to emerge which suggest that Customer Service is the essence of the marketing concept in practice and therefore a source of differentiation and competitive advantage.

It is also suggested that the way firms deal with customer service is a more accurate reflection of their marketing orientation than organisational or other characteristics. A useful reminder that business is about creating and providing customer satisfactions would therefore seem appropriate and ways to improve Customer Service are suggested based on several case study examples.