Inter-Organisational Relationships and Strategy Development in an Evolving Industrial Network: Mapping Structure and Process

The paper explores the complexity of organisational strategies and relationships within an industrial supply chain. Whilst a considerable body of literature exists on inter-organisational relationships (IORs), our assertion is that much of this takes an overly deterministic view of the complex and sometimes conflicting situations that profoundly affect an organisation's (and, indeed, a network's) ability to perform effectively. Thus we turn for insight to literature beyond the traditional marketing arena, i.e.to sociology and organisational science.

We begin by relating aspects of the relationship marketing (RM) literature to a case context wherein the focal firm operates globally, supplying speciality chemicals to the chemical manufacturing market. Next, a brief comparison between the RM and the rather more inductive network (NW) literatures is undertaken. In a section representing the core theoretical underpinning of our study, Giddens' (1984) notion of structuration is then discussed; in particular how it relates to industrial NWs. Further literature from the management sphere is introduced to illustrate how a structurationist perspective might be taken forward in business marketing research.

Thereafter, following a discussion of methodological issues, we describe the case findings. These are presented in the form of "before" and "after" scenarios which illustrate both intra- and inter-firm issues. Our analysis highlights factors and behaviours which we believe can redirect (consciously or not) an organisation's activities away from any intended relationship building and towards a transactional orientation, despite the long term consequences for the NW. In the paper's conclusions, as well as making some pertinent case observations, we discuss the utility of a structurationist approach to research. Finally, we give some recommendations both for the focal case company and for further research into IORs.     

A citation and profiling analysis of pricing research from 1980 to 2010

This paper identifies the body of literature related to pricing that exists in 20 marketing or business journals contained in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between January 1980 and June 2010. During this 30-year period we found over 38,800 citations were made to 1945 articles that dealt with some aspect of pricing. Based on these data, we identify individual articles, authors, and institutions that have contributed most to this body of literature. We study what subjects within the domain of pricing have received most attention, and how these topics have evolved in three year periods. In addition, we use text mining and information visualization tools to identify networks of researchers who collaborate on pricing articles. We identify institutional affiliations within the networks and highlight most frequent subjects of articles written by researchers in each network. Our results show pricing is an important topic in the marketing domain.     

Distribution of Marketing Research Material to Universities: The Case of Archive of Market and Social Research (AMSR)

ABSTRACT

The aim of this note is to understand how content relating to marketing and market research is distributed to and within universities. The focus of the study includes the behavior of all those in this market for information, namely suppliers (whether content generators, aggregators, packagers, or distributors of content) of marketing research, university staff, and students. The case study method was implemented to collect data. The case study focuses on UK Higher Education. Specifically, the authors use the case study of the newly developed Archive of Market and Social Research (AMSR) to explore how content relating to marketing and market research is distributed to and within universities. The research involved personal interviews with 15 librarian senior managers selected from 14 universities.

The interviews with librarians provided insight into how AMSR could be distributed to university libraries and how it could be accessed. The findings highlight the role of university academics in specifying the content of marketing and market research. They focus on ‘real world’ management problems to deliver research with impact and relevant teaching. Therefore, they need company and industry information and are more likely to use current sources. The study maps the process of acquisition of marketing and market research content by universities and identifies the different roles involved in this process. The study is in line with the emerging literature that focuses on the role of education in explaining the relevance gap in marketing research. The study contrasts between the situation in the university market and industrial buying and adds to our understanding of the complexities associated with the distribution of the marketing research material. The result is expected to be a much sharper focus for the marketing of the archive material, leading to greater use of recent high-quality market research by marketing educators, and changes to marketing and market research syllabuses.

This note provides insight into how suppliers (whether content generators, aggregators, packagers, or distributors of content) of market and marketing research should market to universities and ensure the use of their information resources by students and teachers and how they should. The findings of the study contribute to understanding customer needs and shaping a new service product proposition. In addition, the study provides insight into how university students and staff access and should access commercial research on marketing from the market research industry (in particular from the Archive of Market and Social Research) and use it in their learning, so that their knowledge will be more up to date and their employability will be increased. Adding several insights to the issue of distribution of marketing research material to universities. The paper relates to the marketing of information resources to universities, specifically to the work of the Archive of Market and Social Research, in marketing their information assets to universities, and more specifically the relationship between the “push” of suppliers, libraries, journal and textbook suppliers and information aggregators (such as EBSCO and JISC) and the pull coming from academic researchers and lecturers, who might use this information in their teaching and research. The present study can be seen as a classic case study of understanding buyer behavior, but in a modern world of information platforms, aggregation, and the digital economy.     

Making Sense of Marketing Data: Some MIS Perspectives on the Analysis of Large Data Sets

Despite the growth in the size and complexity of corporate data, the technology for analyzing it has not kept up with the advances in data collection, in that managers mostly need to rely on marketing research and information systems experts to generate the analysis and reports they need. We review some useful approaches here from the computer science and information systems fields for the analysis of large data sets, viz. good data organization and the use of flexible analysis tools, for making the analysis more tractable and user-friendly. These methods are increasingly being adopted by practitioners who are hard-pressed to generate business intelligence from large corporate databases. However, the benefits of these approaches may not be confined only to practitioners, and may apply to academic researchers working with large data sets, as well.     

Barriers to advancing the science and practice of marketing

ABSTRACT

From focus groups to clinical interviews to cognitive, neurological and biological approaches, market research borrows heavily from the behavioural sciences. Borrowing ideas and methods from other disciplines, often with adaptations, while clearly valuable, also brings a significant risk of ‘getting it wrong’. Problems arise when researchers do not follow best practices carefully developed in the originating discipline. To maintain competitive advantage, marketing researchers often ‘black box’ the details of how they apply those procedures of method design and analysis. This lack of transparency provides little evidence that best practices are followed. This, in turn, raises questions about the validity and reliability of the resulting insights and their implications. To illustrate this issue, we examine two domains where there is strong evidence to suggest that current practices are not best (or even good) practices – implicit association testing and neuroscience.     

Interpreting discourse: a critical discourse analysis of the marketing of an extreme right party

Viewing marketing as an ideological discourse that places consumption in a central position in people's lives provides further insights into the construction of political marketing discourse. Politicians and political parties now follow the 'logic of the market' in their attempts to connect with voters. Critical discourse analysis can be used in general to study the nature of political marketing discourse and specifically to document the web of identities and power relations that this discourse reproduces. To illustrate this application of theory we examine the marketing of the Vlaams Blok, a successful Flemish extreme-right party. The Vlaams Blok provides a good example of how the adoption of a marketing approach is used in politics, especially in the way a political party communicates to a wide audience using market logic. The analysis echoes approaches used by advertising and marketing communications scholars and highlights the strategic use of lexical, rhetorical and other linguistic devices to brand, sell and differentiate the Vlaams Blok from other political products. The analysis demonstrates that the Vlaams Blok creates a ready-to-consume product that achieves success at the electoral 'checkout'. We set the stage for marketing scholars to help both further understand how marketing methods are deployed with increasing sophistication outside the traditional domain of marketing, and to consider the consequences of a marketing discourse in the civic sphere.     

The Influence of Customer Relationship Marketing Strategies on Supply Chain Relationships: The Moderating Effects of Environmental Uncertainty and Competitive Rivalry

Purpose: A firm's customer relationship marketing strategy also may affect its attitudinal loyalty toward its main supplier. Furthermore, environmental uncertainty and competitive rivalry could moderate this relationship. This research investigates both questions.

Methodology/Approach: The empirical study involves a structured survey of 141 industrial firms. A structural equation technique with EQS 6.1 estimated the causal model. Multi-sample analysis revealed whether environmental uncertainty and/or competitive rivalry act as moderators.

Findings: The influence of customer relationship marketing on attitudinal loyalty toward the main supplier is positive but indirect, working through effective communication, satisfaction, and trust. However, when environmental uncertainty is high, the negative direct effect becomes significantly more intense, and when competitive rivalry is high, the positive indirect effect through satisfaction and trust is less intense.

Originality/Value: This study explores potential new paths in the relationship marketing field. Most scholars focus on the influence of a firm's relationship marketing strategy on customers' loyalty, but no previous works consider its potential influence on the firm's relationship with other partners in the supply chain, notably its strategic suppliers.

Research Implications: Structured academic research on this topic is lacking, even though many firms have implemented customer relationship programs. Supply-side researchers must evaluate the effects of such programs. Furthermore, this study combines different theoretical approaches.

Practical Implications: Practitioners can use the findings to segment their customer base and develop specific programs adapted to each target.     

Symbolic violence and marketing ECRs in the neoliberal University

ABSTRACT

This paper uses symbolic violence as one way of interpreting the lived experiences of early career researchers (ECRs) in the neoliberal University. We focus on marketing ECRs as business schools epitomise the highly market-mediated, performative, and managerialist ideology of the contemporary neoliberal University which facilitates symbolic violence. Specifically, marketing education, with its orientation towards market logic, has been identified as aligning with the neoliberal paradigm. We draw on qualitative narrative interviews with 16 United Kingdom and Australian ECRs in marketing to demonstrate how symbolic violence is produced and reproduced through institutions, ideology, language and discourse, and social relations. We find that while ECRs are not entirely subjugated by symbolic violence in the neoliberal University – with some participants displaying critically reflexive awareness and resistance, we also find that they can be complicit and serve to reproduce the system through seeking to learn and play the game of academia, rather than change it. We argue that symbolic violence offers a framework to help conceptualise the neoliberal University. Further, we submit that instrumental advice to marketing ECRs on how to navigate a life in academia is not enough and that critical reflexivity, resistance, and social action to oppose symbolic violence and the ideology of the neoliberal University is required to achieve emancipation.     

Thirsty in an Ocean of Data? Pitfalls and Practical Strategies When Partnering With Industry on Big Data Supply Chain Research

Increased volume, velocity, and variety of data provides new opportunities for businesses to take advantage of data science techniques, predictive analytics, and big data. However, firms are struggling to make use of their disjointed and unintegrated data streams. Despite this, academics with the analytic tools and training to pursue such research often face difficulty gaining access to corporate data. We explore the divergent goals of practitioners and academics and how the gap that exists between the communities can be overcome to derive mutual value from big data. We describe a practical roadmap for collaboration between academics and practitioners pursuing big data research. Then we detail a case example of how, by following this roadmap, researchers can provide insight to a firm on a specific supply chain problem while developing a replicable template for effective analysis of big data. In our case study, we demonstrate the value of effectively pairing management theory with big data exploration, describe unique challenges involved in big data research, and develop a novel and replicable hierarchical regression‐based process for analyzing big data.     

Leveraging firm-level marketing capabilities with marketing employee development

Using the theoretical foundations of the resource-based view of the firm, this study develops and measures marketing employee development capabilities and investigates how it moderates the relationships between brand and customer relationship management capabilities and firm performance outcomes. Based on a random sample survey of chief marketing executives from selected industries, combined with objective firm performance indicators and controls, results demonstrate that marketing employee development capabilities can leverage the relationships between firm-level marketing capabilities and customer satisfaction, market effectiveness, and objective financial performance. Further, these results show that such capabilities can be complementary and, in some cases, even substitute for each other, which improves organizational performance. Implications for researchers and marketing managers are discussed.     

Behavioural psychology,marketing and consumer behaviour: a literature review and future research agenda

Abstract

Psychology, along with a wide range of other academic disciplines, has influenced research in both consumer behaviour and marketing. However, the influence of one area of psychology – namely, behaviourism – on research on consumers and marketing has been less prominent. Behaviourism has influenced consumer and marketing research through the application of classical and operant conditioning, matching and foraging theories, amongst other frameworks, during the past 50 years. This article provides a review of research and applications of behavioural psychology in the area, as well as a brief introduction of behavioural psychology for scholars unfamiliar with the area. The article also suggests avenues for further research examining the potential development of behavioural psychology approaches for both consumer and marketing researchers.     

Marketing,violence and social cohesion: first steps to a conceptual approach to the understanding of the normalising role of marketing

ABSTRACT

This paper answers a call for contributions ‘dedicated to revealing how markets and marketing make violence culturally acceptable and socially normalised’. Such an investigation has to involve some in-depth conceptualisation with respect to the meanings of both marketing and violence. The market is an institution related to other institutions which altogether are – as in all societies – trying to cope with violence. Today our societies are based on both markets and democracy, but those institutions tend to be mutually contradictory. When marketing tends to replace politics and to almost religiously convert citizens into consumers it is social cohesion that is at stake. This paper aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of social/historical trends. As it highlights the importance of ideas (representations and motivations) and their links with changing institutions, it might help researchers and marketers to a broader understanding of their role and towards a more conscious social behaviour.     

Game theory in marketing science uses and limitations

This paper reviews some major concepts in game theory and indicates how they may apply to marketing science. The theory of games provides a framework for addressing problems of competitive strategies and of buyer-seller interactions. These issues are important in studying industrial markets where there are a small number of buyers as well as for studying how to incorporate knowledgeable, active competitors into consumer marketing mix models.Few marketers have seen much benefit in the past from developments in game theory. This is partly because of the historical preoccupation of game theorists with complete information, zero sum games. The richer area of games of incomplete information may have much more to offer the marketing scientist.In this paper we review how game-theoretic approaches (interactive models) differ from most previous approaches, which are optimizing and asymmetric. We then look at how these alternative approaches apply to two problem areas - competitive entry and bargaining. Then we review potential applications of game theory in marketing and the value of applying marketing science approaches in game theory. We conclude with a perspective on future developments in this field.     

Social Media's Impact on the Consumer Mindset: When to Use Which Sentiment Extraction Tool?

User-generated content provides many opportunities for managers and researchers, but insights are hindered by a lack of consensus on how to extract brand-relevant valence and volume. Marketing studies use different sentiment extraction tools (SETs) based on social media volume, top-down language dictionaries and bottom-up machine learning approaches. This paper compares the explanatory and forecasting power of these methods over several years for daily customer mindset metrics obtained from survey data. For 48 brands in diverse industries, vector autoregressive models show that volume metrics explain the most for brand awareness and purchase intent, while bottom-up SETs excel at explaining brand impression, satisfaction and recommendation. Systematic differences yield contingent advice: the most nuanced version of bottom-up SETs (SVM with Neutral) performs best for the search goods for all consumer mind-set metrics but Purchase Intent for which Volume metrics work best. For experienced goods, Volume outperforms SVM with neutral. As processing time and costs increase when moving from volume to top-down to bottom-up sentiment extraction tools, these conditional findings can help managers decide when more detailed analytics are worth the investment.     

Increasing the Validity of Post Command Economy Research and Application

The demise of communism in the post command economies (PCEs) has created considerable interest from both academics and practitioners. As a result, a myriad of Western marketing academics and practitioners have been exploring the region. Despite the abundance of literature on cross-cultural research and practice, many PCE researchers have failed to consider fundamental issues related to cross-cultural/cross-national research design. This paper highlights a number of problems researchers face when investigating PCE regional phenomena. In particular, the authors discuss the issue of commonality and demonstrate how the use of multivariate analyses can be effectively used to: (1) identify more homogenous groupings of PCEs; and, (2) validate marketing constructs developed outside the PCEs. Though based on analyses of the interdependence of political and economic variables, the authors identify sub-groupings of countries that largely reflect traditional geo-cultural groupings: the Baltics, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia and Peripheral, and Ccntral Asia. The authors also discuss traditional cross-cultural research approaches and demonstrate how the operationalisation of appropriate approaches can improve the application of regional marketing stratey and validity of PCE findings.     

Product innovation in banking: How marketing works

Many benchmarking initiatives are driven by an academic or government desire to understand the position of industry sectors relative to each other or to those of other nations. In contrast, for managers striving to compete and drive their businesses forward, this generalised approach is secondary to their need for tools which are applicable in their own company and which give them direct benefits.

Observing that benchmarking has proved very powerful in manufacturing, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) invested in research to establish a similar approach in marketing. Benchmarking was defined as a system which incorporates three essential elements: measurement, processes, and a defined, measured, aspirational 'benchmark'.

This paper describes a unique benchmarking tool designed specifically for marketing processes (CIMBA), developed by the CIM. It enables both marketers and senior executives in non-marketing functions to identify the role of marketing in their organisation and to measure the processes which convert marketing strategy into reality.

The system is driven by a model of best practice, tailored to each organisation's situation through their particular critical success factors. Analysis is software-based to provide easy manipulations of the data. CIMBA provides the measurements and the means to broker partnerships between carefully matched companies, even across sectors, if they have gone through a CIMBA assessment.     

Benchmarking Marketing Processes for Performance Improvement: A New Approach from the Chartered Institute of Marketing

Many benchmarking initiatives are driven by an academic or government desire to understand the position of industry sectors relative to each other or to those of other nations. In contrast, for managers striving to compete and drive their businesses forward, this generalised approach is secondary to their need for tools which are applicable in their own company and which give them direct benefits.

Observing that benchmarking has proved very powerful in manufacturing, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) invested in research to establish a similar approach in marketing. Benchmarking was defined as a system which incorporates three essential elements: measurement, processes, and a defined, measured, aspirational 'benchmark'.

This paper describes a unique benchmarking tool designed specifically for marketing processes (CIMBA), developed by the CIM It enables both marketers and senior executives in non-marketing functions to identify the role of marketing in their organisation and to measure the processes which convert marketing strategy into reality.

The system is driven by a model of best practice, tailored to each organisation's situation through their particular critical success factors. Analysis is software-based to provide easy manipulations of the data. CIMBA provides the measurements and the means to broker partnerships between carefully matched companies, even across sectors, if they have gone through a CIMBA assessment.     

2008 World Social Marketing Conference: Introduction to special issue

This article summarizes the articles found in this special issue, which were inspired by the 2008 Social Marketing Conference in Brighton, England. This special issue provides readers with an interesting mix of social marketing topics and methods. Both conceptual and empirical articles are represented. Social marketing practitioners will find some good ideas and new approaches. Social marketing researchers will be presented with some of the latest thinking in social marketing, and perhaps will obtain insights for future research.