When does salespeople’s customer orientation lead to customer loyalty? The differential effects of relational and functional customer orientation

Is a customer orientation universally effective for salespeople? Or does its effectiveness depend on the selling situation? While previous research has largely neglected this question, this study investigates contextual influences on the link between customer-oriented behaviors and customer loyalty. To do so, it takes a role theory perspective on salesperson customer orientation by distinguishing functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation. It then investigates which type of customer orientation is more effective with regard to establishing and maintaining customer loyalty, given the specific situation. Here, the authors analyze the moderating impact of a customer’s communication style (task orientation and interaction orientation) and specific characteristics of a supplier’s products (product individuality, importance, complexity, and brand strength). Multilevel analysis of triadic data from a cross-industry survey of 56 sales managers, 195 sales representatives, and 538 customers provides empirical support for positive, non significant, and even adverse effects of salespeople’s customer-oriented behaviors on customer loyalty, depending on contextual variables.     

Proactive customer orientation and its role for creating customer value in global markets

Today??s business customers expect sellers not only to respond effectively to their expressed needs but also to understand their business sufficiently well to proactively address their latent and future needs. Yet, research shows that many firms underestimate, misunderstand, or overlook these customer expectations. To draw clarity to this discrepancy, this study explores the notion of proactive customer orientation and examines the degree to which this capability offers an opportunity for competitive advantage. While research in recent years has explored the role of proactive customer orientation in new product performance, empirical investigation in this stream of market orientation literature is significantly underdeveloped. We assess the impact of the proactive customer orientation construct on value creation by taking a novel approach that examines the proactive customer orientation ?? value ?? satisfaction ?? loyalty chain using data from 800 business customers in India, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that, relative to other firm capabilities, proactive customer orientation is the most consistent driver of customer value across our multinational data set. Results also show robust effects for the interaction of proactive and responsive customer orientation to create superior value. Several moderating conditions further frame the impact of this capability: intense levels of customer value change, a global relationship scope, and a transnational relationship structure. Overall, findings significantly advance the understanding of the proactive dimension within market orientation and provide marketers with insights for voice of the customer processes.     

The continuity factor in retail store display

While future research is necessary to determine the variation in findings by such factors as store type, merchandise type, degree of self-selection, etc., these data do indicate that there is much to be said in favor of display continuity. This, of course, assumes that increased sales per minute is a desirable goal. The desirability of increasing sales per minute should be reviewed from the customer’s point of view as well as from a management’s frame of reference. If the shopping task is viewed as relatively unpleasant, then speed of purchasing becomes a real factor. However, should the customer feel that the shopping act is more one of entertainment relative to procurement, then purchase proficiency is less relevant.     

Overcoming the “recency trap” in customer relationship management

Purchase likelihood typically declines as the length of time since the customer’s previous purchase (“recency”) increases. As a result, firms face a “recency trap,” whereby recency increases for customers who do not purchase in a given period, making it even less likely they will purchase in the next period. Eventually the customer is effectively lost to the firm. We develop and illustrate a modeling approach to target a firm’s marketing efforts, keeping in mind the customer’s recency state. This requires an empirical model that predicts purchase likelihood as a function of recency and marketing, and a dynamic optimization that prescribes the most profitable way to target customers. In our application we find that customers’ purchase likelihoods as well as response to marketing depend on recency. These results are used to show that the targeting of email and direct mail should depend on the customer’s recency and that the optimal decision policy enables the average high recency customer, who currently is virtually worthless to the firm, to become profitable.     

管理创新与技术应用的精妙平衡--从战略角度分析银行客户关系管理

信息社会的哲学原则是建立在非线性理论基础上的自然组织化原则。它不是按照线性规律强制有序的社会，也不是无组织的处于混沌状态的社会，而是通过信息网络的作用使每个社会主体在相互协调的环境中经过不断的组织来实现社会的整体优化。在工业时代，人们注重产品，愿意购买产品。而在网络时代，人们越来越重视服务，越来越愿意以合理的价格购买服务。银行业作为一种服务业，如何在日趋激烈的竞争环境中留住顾客，以相对较低的成本建立一套完整的银行客户关系管理体系，使银行真正实现一种以“客户为中心”的管理模式，成为我国银行业亟待解决的问题。     

Sales contest effectiveness: An examination of sales contest design preferences of field sales forces

Sales contests, a widely used form of sales force special incentives, receive considerable attention in the trade and academic press. While understanding salespersons’ preferences for various contest designs is a critical first step for understanding how sales contests motivate salespeople to pursue contest goals, a knowledge gap exists in understanding design preferences. With expectancy theory serving as a theoretical basis, the authors develop hypotheses about preferences for sales contest components. Following tests of hypotheses using survey and conjoint data provided by field sales forces from three companies, exploratory analyses of how individual, supervisory, and sales setting characteristics may affect preferences suggest potential boundary conditions for initial findings. The results lead to an improved awareness of the determinants of contest design preferences as well as insights and implications for sales managers seeking to design effective contests.     

Managing the co-creation of value

Central to service-dominant (S-D) logic is the proposition that the customer becomes a co-creator of value. This emphasizes the development of customer–supplier relationships through interaction and dialog. However, research to date suggests relatively little is known about how customers engage in the co-creation of value. In this article, the authors: explore the nature of value co-creation in the context of S-D logic; develop a conceptual framework for understanding and managing value co-creation; and utilize field-based research to illustrate practical application of the framework. This process-based framework provides a structure for customer involvement that takes account of key foundational propositions of S-D logic and places the customer explicitly at the same level of importance as the company as co-creators of value. Synthesis of diverse concepts from research on services, customer value and relationship marketing into a new process-based framework for co-creation provide new insights into managing the process of value co-creation.     

The duality of decisions and the case for impulsiveness metrics

Customer metrics help firms manage their performance and predict financial outcomes. While many firms focus on customer satisfaction metrics for this purpose, dual-process theories in psychology and neuroscience show that customer decisions are based on two processes. This suggests that metrics which measure the impulsiveness of purchase decisions might effectively complement customer satisfaction metrics. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that satisfaction and impulsiveness metrics make distinct but strong predictions of consumer choices. Satisfaction and impulsiveness influence choice in different ways. While impulsiveness relates to choice directly, the satisfaction-choice path is mediated by loyalty intention. Moreover this relationship is moderated by product involvement such that impulsiveness metrics provide a better prediction for low-involvement than for high-involvement situations. Finally, a field study of 750 customers of 101 firms demonstrates these relationships at a firm level, indicating that satisfaction and impulsiveness metrics have equally strong but distinct relationships with shareholder value. Therefore firms may be able to benefit from complementing customer satisfaction metrics with customer impulsiveness metrics.     

The impact of a sales team’s perceived entitativity on customer satisfaction

This research investigates the impact of a sales team’s entitativity—the extent to which a group of individuals is perceived as a unified single entity—on customer satisfaction. Four studies demonstrate that a sales team entitativity cue, either based on appearance (e.g., wearing the same outfit) or based on behavior (e.g., explicit coordination in service), leads to heightened perceptions of service quality, which subsequently enhances customer satisfaction. Further, these two entitativity cues are shown to have interactive effects. Specifically, when both cues indicate high entitativity, customer satisfaction with the sales team exceeds the average evaluation of individual team members. However, if at least one cue suggests low entitativity (e.g., different outfits or no explicit coordination), the positive influence of the entitativity cue is undermined and customer satisfaction with the team’s service is mitigated. Product category is identified as an important moderator of the main effect.     

Examining the effect of salesperson service behavior in a competitive context

While few scholars debate the importance of doing things to improve the quality of the buyer–seller relationship, little is known about what salespeople can do after the point of the initial sale to enhance customer satisfaction and trust. On the basis of extensive exploratory interviews across professional selling domains, this research develops a set of behaviors, referred to here as “salesperson service behaviors.” Using data gathered from 358 customers, the authors empirically demonstrate the effect of these behaviors on customer satisfaction and trust and, ultimately, on an objective measure of customer share of market. The authors develop a competitive model that uniquely features customer evaluations of competing sales representatives. The results indicate that these salesperson service behaviors are important in building trust and customer satisfaction, which in turn lead to increases in customer share of market.     

Customer query handling in sales interactions

Using a novel approach with video-recordings of sales interactions, this study focuses on a dynamic analysis of salesperson effectiveness in handling customer queries. We conceptualize salesperson behaviors, namely, resolving, relating, and emoting, as separate elements of customer query handling and empirically identify the distinct verbal and nonverbal cues that salespeople use to display these behaviors during sales interactions. We draw from compensation effects in social cognition theory to propose that customers’ perceptions of a salesperson’s effectiveness are prone to trade-offs between competence (resolving behaviors) and warmth (relating and emoting behaviors). Results, robust to endogeneity corrections, support the proposed tradeoffs such that the effectiveness of salesperson’s resolving behavior is significantly curtailed, even neutralized, by the salesperson’s relating and emoting behaviors. We situate these counterintuitive results within the extant theory and research on sales interactions, and outline implications for practice.     

价格变化、后悔与交易价值损失对抱怨的影响

利用情景模拟实验设计方法获取数据,并采用结构方程模型研究了价格变化对已购买产品的顾客带来的心理感受和影响,结果发现:当产品实际价格下降水平超过已购买者心理预期时,顾客会感受到交易价值损失,且交易损失感受对顾客的后悔感有显著的正向影响,但交易价值损失并不直接影响顾客抱怨,后悔感受构成了交易损失和顾客抱怨关系的中介变量。     

Toward a theory of repeat purchase drivers for consumer services

The marketing discipline’s knowledge about the drivers of service customers’ repeat purchase behavior is highly fragmented. This research attempts to overcome that fragmented state of knowledge by making major advances toward a theory of repeat purchase drivers for consumer services. Drawing on means–end theory, the authors develop a hierarchical classification scheme that organizes repeat purchase drivers into an integrative and comprehensive framework. They then identify drivers on the basis of 188 face-to-face laddering interviews in two countries (USA and Germany) and assess the drivers’ importance and interrelations through a national probability sample survey of 618 service customers. In addition to presenting an exhaustive and coherent set of hierarchical repeat-purchase drivers, the authors provide theoretical explanations for how and why drivers relate to one another and to repeat purchase behavior. This research also tests the boundary conditions of the proposed framework by accounting for different service types. In addition to its theoretical contribution, the framework provides companies with specific information about how to manage long-term customer relationships successfully.

顾客参与对顾客价值感知的影响研究——以女性减肥计划为例

文章从顾客与企业的交互层面上分析构建了顾客参与前因要素与顾客顾客参与结果的整合模型,考察了顾客参与对顾客价值感知的影响。对30家女性养生会所和减肥俱乐部的480名女性减肥顾客的调查问卷,运用结构模型的方法对数据进行处理。通过实证研究发现,顾客的参与显著地影响了顾客的价值感知,且呈正相关关系,顾客参与通过功能性价值来间接影响情感性价值和社会性价值。本文最后对该研究在企业管理方面的意义以及未来的研究方向做了展望。     

The influence of C2C communications in online brand communities on customer purchase behavior

Increasingly, consumers use the internet as a vehicle for pre-purchase information gathering. While technical specifications and potentially biased selling points can be gleaned from corporate web sites, online brand communities are becoming essential conduits for the customer-to-customer (C2C) sharing of product information and experiences. This study develops and tests a model of online C2C communications in developing desirable online brand community outcomes. Two studies were used to test the model. In Study 1, a netnography technique was employed and conversations between brand community members were coded and combined with survey data to test the research model. In Study 2 an experiment was conducted to further test the sequence of events in our base model. Our findings show that online brand communities are effective tools for influencing sales, regardless of whether these communities reside on company-owned or independently-owned websites. In addition, we demonstrate interesting asymmetrical effects, whereby the positive information shared by community members has a stronger moderating influence on purchase behavior than negative information. Further, we find that online brand communities are effective customer retention tools for retaining both experienced and novice customers. These findings highlight the need for all firms to carefully consider their online community strategies.     

Elevating marketing: marketing is dead! Long live marketing!

Marketing must be elevated to a higher level of consciousness. A consciousness that grows beyond solving small, immediate problems to addressing long-term, large problems that goes beyond individual customer satisfaction and short-term financial performance to encompass the total value creation system. The discipline, in theory and practice, must move beyond a narrow focus on customers to a broader concern for them as citizen-consumers. This necessitates a recommitment of marketing to its fundamental purpose in society, which is improving the standard of living for all citizens by co-creating value at all levels within a socio-economic system. An elevated (systems) concept of marketing must focus on micro, meso and macro systems with an understanding of the purpose and shared vision for each system, a clear identification of responsibilities, and a focus on resource effectiveness and efficiency.     

Customer satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the empirical evidence

The growing number of academic studies on customer satisfaction and the mixed findings they report complicate efforts among managers and academics to identify the antecedents to, and outcomes of, businesses having more-versus less-satisfied customers. These mixed findings and the growing emphasis by managers on having satisfied customers point to the value of empirically synthesizing the evidence on customer satisfaction to assess current knowledge. To this end, the authors conduct a meta-analysis of the reported findings on customer satisfaction. They document that equity and disconfirmation are most strongly related to customer satisfaction on average. They also find that measurement and method factors that characterize the research often moderate relationship strength between satisfaction and its antecedents and outcomes. The authors discuss the implications surrounding these effects and offer several directions for future research. David M. Szymanski (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the Al and Marion Withers Research Fellow and Director, Center for Retailing Studies in the Lowry Mays College and Graduate School of Business, Texas A&M University. His research interests include applied meta-analysis, marketing strategy, personal selling and sales management, product innovation, and retail strategy. Representative research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, and theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. David H. Henard (Ph.D., Texas A&M University) is an assistant professor of marketing at North Carolina State University. His research interests include product innovation, new product development, and corporate reputation.     

Customer mind-set of employees throughout the organization

Previous research has provided strong evidence for the benefits of embracing a market orientation, an organizational focus highlighting the needs of customers, and the creation of customer value. This study extends this focus on the customer to the individual worker level. A construct, customer mind-set (CMS), is developed that reflects the extent to which an individual employee believes that understanding and satisfying customers, whether internal or external to the organization, is central to the proper execution of his or her job. In this exploratory study, the authors develop a parsimonious scale for measuring CMS. Relationships between CMS and significant organizational variables are examined to establish CMS's validity and provide some tentative insights into its value to researchers and practitioners. The authors believe the CMS construct will allow for operational-level analysis of the extent to which a customer orientation is embraced throughout an organization, permitting managers to implement targeted improvement strategies. Karen Norman Kennedy is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include customer orientation and cultural change in organizations, as well as the evolving role of customers and employees in today's marketplace. Her work has been published in theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, theJournal of Services Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, and theJournal of Marketing Education. Felicia G. Lassk is an assistant professor in the Marketing Group of Northeastern University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include customer orientation, salesperson job involvement, and measurement issues. Her articles have appeared in the theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Industrial Marketing Management, and theJournal of Marketing Education, among others. Jerry R. Goolsby is the Hilton/Baldridge Eminent Chair of Music Industry Studies at Loyola University New Orleans. He received his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University. His research interests include issues related to market orientation and its implementation, customer and employee relationships, and sales interactions. His work has been published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and other marketing journals.     

Do institutional investors pay attention to customer satisfaction and why?

Extant marketing, accounting, and finance research has neglected to examine the relevance of customer satisfaction information for institutional investors, despite their potential importance. This study develops and supports a framework suggesting that firms with positive changes in customer satisfaction are more attractive to transient institutional investors than to non-transient institutional investors. We also find that the impact of customer satisfaction on transient institutional investor holdings is contingent upon firm intangible asset intensity, product-market demand uncertainty, and financial market volatility. In addition, transient institutional investor holdings at least partially mediate the effects of changes in customer satisfaction on firm abnormal return and idiosyncratic risk. Thus, transient institutional investor investments represent a mechanism through which customer satisfaction affects firm value.     

略论商品的数字化陈列

封闭式的实样品陈列方式没有为顾客欲选购的具有多样具体属性的商品 ,规定一个可以向服务人员便捷、准确传递的统一称号 ,势必影响购买行为的理性化。对商品实行数字编码陈列 ,能使顾客对其欲选购商品直呼其号 ,售货员则直取其样 ,从而有利于求购目标的实现 ,扩大商品销售量 ,提高经济效益。