Advantageous alliances

Previously, he was executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. He has authored 10 books and 100 articles in the areas of marketing and strategic business planning. He has received various awards, including two Alpha Kappa Psi Foundation Awards and two Harold H. Maynard Awards for the best articles published in theJournal of Marketing; in 1994 he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for distinguished contributions to the field of marketing.     

Spreading the word: Investigating antecedents of consumers’ positive word-of-mouth intentions and behaviors in a retailing context

Empirical studies investigating the antecedents of positive word of mouth (WOM) typically focus on the direct effects of consumers’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction with previous purchasing experiences. The authors develop and test a more comprehensive model of the antecedents of positive. WOM (both intentions and behaviors), including consumer identification and commitment. Specifically, they hypothesize and test commitment as a mediator and moderator of satisfaction on positive WOM and commitment as a mediator of identification on WOM. Using data obtained from customers of a retailer offering both products and services, they find support for all hypothesized relationships with WOM intentions and/or WOM behaviors as the dependent variable. The authors conclude with a discussion of their findings and implications for both marketing theory and practice. Tom J. Brown (tomb@okstate.edu) is Ardmore Professor of Business Administration and an associate professor of marketing at Oklahoma State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His articles have appeared in leading marketing journals including theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Research, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His current research interests include causes and effects of corporate reputation and the customer orientation of service workers. He is cofounder of the Corporate Identity/Associations Research Group. Teaching interests include marketing research, services marketing, and corporate communications. He is coauthor (with Gilbert A. Churchill Jr.) ofBasic Marketing Research (5th ed.). Thomas E. Barry (tbarry@mail.smu.edu) is a professor of marketing and vice president for executive affairs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Texas. His primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of integrated marketing communications, marketing management, brand equity, loyalty, and advertising effectiveness. His research has appeared in numerous journals including theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Consumer Psychology, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He is the author or coauthor of two books in marketing and advertising management. He has consulted for a variety of firms and is a director on four boards. In 1995, he received the Outstanding Contributions in Advertising Research Award from the American Academy of Advertising. Peter A. Dacin (pdacin@business.queens.ca) is a professor of marketing at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His primary teaching and research interests lie in consumer/managerial judgment formation, brand equity/dilution, corporate reputation, and research methods and design. He has also published in the area of sales force management. His research has appeared in several leading journals including theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, and theJournal of Consumer Research. In addition, he has published in numerous conference proceedings. He is currently the chair of the American Marketing Association’s ConsumerBehavior Special Interest Group, serves on the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association, and is cofounder of the Corporate Identity/Associations Research Group. Richard F. Gunst (rgunst@mail.smu.edu) is a professor and chair of the Department of Statistical Science at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. He received his Ph.D. from SMU. His primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of linear and nonlinear modeling and regression analysis, with an emphasis on spatial statistical modeling. He has co-authored three books on regression analysis and the statistical design and analysis of experiments, in addition to publishing scholarly articles in theJournal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, Biometrics, andTechnometrics. He has received the W. J. Youden (1974, 1985) and Frank Wilcoxon (1994) Publication Awards fromTechnometrics, and the American Statistical Association’s Award for Outstanding Statistical Application Award (1994). He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and received its Founders Award in 1999.     

Interimistic relational exchange: Conceptualization and propositional development

Research on relational exchange has focused primarily on long-term, or “enduring,” relational exchange. The evolutionary model of relationship development that is the foundation for much of the research on enduring relational exchange lacks applicability for short-term, or “interimitic,” relational exchange. Interimistic relational exchange is defined as a close, collaborative, fast-developing, short-lived exchange relationship in which companies pool their skills and/or resources to address a transient, albeit important, business opportunity and/or threat. Because interimistic exchange relationships must quickly become functional and have a short life, these relationships have less time to fully develop the relational governance mechanisms assumed in the evolutionary model. There-fore, interimistic relational exchange appears to relymore on nonrelational mechanisms than does enduring relational exchange. This article (1) examines how interimistic relational exchange governance differs from that of enduring relational exchange and (2) develops propositions for further research on interimistic relational exchange. C. Jay Lambe received his doctorate from the Darden School at the University of Virginia. He is an assistant professor of marketing at Texas Tech University. Prior to entering academe, he was engaged in business-to-business marketing for both Xerox and AT&T. His research interests include business-to-business marketing, relationship marketing, marketing strategy, and sales management. He has publications in theJournal of Product Innovation Management, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and theInternational Journal of Management Reviews. In 1999, he was one of five Texas Tech University faculty members chosen by the students for the annual Outstanding Faculty Member Award. Robert E. Spekman is the Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School. He was formerly a professor of marketing and associate director of the Center for Telecommunications at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a recognized authority on business-to-business marketing and strategic alliances. His consulting experiences range from marketing research and competitive analysis to strategic market planning, supply chain management, channels of distribution design and implementation, and strategic partnering. He has taught in a number of executive programs in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. He has edited/written seven books and has authored (coauthored) more than 80 articles and papers. He also serves as a reviewer for a number of marketing and management journals as well as for the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining the faculty at USC, he taught in the College of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. During his tenure at Maryland, he was granted the Most Distinguished Faculty Award by the MBA students on three separate occasions. Shelby D. Hunt is the J. B. Hoskins and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. A past editor of theJournal of Marketing (1985–1987) and author ofModern Marketing Theory: Critical Issues in the Philosophy of Marketing Science (South-Western, 1991), he has written numerous articles on competitive theory, macro marketing, ethics, channels of distribution, and marketing theory. Three of hisJournal of Marketing articles, “The Nature and Scope of Marketing” (1976), “General Theories and the Fundamental Explananda of Marketing” (1983), and “The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition” (1995) won the Harold H. Maynard Award for the “best article on marketing theory”. He received the 1986 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association for his “outstanding contributions to theory and science in marketing”. He received the 1987 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science and the 1992 American Marketing Association/Richard D. Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. His new and provocative book is titledA General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (Sage, 2000).     

The strategic imperative and sustainable competitive advantage: Public policy implications of resource-advantage theory

Strategy theorists share (1) the view that the strategic imperative of a firm should be sustained, superior financial performance and (2) the belief that this goal can be achieved through a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. Neoclassical perfect competition and traditional industrial organization economics, however, imply that the sustained performance goal advocated by strategy theorists is anticompetitive and its achievement presumptively detrimental to social welfare. This article addresses the strategy-is-anticompetitive thesis with the goal of grounding strategy in a theory of competition— resource-advantage theory—that does not imply that the strategic imperative and its achievement are presumptively anticompetitive and antisocial. As such, this article initiates a discussion of the public policy implications of resource-advantage theory. Shelby D. Hunt is the J. B. Hoskins and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. A past editor of theJournal of Marketing (1985–1987) and author ofModern Marketing Theory: Critical Issues in the Philosophy of Marketing Science (South-Western, 1991), he has numerous articles on competitive theory, macromarketing, ethics, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. Three of hisJournal of Marketing articles, “The Nature and Scope of Marketing” (1976), “General Theories and Fundamental Explananda of Marketing” (1983), and “The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition” (1995), have won the Harold H. Maynard Award for the “best article on marketing theory.” He received the 1986 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association for his contributions to theory and science in marketing. He received the 1987 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science and the 1992 American Marketing Association/Richard D. Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator Award.     

Marketing to and serving customers through the internet: An overview and research agenda

The authors discuss the motivations for this special issue and propose a conceptual framework pertaining to the issue’s theme. Using this framework as a backdrop, they then offer an overview of the remaining articles by segmenting them into categories and discussing their relationship to the framework. They conclude by highlighting research avenues for augmenting our understanding of marketing to and serving customers through the Internet. A. Parasuraman (D.B.A., Indiana University) is a professor and holder of the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. He has received many distinguished teaching and research awards. In 1988, he was selected as one of the “Ten Most Influential Figures in Quality” by the editorial board ofThe Quality Review. In 1998, he received the American Marketing Association’s “Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award.” In 2001, he received the Academy of Marketing Science’s “Outstanding Marketing Educator Award.” Dr. Parasuraman has published numerous articles in leading scholarly and managerial journals. He has served as editor of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science for a 3-year term (1997–2000). He has authored or coauthored several books, the most recent of which isTechno-Ready Marketing: How and Why Your Customers Adopt Technology (2001). George M. Zinkhan is the Coca-Cola Company Chair of Marketing at the University of Georgia. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Michigan, he served on the faculty at both the University of Houston and the University of Pittsburgh. His main research focus is in the areas of communication, advertising, and electronic commerce. His recent coauthored books includeElectronic Commerce: A Strategic Perspective (2000) andConsumers (2002).     

Alliance competence, resources, and alliance success: Conceptualization, measurement, and initial test

This research examines the effect of an alliance competence on resource-based alliance success. The fundamental thesis guiding this research is that an alliance competence contributes to alliance success, both directly and through the acquisition and creation of resources. Using survey data gathered from 145 alliances, empirical tests of the hypotheses provide support for the posited explanation of alliance success. The findings indicate that an alliance competence is not only antecedent to the resources that are necessary for alliance success but also to alliance success itself. C. Jay Lambe (Ph.D., The Darden School at University of Virginia) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. For 10 years prior to entering academe, he was engaged in business-to-business marketing for both Xerox and AT&T. His research interests include business-to-business marketing, relationship marketing, marketing strategy, and sales management. He has publications in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, theInternational Journal of Management Reviews, theJournal of Business-to-Business Marketing, and theJournal of Relationship Marketing. He also serves as a reviewer for theJournal of Business-to-Business Marketing. Prior to joining the faculty at Virginia Tech, he was one of five Texas Tech University faculty members chosen in 1999 from the entire university for the annual Outstanding Faculty Member Award by the Mortar Board and Omicron Delta Kappa (Texas Tech University student organizations that recognize excellence in teaching). Robert E. Spekman is the Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School at the University of Virginia. He was formerly a professor of marketing and associate director of the Center for Telecommunications at the University of Southern California. He is an internationally recognized authority on business-to-business marketing and strategic alliances. His consulting experiences range from marketing research and competitive analysis, to strategic market planning, supply chain management, channels of distribution design and implementation, and strategic partnering. He has taught in a number of executive programs in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. His executive program experience ranges from general marketing strategy, to sales force management, to channels strategy, to creating strategic alliances, to business-to-business marketing strategy, to a number of single-company and senior executive management programs. He has edited and/or written seven books and has authored (coauthored) more than 80 articles and papers. He also serves as a reviewer for a number of marketing and management journals, as well as for the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Southern California, he taught in the College of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. During his tenure at Maryland, he was granted the Most Distinguished Faculty Award by the MBA students on three separate occasions. Shelby D. Hunt is the J. B. Hoskins and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Lubbock. A past editor of theJournal of Marketing (1985–87), he is the author ofModern Marketing Theory: Critical Issues in the Philosophy of Marketing Science (South-Western, 1991) andA General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (Sage, 2000). He has written numerous articles on competitive theory, macromarketing, ethics, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. Three of hisJournal of Marketing articles—“The Nature and Scope of Marketing” (1976), “General Theories and Fundamental Explananda of Marketing” (1983), and “The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition” (1995) (with Robert M. Morgan)—won the Harold H. Maynard Award for the best article on marketing theory. His 1985Journal of Business Research article with Lawrence B. Chonko, “Ethics and Marketing Management,” received the 2000 Elsevier Science Exceptional Quality and High Scholarly Impact award. His 1989 article, ”Reification and Realism in Marketing: in Defense of Reason,” won theJournal of Macromarketing Charles C. Slater Award. For his contributions to theory and science in marketing, he received the 1986 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association, the 1987 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, and the 1992 American Marketing Association/Richard D. Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator Award.     

What attracts customers to online stores,and what keeps them coming back?

Many businesses on the Internet in the late 1990s spent wildly, doing whatever it might take to attract customers to their sites. It soon became clear that the challenge was not simply to bring the customers in the door but also to retain these customers for future purchases. The quest was on to discover what tactics had the most appeal to Internet shoppers. This study reveals survey and behavioral data drawn from Internet customers that reflect what was most important to the Internet shoppers and compare the factors for attraction versus retention. Since many have viewed the Internet as creating more perfect information for the buyer, the question arises as to how important price will be in the purchase process. What becomes clear from the analysis is that what attracts customers to the site are not the same dimensions critical in retaining customers on a longer term basis. David J. Reibstein is the William S. Woodside Professor and a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He was the executive director of the Marketing Science Institute from 1999 to 2001. He received his Ph.D. in industrial administration at Purdue University. He has authored numerous articles that have appeared in major marketing journals, including theJournal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Marketing, andJournal of Consumer Research. His primary research interests are in Internet marketing, competitive marketing strategy, market segmentation, marketing models, and understanding brand choice behavior. He has been actively involved as a consultant with a number of major companies and serves on the board of several companies and not-for-profit organizations.     

The customer economics of internet privacy

The World Wide Web has significantly reduced the costs of obtaining information about individuals, resulting in a widespread perception by consumers that their privacy is being eroded. The conventional wisdom among the technological cognoscenti seems to be that privacy will continue to erode, until it essentially disappears. The authors use a simple economic model to explore this conventional wisdom, under the assumption that there is no government intervention and privacy is left to free-market forces. They find support for the assertion that, under those conditions, the amount of privacy will decline over time and that privacy will be increasingly expensive to maintain. The authors conclude that a market for privacy will emerge, enabling customers to purchase a certain degree of privacy, no matter how easy it becomes for companies to obtain information, but the overall amount of privacy and privacy-based customer utility will continue to erode. Roland T. Rust (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) holds the David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he directs the Center for e-Service. His lifetime achievement honors include the American Marketing Association’s (AMA’s) Gilbert A. Churchill Award for contributions to marketing research, the Outstanding Contributions to Research in Advertising Award from the American Academy of Advertising, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the AMA Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, and the Henry Latané Distinguished Doctoral Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has won best article awards for articles inMarketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, andJournal of Retailing, as well as the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Best Paper Award. His seven books includee-Service, Driving Customer Equity, Service Marketing, andReturn on Quality. His work has received extensive media coverage, including aBusiness Week cover story and an appearance onABC World News Tonight With Peter Jennings. He is the founder and chair of the AMA Frontiers in Services Conference and serves as founding editor of theJournal of Service Research. Professor Rust also is an area editor atMarketing Science and serves on the editorial review boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and theJournal of Interactive Marketing. P. K. Kannan (Ph.D., Purdue University) is Safeway Fellow and Associate Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is the associate director of the Center for E-Service. His research focuses on e-commerce, centering on marketing information services on the Internet, pricing information products, and marketing and product development in virtual communities. He is working with the IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce on e-couponing and also with National Academy Press on pricing information products. He is an associate editor ofDecision Support Systems and Electronic Commerce and serves on the editorial board of theJournal of Service Research and theInternational Journal of Electronic Commerce. He is currently editing a special issue on marketing in the e-channel for theInternational Journal of Electronic Commerce. He is the chair for the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Marketing Research. He has corporate experience with Tata Engineering and Ingersoll-Rand and has consulted for companies such as Frito-Lay, Pepsi Co, Giant Food, SAIC, Fannie Mae, Proxicom, and IBM. Na Peng is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland.     

Salesperson cooperation: The influence of relational, task, organizational, and personal factors

Salesperson cooperation has become a crucial issue for the overall performance of most sales organizations. The authors examine the antecedents of task-specific, cooperative behaviors of salespersons toward other salespeople working in the same organization. The main theses of the study are that (1) the four major antecedent categories of factors—relational, task, organizational, and personal— constitute, collectively, the primary determinants of salesperson cooperation and (2) each antecedent category exerts, independently, significant influence on the cooperative behaviors of salespersons. The results support the main theses and provide useful insights for sales managers attempting to foster cooperation among salespeople. The relative impact of each antecedent category, as well as the effects of specific variables within each, is discussed. Cengiz Yilmaz is an assistant professor of marketing at Gebze Institute of Technology, Turkey. He obtained his Ph.D. in marketing from Texas Tech University in 1999. His research interests focus on sales management, distribution channels and relationship marketing, and strategic issues concerning intra- and interfirm aspects in marketing systems and their links with business performance. His research has been published in various conference proceedings. Shelby D. Hunt is the J. B. Hoskins and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. A past editor of theJournal of Marketing (1985–1987), he is the author ofModern Marketing Theory: Critical Issues in the Philosophy of Marketing Science (South-Western, 1991) andA General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (Sage Publications, 2000). He has written numerous articles on competitive theory, macromarketing, ethics, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. Three of hisJournal of Marketing articles, “The Nature and Scope of Marketing” (1976), “General Theories and Fundamental Explananda of Marketing” (1983), and “The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition” (1995) (with Robert M. Morgan) won the Harold H. Maynard Award for the “best article on marketing theory.” His 1985Journal of Business Research article with Lawrence B. Chonko, “Ethics and Marketing Management,” received the 2000 Elsevier Science Exceptional Quality and High Scholarly Impact Award. His 1989 article, “Reification and Realism in Marketing: In Defense of Reason,” won theJournal of Macromarketing Charles C. Slater Award. For his contributions to theory and science in marketing, he received the 1986 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association, the 1987 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, and the 1992 American Marketing Association/Richard D. Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator Award.     

Heterogeneity in sales districts: Beyond individual-level predictors of satisfaction and performance

This article examines the influence of heterogeneity within a sales unit on the unit’s satisfaction and performance.Sales unit refers to a set of salespersons working out of the same office and for the same supervisor, andheterogenity refers to salespersons’ dispersion or variance on key dimensions. Specifically, drawing on theories in social psychology, the authors study the influence of sales unit heterogeneity in terms of (1) demographic characteristics (e.g., gender dispersion), (2) skills and rewards (e.g., reward dispersion), and (3) goal orientations (e.g., learning orientation dispersion) on a sales unit’s performance and job satisfaction levels. The hypotheses developed are tested using data from a study involving 476 salespeople belonging to 105 sales units in a large organization. The authors find that the focal heterogeneity variables account for nearly 25 percent of the total variance explained by the full set of independent variables included in the model. R. Venkatesh is an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business. His articles on product bundling, cobranding and sales force management have appeared or are forthcoming in theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, andMarketing Science. Goutam Challagalla is an associate marketing professor at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Texas at Austin, where he won the Outstanding Dissertation Award. He has published articles on sales management and marketing theory in marketing and psychology journals. Ajay K. Kohli is Isaac Stiles Hopkins professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. During 2000–2001, he is on leave from Emory and working at the Monitor Company. He has published in several journals on market orientation, sales management, and organizational buying behavior.     

Service quality delivery through web sites: A critical review of extant knowledge

Evidence exists that service quality delivery through Web sites is an essential strategy to success, possibly more important than low price and Web presence. To deliver superior service quality, managers of companies with Web presences must first understand how customers perceive and evaluate online customer service. Information on this topic is beginning to emerge from both academic and practitioner sources, but this information has not yet been examined as a whole. The goals of this article are to review and synthesize the literature about service quality delivery through Web sites, describe what is known about the topic, and develop an agenda for needed research. In the offline worl...30% of a company’s resources are spent providing a good customer experience and 70% goes to marketing. But online...70% should be devoted to creating a great customer experience and 30% should be spent on “shouting” about it. Valarie A. Zeithaml is the Roy and Alice Richards Bicentennial Professor and Area Chair at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She obtained an M.B.A. and doctorate from the University of Maryland and has devoted the past 20 years to researching and teaching the topics of service quality and services management. She is the author of three service books:Delivery Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, Driving Customer Equity, andServices Marketing, a textbook now in its second edition. She has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Ferber Award from theJournal of Consumer Research, the Maynard Award from theJournal of Marketing, the Jagdish Sheth Award from theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the O’Dell Award from theJournal of Marketing Research. She has consulted with more than 40 service and product companies. A. Parasuraman (D.B.A., Indiana University) is a professor and holder of the James W.McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. He has received many distinguished teaching and research awards. In 1988, he was selected as one of the “Ten Most Influential Figures in Quality” by the editorial board ofThe Quality Review. In 1998, he received the American Marketing Association’s “Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award.” In 2001, he received the Academy of Marketing Science’s “Outstanding Marketing Educator Award.” Dr. Parasuraman has published numerous articles in leading scholarly and managerial journals. He has served as editor of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science for a 3-year term (1997–2000). He has authored or coauthored several books, the most recent of which isTechno-Ready Marketing: How and Why Your Customers Adopt Technology (2001). Arvind Malhotra is an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has conducted award-winning research on how companies exploit information technology to reinvent themselves for e-business. He teaches e-commerce strategies to executive M.B.A.s and strategic use of information technology to M.B.A. students.     

Managing and measuring relational equity in the network economy

The Internet is emerging as a powerful connecting force, allowing firms to serve customers, collaborate with partners and suppliers, and empower employees more effectively than ever before. In the network economy, relationships with key stakeholders are becoming valuable assets of the firm, but few firms manage relationships effectively. The authors propose that firms need to take a more holistic approach to understanding where their relational equity resides and how it should be managed and measured. They also propose that relational equity is not limited to relationships with customers but also includes relationships with partners, suppliers, and employees. Effective management of relational equity requires firms to think in an integrative manner along several dimensions: strategy, process, technology, organization design, and metrics. The authors develop conceptual frameworks for each of these dimensions. Taken together, these frameworks offer a conceptual foundation for research and managerial practice on managing relational equity. Seurat Company Mohanbir Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and the director of the Center for Research Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, North-western University. He is the coauthor (with Jeff Zabin) ofThe Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights Into eBusiness Transformation (2001). His research has been published in leading journals such asCalifornia Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Interactive Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He also writes for leading trade publications, including theFinancial Times, CIO Magazine, andBusiness 2.0. He has created three new M.B.A. courses at Kellogg, as well as a popular executive course, and has won several awards for teaching. He is a fellow of the World Economic Forum, a fellow at DiamondCluster International, and a charter member if The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). He advises and speaks to Global 2000 firms worldwide and serves on the advisory boards of several technology startup companies. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Jeff Zabin is a vice president at Seurat Company, a technology firm that specializes in Internet-based marketing resource management services. He is the coauthor (with Mohanbir Sawhney) ofThe Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights Into eBusiness Transformation (2001). He has written about marketing in the network economy for several trade magazines, includingComputerworld, and he is a frequent speaker on the topic, with recent audiences including the Strategic Management Association, the Society for Information Management, and the Marketing Science Institute. Prior to joining Seurat, he was a research fellow with DiamondCluster International and a business analyst at a boutique consultancy called Digital Knowledge Assets. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and a returned Peace Corps volunteer, he began his career in educational publishing at Houghton Mifflin. He has helped launch several Internet ventures and currently serves on the advisory board of PreviewPort, Inc.     

Developing new rules for new markets

This article examines emerging technologies and the markets that they create, reviewing ideas about how new rules might be developed for successful participation in them. The need to examine new markets is being driven by the convergence of information technology and telecommunications, increased channel turbulence caused by the Internet, the embodiment of information technology in new products, globalization, and the increasing concentration and interdependence of industries. New rules to succeed in these markets depend on (1) an understanding of the market and (2) an ability to take that understanding and exploit it into profitable, customer-focused action. This article looks at market calibration including the development of new stimuli, measures, and models. It then takes the results of that calibration to show how firms in the new millennium can focus marketing action not only on a welltargeted marketing mix that has historically been the focus of marketing in the 1900s but by developing, maintaining, and maximizing their installed customer base. John H. Roberts undertook a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after 12 years in industry as a marketing manager and marketing director. His Ph.D. won the American Marketing Association's John Howard Award. Since then his research has won the O'Dell Award and he has been runner-up in the John D. C. Little Award twice. He sits on the Editorial Boards of theJournal of Market Research, Marketing Science, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Forecasting, and theAustralia-Asia Journal of Marketing. He is the National Australia Bank Professor of Marketing at the Australian Graduate School of Management where he is the holder of the Distinguished Teaching Award.     

The antecedents and consequences of customer-centric marketing

As we enter the twenty-first century, the marketing function remains concerned with serving customers and consumers effectively. The authors propose that just as the marketing function gradually shifted from mass marketing to segmented marketing in the twentieth century, it will increasingly move toward customer-centric marketing in the next century. In the practice of customer-centric marketing, the marketing function seeks to fulfill the needs and wants of each individual customer. The antecedents of customer-centric marketing are the increasing pressure on firms to improve marketing productivity, increasing market diversity in household and business markets, and technology applicability. On the basis of the shift toward customer-centric marketing, the authors expect increased importance of marketing as a “supply management” function, customer outsourcing, cocreation marketing, fixedcost marketing, and customer-centric organizations. This article highlights the implications of customer-centric marketing as well as the boundary conditions that will affect its adoption. Jagdish N. Sheth is the Kellstadt Professor of Marketing in the Gouizeta Business School at Emory University. He has published 26 books and more than 200 articles in marketing and other business disciplines. His book,The Theory of Buyer Behavior (with John A. Howard), is a classic in the field of consumer behavior and is one of the most cited works in marketing. His other books includeMarketing Theory: Evolution and Evaluation (with David Gardner and Dennis Garrett) andConsumption Values and Market Choices: Theory and Applications (with Bruce Newman and Barbara Gross). Rajendra S. Sisodia is Trustee Professor of Marketing at Bentley College. Previously, he was an associate professor of marketing and director of executive programs at George Mason University and an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University. He has a Ph.D. in marketing from Columbia University. He has published more than 40 articles in journals such asHarvard Business Review, Journal of Business Strategy, Marketing Letters, andMarketing Management. He has also authored about two dozen cases, primarily on strategic and marketing issues in the telecommunications industry, as well as a number of telecommunications industry and company analyses. Arun Sharma is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Miami. He has published more than 30 articles in marketing and his interests are in the area of market and marketing evolution.     

The paradox of a marketing planning capability

Strategy scholars have long debated the value of formal planning, and research has offered inconsistent support for planning to enhance firm performance. Given these mixed empirical effects, we draw from the resource-based view of the firm to illustrate a paradox firms may face. In particular, a strong marketing planning capability may not only reduce the incidence of postplan improvisation but also contain inherent process rigidity. Since both of these can also increase performance, results illustrate a performance paradox in marketing planning. Rebecca J. Slotegraaf (rslotegr@indiana.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the nature and effect of organizational resources, marketing capabilities, and deployment actions on competitive advantage. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to this publication in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, she has also published several articles in theJournal of Marketing Research. Peter R. Dickson (dicksonp@fiu.edu) is the Knight-Ridder Eminent Scholar in Global Marketing at Florida International University. He was previously the Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., Chair of Marketing Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and before that the Crane Professor of Strategic Marketing and a professor of industrial design at the Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Thirty of his articles on buyer and seller behavior have been published in leading marketing journals.     

An analysis of e-business adoption and its impact on business performance

Across industries, firms have adopted e-business initiatives to better manage their internal business processes as well as their interfaces with the environment. In this study, a unified framework that captures the antecedents of e-business adoption, adoption intensity, and performance outcomes is proposed and empirically tested using data collected from senior managers in four technology-intensive industries. Applying a framework that captures the intensity of e-business adoption across four business process domains, the authors find that the antecedents and performance outcomes of e-business adoption are best studied in a process-specific context. They find, for example, that while the communication and internal administration aspects of e-business positively affect performance outcomes, the more high-profile activities related to online order taking and e-procurement do not. The authors' findings provide the foundation for a more rigorous study of e-business. Fang Wu (fangwu@msu.edu) (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University. Her current research interests include e-business adoption strategy, knowledge transfer in new product alliances, interfirm learning dynamics, and marketing knowledge management. Vijay Mahajan (vijay.mahajan@bus.utexas.edu) (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is the John P. Harbin Centennial Chair in Business and a professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, and dean of the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad, India. He has written extensively on product diffusion, marketing strategy, and marketing research methodologies. He has written and/or edited eight books. His research appears in journals such as theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Management Science, andHarvard Business Review. He has received the Best Research Paper Award from theJournal of Retailing (1982, 1985), theJournal of Marketing (Maynard Award, 1990), and theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing (Prentice Hall Award, 1995). He also received the American Marketing Association (AMA) Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award (1997) and the AMA Marketing Research Special Interest Group Gilbert Churchill Award in 1999, recognizing lifetime achievement in marketing research. Sridhar Balasubramanian (balasubs@bschool.unc.edu) (Ph.D., Yale University) is an assistant professor of marketing at Kenan-Flagler, the University of North Carolina Business School. His research interests cover multiple areas including marketing strategy, channel portfolio management, e-commerce and m-commerce, direct marketing and customer relationship management, game theory and the management of competition, digitization, and strategic compensation. His research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such asMarketing Science, Management Science, Statistica Neerlandica, theInternational Journal of Electronic Commerce, Decision Support Systems, and theJournal of Retailing. He received the John D. C. Little Award for 1998 from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science (INFORMS) for the best marketing paper inMarketing Science andManagement Science. He has worked as a marketing strategy adviser to start-up companies and served as guest coeditor of the Centennial Issue of theJournal of Retailing.     

The e-marketing mix: A contribution of the e-tailing wars

In the context of the wars between the upstart Internet retailers and the existing bricks-and-mortar retailers, many e-marketing techniques were invented. This article develops a single unifying and theoretically based taxonomy for e-marketing techniques: the e-marketing mix. Drawing on the paradigms of exchange, relationships, and digital interactions in networks, 11 e-marketing functions are identified that form the elements of the e-marketing mix. Nine of the 11 e-marketing functions are considered basic, while 7 functions moderate the effects of others and are termedoverlapping. The 11 e-marketing functions provide a categorization of the e-marketing techniques. Compared to the conventional marketing mix, the e-marketing mix has more overlapping elements and directly represents personalization, an aspect of segmentation, as a basic function. The existence of multiple elements that are basic and overlapping in the e-marketing mix indicates that integration across elements should be more commonplace compared to the traditional marketing mix. Kirthi Kalyanam is the J. C. Penney Research Professor in the Department of Marketing and the director of E^*Business Initiatives at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. The Leavey School offers the premier M.B.A. program for working professionals in Silicon Valley. He teaches e-business, channel marketing, and retailing in the EMBA, M.B.A., and undergraduate programs. His research interests are in e-business, retailing, and pricing. His publications have appeared as lead articles inMarketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, Journal of Retailing, andJournal of Interactive Marketing. His research paper, published in theJournal of Marketing Research on GeoDemographic Marketing, was selected as a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s Paul E. Green Award for impact on the practice of marketing. Professor Kalyanam has received the dean’s award for outstanding teaching and/or research contributions. He has also taught at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, the Krannert School of Management, and the Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing at Purdue University and at DePaul University in Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in business administration from the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. Shelby McIntyre is a professor of marketing at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. He is also a research associate at the Retail Workbench, a research and education center dedicated to applying advanced information technology to the problems of retailing. He earned a B.S. in engineering (1965), an M.B.A. (1973), and a Ph.D. (1979), all from Stanford University. He has subsequently published more than 50 articles in leading marketing journals, including 5 in theJournal of Marketing Research, 2 inManagement Science, and 11 in theJournal of Retailing. He is on the editorial board of theJournal of Marketing. He has twice received the annual award from theJournal of Retailing for the article “Best Contributing to Theory and Practice in Retail Marketing.” He teaches marketing information systems, marketing research, brand management, and marketing management and was the chair of the Marketing Department at Santa Clara University from 1983 to 1991. His research interests currently focus on decision support systems, retail-related decision models, and e-commerce.     

Should we delight the customer?

Critics have suggested that delighting the customer “raises the bar” of customer expectations, making it more difficult to satisfy the customer in the next purchase cycle and hurting the firm in the long run. The authors explore this issue by using a mathematical model of delight, based on assumptions gathered from the customer satisfaction literature. Although delighting the customer heightens repurchase expectations and makes satisfying the customer more difficult in the future, and the delighting firm is injured by raised customer expectations, the (nondelighting) competition is hurt worse through customer attrition to the delighting firm. If customers forget delighting incidents to some degree from occasion to occasion, the delighting firm suffers if it is in a position to take customers from the competition. If taking customers from the competition is difficult, the delighting firm actually benefits from customer forgetting, because the same delighting experience can be repeated again, with the same effect. Roland T. Rust (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is the Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Service Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His publication record includes more than 60 journal articles and five books. His 1997Marketing Science article, “Customer Satisfaction, Productivity, and Profitability: Differences Between Goods and Services,” won the Best Services Article Award from the American marketing Association, for the best services article in any journal, and his 1995 article, “Return on Quality (ROQ): Making Service Quality Financially Accountable,” won theJournal of Marketing's Alpha Kappa Psi Award for the article with the greatest impact on marketing practice. He has also won best article awards from theJournal of Advertising and theJournal of Retailing. His honors include career achievement awards from the American Statistical Association and the American Academy of Advertising, as well as the Henry Latané Distinguished Doctoral Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has been covered widely in the media and has resulted in aBusiness Week cover story and an appearance onABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. He is the founder and chair of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Frontiers in Services Conference and serves as founding editor of theJournal of Service Research. He also serves on the editorial review boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, andMarketing Science. Richard L. Oliver (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison) is the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt, University. His research interests include consumer psychology with a special focus on customer satisfaction and postpurchase processes. He holds the position of Fellow of the American Psychological Association for his extensive writings on the psychology of the satisfaction response. He is the author ofSatisfaction: A Behavioral Perspective on the Consumer (Irwin/McGraw-Hill) and coeditor ofService Quality: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Sage). He previously served on the boards of theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and theJournal of Retailing and has published articles in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Applied Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, Behavioral Science, theJournal of Economic Psychology, Applied Psychological Measurement, Psychometrika, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Advances in Consumer Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, theJournal of Consumer Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction & Complaining Behavior, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, and others. He previously taught at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and at Washington University in St. Louis.     

Reducing marketing’s conflict with other functions: The differential effects of integrating mechanisms

To operate effectively, marketing must work in harmony with other functional departments in a firm. This study focuses on marketing’s interactions with three functions that play a key role in the achievement of marketing goals—finance, manufacturing, and R&D. The authors combine insights from previous studies and interviews with practicing managers to identify six integrating mechanisms proposed to mitigate manifest interfunctional conflict (behavior that frustrates marketing initiatives). In addition, they investigate the role of internal volatility (turbulence within an organization) in shaping manifest conflict. Based on a large-scale, multi-informant empirical study, the authors identify the more effective of these six integrating mechanisms. Furthermore, they argue and demonstrate these mechanisms are differentially effective across the marketing-finance, marketing-manufacturing, and marketing-R&D interfaces. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Elliot Maltz received his MBA from the University of California at Davis and his Ph.D in marketing from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to coming to the Atkinson School, he taught at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Dr. Maltz’s research focuses on how market information can be effectively transmitted from marketing to other functions within a firm (e.g., R&D, manufacturing) or across firms (e.g., in distribution channels, strategic alliances) to facilitate new product development or marketing initiatives designed to respond to changes in market conditions. His research has been published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Business Research, and theJournal of Product Innovation Management and Long Range Planning Ajay K. Kohli is the Isaac Stiles Hopkins Professor of Marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. His undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees are in business administration. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, the University of Texas at Austin, Koblenz School of Corporate Management in Germany, and at the Norwegian School of Management, Norway. His published work focuses on market orientation, sales management, and B2B Marketing. He has received several research and teaching awards including the Jagdish N. Sheth Award for the best article published in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 1997, the Alpha Kappa Psi award for best practice-oriented article published in theJournal of Marketing (1990), and the Jack Taylor award for excellence in teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.     

Relationship marketing of services—growing interest,emerging perspectives

Relationship marketing is an old idea but a new focus now at the forefront of services marketing practice and academic research. The impetus for its development has come from the maturing of services marketing with the emphasis on quality, increased recognition of potential benefits for the firm and the customer, and technological advances. Accelerating interest and active research are extending the concept to incorporate newer, more sophisticated viewpoints. Emerging perspectives explored here include targeting profitable customers, using the strongest possible strategies for customer bonding, marketing to employees and other stakeholders, and building trust as a marketing tool. Although relationship marketing is developing, more research is needed before it reaches maturity. A baker’s dozen of researchable questions suggests some future directions. holds the J. C. Penney Chair of Retailing Studies, is a professor of Marketing, and is director of the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University. He is a former national president of the American Marketing Association. His research interests are services marketing, service quality, and retailing strategy. He has published numerous journal articles and books, includingDelivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations (Free Press, 1990),Marketing Services: Competing Through Quality (Free Press, 1991), andOn Great Service: A Framework for Action (Free Press, 1995).