Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales

Social media have changed how buyers and sellers interact, and increased involvement through social media may yield positive results for sales organizations if salespeople utilize it in facilitating their behaviors. Through the perspective of value creation, we test the mediating effects of salesperson information communication behaviors between social media use and customer satisfaction. Using salesperson-reported data, within a B2B context, we empirically test a model using structural equation modeling. Salesperson's use of social media is found to impact information communication behaviors, which enhance salesperson responsiveness and customer satisfaction. Also, salesperson responsiveness is found to have a positive relationship with customer satisfaction. Findings suggest that social media plays an important role in communicating information to customers, but as an antecedent enhancing salesperson behaviors to increase customer satisfaction rather than a direct factor. This encourages managers to carefully assess goals related to social media use of their sales force.     

The use of social media in sales: Individual and organizational antecedents,and the role of customer engagement in social media

There is recognition that social media can benefit personal selling and sales management, especially in the B2B context. This research draws on interactional psychology theory to propose and test a model of usage of social media in sales, analyzing individual, organizational, and customer-related factors. We find that organizational competence and commitment with social media are key determinants of social media usage in sales, as well as individual commitment. Customer engagement with social media also predicts social media usage in sales, both directly and (mostly) through the individual and organizational factors analyzed, especially organizational competence and commitment. Finally, we find evidence of synergistic effects between individual competence and commitment, which is not found at the organizational level. We conduct multiple regression analysis of data obtained by surveying 220 sales executives in the United States.     

The external effect of marketing accountability in business relationships: Exploring the role of customer perceived value

This paper explores where and how marketing accountability of a supplier meets customer perceived value in a business relationship setting. If the supplier's firm implements marketing accountability processes, marketing activities are improved, as well as the communication of the value proposition to customers. The supplier's value proposition is in turn reflected through the creation of superior customer perceived value, which triggers attitudinal and behavioral value outcomes. Hence, the marketing accountability of the supplier, through its external manifestation with customers, ultimately influences the supplier's financial results. The aim of the paper is to discuss the external effect of marketing accountability in a business relationship context, which is often suppressed by the prevailing focus on the internal manifestations of marketing accountability, or the inside-out approach. As marketing accountability is an evolving field, bibliometric co-citation analysis is carried out to gain a better understanding of the marketing accountability's domain and scope. On the grounds of the relationship marketing theory and resource-based view, qualitative research was carried out and insights from interviews with marketing managers from different industries were analyzed. The paper concludes by suggesting the operationalization of the marketing accountability construct and pointing out the need for a multilevel and dyadic design of further empirical studies for testing the proposed external effect of marketing accountability.     

How social media applications affect B2B communication and improve business performance in SMEs

Social Media Apps (SMA) are widely used to facilitate individual communications. In company situations, they are utilized as a channel to communicate with their customers. However, studies examining how SMA have been utilized in the Business-to-Business (Social Media Benchmarking Report, 2014) context are lacking. Using a model based on Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), we present one of the first empirical studies investigating the relationship between the capabilities of SMA (transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability) and B2B communication and business performance. Five case studies based on face-to-face interviews with the senior managers/owners of SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) were conducted. The data were analyzed and the findings confirmed the SMA media capabilities as explained by MST. The findings also revealed a missing SMA capability, that of information security and control, which has been added to the proposed model and which may be an important addition to MST. This study calls for more research to verify this finding.     

Return on marketing investments in B2B customer relationships: A decision-making and optimization approach

The basic notion of relationship marketing entails that firms should strive for mutually beneficial customer relationships. By combining relationship marketing theory and operations research methods, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a managerial decision-making model that business market managers can use to optimize and evaluate marketing investments in both a customer-oriented and economically feasible manner. The intended contributions of our work are as follows. First, we add to the return on marketing literature by providing a first decision-making approach that explicitly assesses the optimization of marketing investments in terms of profitability, effort, and resource allocation. Second, we show how the risk of marketing investments can be assessed using sensitivity analysis. By means of an empirical study the versatility of our decision-making approach is demonstrated by assessing various critical decision making issues for business marketing managers in detail.     

Product and relationship quality influence on customer commitment and loyalty in B2B manufacturing relationships

The article examines how product and relationship quality influence customer commitment along with their combined effect on customer loyalty. The results show that product quality influences positive and negative calculative commitment. With regard to relationship quality, its “social” dimensions such as cooperation and trust have a much greater influence on commitment than its “technical” dimensions such as knowledge transfers and adaptation. On the “social” side, cooperation and trust positively influence affective and normative commitment, with trust also positively affecting positive calculative commitment, while on the “technical” side the only significant link is between adaptation and normative commitment. As for the consequences of commitment, affective commitment positively influences attitudinal and behavioral loyalty, while negative calculative commitment positively influences behavioral loyalty. In addition to indirect effects, product quality also directly positively influences attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. The results imply that customer loyalty depends more on “emotional” (affective commitment) than on “rational” (negative calculative commitment and product quality) motivation to continue the relationship.     

B2B social media semantics: Analysing multimodal online meanings in marketing conversations

There are theoretical and methodological gaps in the B2B social media marketing communications literature. As a consequence, there is a need for new approaches that provide a comprehensive understanding of how B2B online marketing posts create virtual conversations and the types of meanings these linked communication events construct and convey, particularly as these message are often distributed across multiple social media platforms. This paper presents a Social Semiotic Multimodal (SSMM) framework that attempts to address shortfalls in theory and method conceptualisation of social media communications. This framework employs multimodal extensions to systemic functional linguistics enabling it to be applying to analysing non-language as well as language constituents of social media messages. Furthermore the framework also utilises expansion theory to identify, categorise and analyse various marketing communication resources associated with marketing messages and also to reveal how conversations are chained together to form extended online marketing conversations. This semantic approach is exemplified using a Fairtrade Australia B2B case study demonstrating how marketing conversations can be mapped and analysed. The framework emphasises the importance of acknowledging the impact of all stakeholders, particularly messages that may distract or confuse the original purpose of the conversation.     

B2B SME management of antecedents to the application of social media

This paper elucidates how business-to-business (B2B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can manage antecedents to the application of social media for potential contributions to their business. This in-depth qualitative research study was conducted at four plastic-producing SMEs from October 2013 to October 2014, with follow-up interviews in October 2015.The findings reveal two important antecedents to the application of social media that overcome the gap between acknowledging the usefulness of social media and its actual limited application in practical B2B contexts. First, open collaborative business model innovation is needed to apply social media in local business processes. Second, central and distributed leadership must be integrated to create ownership and responsibility across the SME organisation and beyond to customers and partners. These findings differ from the social media application stages and the gaps between them identified in the previous literature. The developed model makes a contribution to the B2B SME field and to academia by recognising the importance of integrating critical antecedents before social media application can enhance business in B2B SMEs. This understanding is beneficial for the B2B SMEs and for society.     

Interactive strategy formation: Organizational and entrepreneurial factors related to effective customer information systems practices in B2B firms

Interactive marketing requires that a firm learn about its customers and remember what the customer has said to personalize communications and customize product offerings to those customers. This type of marketing requires that customer information be actively managed because information from and about the customer is the core of marketing decision-making. In-depth interviews with 17 managers in five firms identified specific organizational and entrepreneurial factors pertinent to the strategic management of customer information. The research suggests that interactive marketing require a company that can itself be interactive with its internal and external environment to create strategies that can succeed in a changing environment.One exemplary company was compared to four others to uncover organizational issues and processes leading to effective management of customer information. Using the Resource-Based View and the importance of the effective management of intangible assets as its starting point, this research illuminated the processes involved with collecting and disseminating information and highlighted the firms' struggle with issues of inter-functional conflict. Perhaps most importantly, from a strategy-formation point of view, customer-centric strategies related to customer information management were found to be developed interactively, as a dialogue between middle and upper management, using customer data and competitive trends.     

Development of special forms of B2B relationships: Examining the role of interpersonal liking in developing Guanxi and Et-Moone relationships

The paper examines the driving factors of two of the special forms of relationships that exist in Eastern countries namely Guanxi (China) and Et-Moone (Saudi Arabia). The paper argues that these special forms of relationships that have been found to significantly influence business-to-business relationships in these countries are primarily motivated by the presence of strong interpersonal liking. To do this, a conceptual model has been developed within which interpersonal liking is placed as the key mediating variable. The key outcomes of interpersonal liking are trust and Guanxi (in the Chinese sample) and Et-Moone (in the Saudi sample). Because Guanxi has received significant attention both conceptually and empirically, the research started by conducting in-depth interviews in Saudi Arabia to further explore the concept of Et-Moone. Survey data was collected from 401 businesses in China and Saudi Arabia. Using structural equation modelling, the model has been supported in both samples. The findings show that interpersonal liking plays a crucial role in the development of Guanxi and Et-Moone. Managerial implications and future research are discussed.     

How employees engage with B2B brands on social media: Word choice and verbal tone

Marketing scholars and practitioners are keenly interested in brand engagement in social media because brand engagement has strong links to brand equity. However, much of the marketing literature focuses on customer brand engagement and often in a consumer market setting. This paper advances this literature in two ways by (1) focusing on employees, not customers, as important stakeholders who frequently engage with brands on social media, and by (2) observing brand engagement in a business-to-business context. We develop a conceptual framework based on a theory of word choice and verbal tone to understand the content of engagement observations (i.e., reviews) that breaks into five content dimensions—activity, optimism, certainty, realism, commonality—and four calculated dimensions—insistence, embellishment, variety, and complexity. Then, we examine over 6300 job reviews authored by employees of B2B firms to explore the differences in the way employees engage with both highly-ranked, and -rated brands versus low-ranked and -rated brands. We find that there are significant differences in nearly all the theoretical dimensions, yet the effect sizes are much larger between high versus low review ratings compared to high versus low B2B brand ranking. We close with some important managerial implications and future research directions.     

Value co-creation in industrial AI: The interactive role of B2B supplier,customer and technology provider

This research explores the interactive role of supplier, customer and technology company in business-to-business (B2B) marketing when they develop and use industrial artificial intelligence (AI). From a value co-creation perspective and following a service-dominant logic, this study aims to identify essential value types that are created collaboratively by B2B professionals (namely suppliers, customers and AI providers), and critical capabilities that contribute to their value co-creation practices. Nineteen in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with three groups of B2B stakeholders in six companies that involved in an industrial AI development and usage project. The data was then analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The results of this research contain a categorisation of four value types and three sets of capabilities, together with the interrelationships between them. This study contributes to the literature of value co-creation, information system and B2B marketing by bridging these three disciplines within the context of industrial AI development and usage.     

The role of customer entertainment in B2B sales strategy: Comparative insights from professional buyers and salespeople

Customer entertainment is any activity considered to provide entertainment, amusement, or recreation. Business-to-business firms, as part of their sales strategy, have entertained customers for decades in hopes of influencing purchasing and building long-term relationships. Using social exchange theory and the element of reciprocity, this study examines how customer entertainment influences buyers' perceptions of gratitude, indebtedness, and purchase intention within their relationship with the B2B seller. In order to assess the importance and strategic role of customer entertainment in building and strengthening buyer-seller relationships, this study investigates customer entertainment throughout the sequential relationship stages of exploration, expansion, and commitment. A multimethod research design was developed comprised of 2 qualitative studies, 3 pretests, and a conclusive experimental field study that compared buyer attitudes with salespeople's perceptions of buyer attitudes. The final study contrasts results between 248 buyers and 245 salespeople and consists of a 3 × 3 experimental field study, with the levels of customer entertainment events and stage of relationship as manipulating variables. The analysis reveals that salespeople and buyers view of reciprocity differs, with salespeople being more socially oriented and focused on gratitude while buyers are more economically oriented and more attuned to indebtedness.     

Brand innovation and social media: Knowledge acquisition from social media,market orientation,and the moderating role of social media strategic capability

The study examines the relationships between knowledge acquisition from social media, two forms of market orientation (proactive and reactive), social media strategic capability, and brand innovation strategy in the context of China's online technology industry. Analysis of 357 online technology ventures, created during the past 6 years, suggests that brand innovation is affected by both knowledge acquisition from social media and market orientation. Social media strategic capability positively affects brand innovation and acts as a moderator between knowledge acquisition, market orientation, and brand innovation. It further enhances both types of market orientations in achieving brand innovation, suggesting that on social media, customer's needs, both expressed and latent (or unexpressed), can be identified more comprehensively than that of the traditional setting. Hence, the context of social media provides a different set of rules for competition and strategic behavior, in which online technology ventures should note. Implications are useful to improve the current understanding of social media brand innovation strategy, here in China's dynamic social media scene.     

The paradox of tie strength in customer relationships for innovation: a longitudinal case study in the sports industry

Current literature argues that firms should have strong ties to customers to benefit from increased customer retention and loyalty. Strong ties, however, have also shown to prevent innovation, suggesting that firms should also develop weak ties to other customer groups. This paper focuses on the potential for strong ties to facilitate, rather than prohibit, innovation. It is based in a 7‐year longitudinal research project with Adidas, a global sporting goods company. From the case, we find that the paradox of tie strength results from an overly simplified view of the nature of company–customer relationships. Contrary to the established literature, we find that strong ties in the Adidas case supported significant innovation. In fact, the involvement resulted in the development of a new product with a radically different product architecture and led to one of the most successful product launches in the company's history. To explain these findings, we introduce the nature of customer participation in a firm's value creation processes as a new dimension of the constitution of firm–customer ties and discuss how such a kind of relationship can develop.     

Speak to head and heart: The effects of linguistic features on B2B brand engagement on social media

Brand engagement on social media increasingly draws B2B brands' attention as it may produce positive WOM and bring branding and financial benefits. However, B2B marketers face challenges in creating compelling brand posts on social media. Beyond ‘knowing what to post’, what is even more challenging for B2B marketers is a lack of knowledge of ‘knowing how to communicate’, i.e., knowing how to design the non-informational cues in brand posts to stimulate brand engagement and generate social media WOM. This research makes initial attempts to address this gap by investigating the impacts of post language on B2B brand engagement on social media. Building on the model of B2B effective communication and theories in linguistics, we identify six linguistic features (i.e., post length, language complexity, visual complexity, emotional cues, interpersonal cues, and multimodal cues in rich media) that influence brand engagement, captured using Twitter likes and retweets. Through analyzing 229,272 tweets collected from 156 B2B brands in 10 industries, we found that, in general, linguistic features that facilitate the central or peripheral route processing will have positive effects, while those that hinder the processing will have negative impacts on brand engagement. This research contributes to our knowledge of B2B social media communication by revealing the power of brand language in driving brand engagement and introducing linguistics as a valuable conceptual lens for maximizing the benefits of B2B marketing content on social media. This research also highlights the interpretative nature of social media communication – B2B brands must go beyond the content purpose and strategy decisions to consider the specific language use and communication style of the message.     

Satisfactory listening: The differential role of salesperson communication in (co)creating value for B2B buyers

The importance of communication skills of the salesperson (SP) on buyer satisfaction is fait accompli. However, how various facets of listening, along with the core components of SP's communication (i.e., content and diligence) contribute to the value creation process is poorly understood. The current research presents a conceptual framework to explain these effects and tests the model empirically. The authors conceptualize a framework for how critical aspects of SP's communication with customers differentially influence imagery versus transactional value creation. This process is explained with an application of the dual process theory. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is employed to examine the theorized pathways within a sample of buyers of a large manufacturing firm in the United States. Results exhibit that while various facets of listening differentially contribute to the two value types, the core aspects of SP's communication mainly affect transactional value creation. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.     

Profiting from innovations: the role of new game strategies in the case of Lipitor of the US pharmaceutical industry

In exploring why innovators often do not profit from their innovations, researchers concentrate on innovators versus imitators and the extent to which owners of complementary assets capture profits from innovations. The literature provides scant attention to factors that sap profits from innovations. This paper argues that an innovator's positioning vis‐à‐vis customers, suppliers, complementors, and other co‐opetitors plays a critical role in the innovator's profitability. The article explores how an innovator can use new game strategies to better positioning, thus capturing rents from innovations and enabling further innovations in the future. The study examines the case of Lipitor, one of the world's best‐selling drug, to illustrate how positioning can play in a firm's ability to profit from its innovations.     

Towards a framework of customer value assessment in B2B markets: An exploratory study

This paper examines the key processes and activities of customer value assessment in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Given that an increasing number of B2B firms are providing combinations of products and services, or integrated solutions, the present study examines customer value assessment from the solution supplier's perspective. Specifically, based on an exploratory field study and in-depth interviews with 18 managers in three different firms, the present study identifies five key processes (i.e., value potential identification, baseline assessment, performance evaluation, long-term value realization, and systematic data management) and 11 related activities involved in customer value assessment in B2B markets, and integrates them into a managerially grounded framework. The findings from this study contribute to the literature on customer value and solution research, and provide useful insights for managers on how to assess the value delivered by their offerings to customers.