Worried about strategy implementation? Don’t overlook marketing's role

Many executives and scholars have argued that effective strategy implementation is at least as important as—if not more important than—developing a brilliant strategy. While there are several extant viewpoints regarding what is required for successful strategy implementation, perhaps the most influential perspective is that business success requires a fit between strategy and organizational architecture. Organizational architecture subsumes structural variables and capabilities. For the past 10 years, we have studied the performance implications of matching marketing's organizational architecture to four generic business strategies: Prospectors, Analyzers, Low-Cost Defenders, and Differentiated Defenders. Through six empirical studies we have identified best practice matches between these strategy types and: (1) marketing organization culture, (2) marketing strategy, (3) market strategy formation process, (4) market-focused strategic organizational behaviors, (5) marketing organization structure, and (6) marketing control systems. In this article, we bring together findings from each of these studies to provide a comprehensive overview of those marketing actions and policies that are associated with superior firm performance.     

Storytelling is not just for marketing: Cultivating a storytelling culture throughout the organization

When managers consider storytelling part of their organizational strategy, it is generally considered a marketer’s task. However, we argue that intentionally building a storytelling culture across domains and functions can provide value to all parts of the organization. Even so, storytelling can often feel like a formidable undertaking, exclusive to firms with ample in-house resources or finely tuned existing brand stories. This is not the case, and in this article we offer examples and concrete advice for companies of all sizes and resource levels to embed storytelling throughout the organization. Likewise, we build a case for developing organizational culture and capacity to harness the power of storytelling not only for marketing strategy, but also for overall organizational functionality. We provide examples of potential storytelling applications, a review of storytelling benefits, and step-by-step guidance on how to manage and embed storytelling.     

Investigating the Types of Value and Cost of Green Brands: Proposition of a Conceptual Framework

This conceptual article applies the customer value (CV) concept in the context of green marketing aiming to provide insights on the factors that motivate and/or hinder the development of consumer–green brand relationships. The article draws upon existing literature on the streams of CV, relationship marketing and environmental behaviour and synthesises relevant findings to propose an integrated conceptual framework entailing all identified types of value and cost, psychographic characteristics, as well as dimensions of relationship quality (RQ) and loyalty. Furthermore, it addresses existing questions on the links among constructs and proposes several relationships that may lead to a better understanding of consumer behaviour towards green brands. Through the here-proposed conceptual model, the article initiates the process of empirically examining the consumer adoption of and relationship development with green brands. The CV framework adopted here may provide practitioners with knowledge on the value and sacrifice factors, as well as the dimensions of RQ that are the most important in targeting green consumers and designing relationship marketing strategies. The article also fulfils an identified gap in the literature, as it is the first that brings together and applies research findings from CV and relationship marketing fields in the green marketing context and proposes an integrated approach to understanding consumer–green brands relationships.     

Restorying a Culture of Ethical and Spiritual Values: A Role for Leader Storytelling

In this paper, we outline some of the connections between the literatures of organizational storytelling, spirituality in the workplace, organizational culture, and authentic leadership. We suggest that leader storytelling that integrates a moral and spiritual component can transform an organizational culture so members of the organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose. We specifically discuss how leader role modeling in authentic storytelling is essential in developing an ethically and spiritually based organizational culture. However, we also acknowledge a potential dark side to leader storytelling. Implications for authentic storytelling research and practice are discussed. An early draft of this paper was presented at the 2004 Academy of Management Conference in New Orleans. Cathy Driscoll received her Ph.D. in organizational behavior and marketing from Queen's University in 1994. Currently, she is an associate professor in the Department of Management in the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary's University. Prior to coming to SMU, she worked as a project manager and policy advisor with the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy in Ottawa. She has published articles in The Journal of Business Ethics and Business and Society. Margaret McKee is in her fourth year of doctoral studies at the Sobey School of Business. She was recently awarded a two year Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to conduct her dissertation research. She has taught a variety of management and communications courses at Mount Saint Vincent, Sobey School of Business, and Dalhousie University. Her research interests are leadership and values based organizational cultures.     

Four supply chain management systems: From supply chain strategies to human resource management

This article develops a conceptual model that supports and aligns supply chain strategies with organizational culture and leadership styles. We examine various supply chain theories and organizational behavior concepts to develop an integrated supply chain: the human factor model. Based on the underlying dimensions of environmental uncertainty and product complexity, we propose a 2x2 typology to identify four different supply chain systems that can be used by organization leaders to identify suitable supply chain strategies and compatible people management practices. We provide a useful and practical framework to analyze the alignment between the external environment and the internal organization of a supply chain system.     

Does organisational support promote citizenship? The moderating role of market-focused HRM

This paper describes how employment relationships and human-resource management (HRM) functions can influence employees’ citizenship role definitions in service settings. Integrating social exchange and role theory, the paper suggests that contact employees will reciprocate felt obligations of high-quality employee–organisation relationships (i.e. perceived organisational support (POS)) by expanding their role in ways consistent with contextual behavioural expectations. The longitudinal survey of 1387 contact employees and 108 managers in a large supermarket chain shows that POS and several market-focused HRM practices influence employees’ service-oriented citizenship role definitions. In particular, high-quality employment relationships contribute to expanded service-oriented citizenship role definitions when market-focused HRM practices were implemented.     

仆从领导文化与企业声誉管理

本文将Grahame企业声誉的理论模型运用于仆从领导文化与企业声誉管理内在关系的研究。通过对仆从领导的“齿轮传动模型”的阐释,本文分析了仆从领导文化与企业声誉管理相关的四个特征,即领导知名度、员工参与度、顾客满意度与社区和谐度,揭示了企业文化作用于企业声誉管理的“光环效应”。     

Marketing management,its environment,and information processing: a problem of organizational design

The marketing literature has overlooked the problem of designing optimal organizational structures for marketing management. The study of this problem is crucial and pressing. Some relationships are proposed between the information generated by the market environment and the ability of the organization of a marketing department to process this information. Insights and opportunities for future conceptual and empirical work are provided.     

Ethical Leadership: Assessing the Value of a Multifoci Social Exchange Perspective

In this study, we comprehensively examine the relationships between ethical leadership, social exchange, and employee commitment. We find that organizational and supervisory ethical leadership are positively related to employee commitment to the organization and supervisor, respectively. We also find that different types of social exchange relationships mediate these relationships. Our results suggest that the application of a multifoci social exchange perspective to the context of ethical leadership is indeed useful: As hypothesized, within-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between organizational ethical leadership and commitment to the organization) are stronger than cross-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between supervisory ethical leadership and commitment to the organization). In addition, in contrast to the “trickle down” model of ethical leadership (Mayer et al. in Org Behav Hum Decis Process 108:1–13, 2009), our results suggest that organizational ethical leadership is both directly and indirectly related to employee outcomes.     

Implementing Marketing Strategy Through a Market Orientation

The adoption of specific marketing strategies is related to several factors in an organization including the organization's mission, objectives, resources, and market orientation. We report an exploratory study in which we define relationships between market orientation and marketing strategy in a high technology environment - the telecommunications industry in the United States. Market orientation is defined as a culture that influences how employees think and act. Our results indicate that a market orientation provides a context for the implementation of specific marketing strategies by serving as a moderator of operational marketing strategy. For example, those organizations who possess a strong market-oriented culture (high-spirited cultures) engage in value creation strategies such as market segmentation, developing new products/services for new markets, and product or service customisation. Those organizations possessing low market orientations (ineffectual cultures) generally practice less aggressive and internally focused strategies such as charging lower prices, providing limited customer service, product/service standardization, and undertake limited market research.     

North Carolina's Social Marketing Matrix Team: Using Social Marketing Concepts to Institutionalize Social Marketing Capacity in a State Health Department

SUMMARY

The North Carolina Division of Public Health has employed traditional marketing concepts to increase the capacity of its programs to use the social marketing process. A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Turning Point grant enabled this capacity building. During a three-year period there has been over a two-hundred-percent increase in programs attempting to use social marketing in the division. This article describes the division's application of social marketing concepts, reviews other theories useful to the incorporation of a social marketing approach in a social-change organization, makes suggestions for their application, and presents lessons learned.     

The effects of subsidiary’s leadership and entrepreneurship on international marketing knowledge transfer and new product development

This study investigates the role of a strong subsidiary leadership and entrepreneurial culture in the promotion of marketing knowledge inflows. We further examine their consequences on the subsidiary’s ability to develop new products when moderated by the tacitness of knowledge. The data were collected from 202 Portuguese subsidiaries of multinational corporations and were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modelling to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that subsidiaries’ strong leadership support and entrepreneurial culture are fundamental mechanisms that foster marketing knowledge inflows from both the headquarters and peer subsidiaries. Moreover, marketing knowledge inflows enhance the focal subsidiary’s innovation abilities. We also find that tacit knowledge exerts contradictory moderating effects on the transfers of marketing knowledge, carrying distinct implications for a subsidiary’s knowledge management. The results expand our understanding of the effectiveness of transferring marketing knowledge among multinational corporations’ (MNCs) subsidiaries.     

我国医院营销行为中存在的问题及对策分析

本文认为,我国医院营销行为中存在的主要问题有:营销意识淡薄,营销观念滞后;营销组织不健全,营销人才缺乏;市场调研不科学,信息反馈不到位;医疗服务同质化,市场开拓能力较弱;医药费用虚高,医疗服务定价不合理;营销手段单一,宣传力度不够;医疗诚信缺失,过度推销严重等等。文章提出,提高医院营销管理水平,一要树立营销意识,更新营销观念;二要建立健全专职营销组织,积极培养和引进营销专业人才;三要充分发挥营销部门的主导作用,实现医院营销手段和营销主体的有效整合;四要加强诚信教育,完善管理机制,遏制过度推销行为。     

文化营销在品牌传播中的价值及实现方式

随着市场经济的不断深化，市场营销经受了新一轮的洗礼和变革。一种新型的营销模式——文化营销应运而生。文化营销在品牌传播中的价值日趋显现，主要体现增加产品附加值、提升企业形象、消除文化障碍和实施产品差别化。本文尝试从产品文化营销、渠道文化营销、价格文化营销和促销文化营销探讨文化营销价值的实现形态。     

Impact of Traditional Chinese Culture on Business-to-Business Relationship Marketing and Service Firm Performance

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This work addresses the mixed findings in relationship marketing studies regarding the importance of traditional culture-level (i.e., interpersonal) relationships on service firm outcomes.

Methodology/approach: This article leverages customer relationship marketing (CRM) theory to advance a framework for understanding the causal relationship between the Chinese cultural worldview and relationship marketing in order to better predict firm performance.

Findings: The author suggests that five major Chinese cultural characteristics—iren-qing, wa-pao, mianzi, chaxu-geju, and collectivism—can qualify the business-to-business (B-to-B) relationship building process and impact the effectiveness of interpersonal and/or group relationships on service firm outcomes.

Research implications: The study’s framework suggests that Chinese cultural characteristics, universal concepts manifest in the activities of Chinese society and organizations, have a positive effect on customer relationship marketing. Chinese culture characteristics can be used to generate excellent relationships with customers and thus create a consumer preference for certain companies and drive service marketing repurchase.

Originality/value/contribution: This study’s theoretical framework (a) distinguishes between Chinese cultural characteristic and relationship marketing relationships; (b) suggests that Chinese cultural characteristics and customer relationship marketing have a positive and substantial effect on service firm performance and that Chinese cultural characteristics are related to customer relationship marketing in their effect on service firm performance; and (c) provides managerially relevant guidelines for strategic sales planning.     

21世纪的营销:后现代主义视角

“后现代主义”是法国现代哲学的一个流派,越来越多的领域引入这一哲学思想,西方经济学和营销领域也开始研究经济及消费生活中的后现代现象。文章在介绍了后现代主义思想并分析其对消费文化的影响的基础上,提出了新世纪企业应采取的新营销战略。     

Tactical Service Failure: A Case Study on Public Funding as a Marketing Issue

This article analyzes the ways in which public-sector service providers may use service-delivery failure as a way of securing resources. In tactical service failure, an organization tactically delivers nonadequate service, so as to project a media image of being harmed by its funding cuts. Analyzing this process enables new insight into both public funding and provider-to-funder (P2F) marketing and selling. This research uses a single case study method to confirm the existence of the phenomenon first detected through long-term media analysis. To explore the single case, the authors interviewed a former city official who participated in tactical-service-failure processes and their marketing. The article shows how and why service providers may opt for this tactic and the potential gains and pitfalls of utilizing it. New insight is offered into how media connections are used to influence public-funding decisions.     

Theoretical Applicability vs. Environmental Straitjacket:

This article is concerned with the application of the marketing audit, a commercially derived marketing tool, to a public sector non-profit organization. The paper reviews the literature extensively before turning to research findings derived from interviews with internal and external publics in the organizational environment. While findings indicate that a marketing audit would indeed be useful in underpinning marketing orientation, possibly as a prelude to marketing planning, they also show that organizational constraints may militate against adoption of marketing orientation. The article concludes by suggesting that marketing itself, as a generic paradigm, may not be an appropriate mechanism for organizations like ERS (Employment Rehabilitation Service). Rather ERS, and its private sector counterparts, may require the development of an entirely new discipline which may be more applicable than marketing.     

Who Shall Lead Us? How Cultural Values and Ethical Ideologies Guide Young Marketers’ Evaluations of the Transformational Manager–Leader

Today’s young marketers transition from schools and into the workforce with a variety of career options in sales, advertising, and general marketing after graduation. Beyond their discipline-specific knowledge of market research, consumer behavior, and marketing communications, these individuals bring along their own set of personal values and ideologies that may influence how they engage the people, personalities, and priorities of the business organization. As new generations of young professionals enter the publicly scrutinized fields of sales and marketing, they are expected to make morally grounded decisions that may be informed by these values and ideologies. This study frames this state of affairs by examining the inquiry “Who Shall Lead Us?” whereby young marketers evaluate the fitness of a leadership climate in which they would potentially work. Here, individual cultural values and ethical ideologies are posited to influence evaluations of transformational leadership.     

But you promised! Managing consumers’ psychological contracts

In management literature, a psychological contract generally refers to an employee's beliefs about the reciprocal obligations that exist between him or her and an organization. Legal contracts, on the other hand, are agreements that create obligations between the parties that are enforceable by law. Psychological contracts are different from legal contracts in that they are characterized by the belief that both parties have entered into a set of mutual obligations. While marketing scholars and practitioners have largely overlooked the notion of psychological contracts, this article argues that a firm's customers might view the promises they believe a firm has made to them as psychological contracts. Psychological contracts are as relevant to marketing as they are to management. This article expands the notion of psychological contracts to marketing relationships and outlines internal and external strategies firms can employ to manage psychological contracts more effectively.