Classifying a customer as a national account

A recent article [Stevenson and Page, Industrial Marketing Management 8, 94–100 (1979)] addressed the issue of how industrial marketers determine if their firms can use national account marketing. Once that decision is made, a next logical step is to determine which customers should be classified as national accounts. This article discusses appropriate classification criteria that industrial marketers can use to make such decisions. The information presented here is based on a study of national account marketing.     

Selecting Winning New Product Projects: Using the NewProd System

Separating probable winners from probable losers is the goal of the new product screening task, and Professor Robert G. Cooper has developed a model that does this with remarkable success. In this article, he reviews various approaches to new product screening and then presents the basics of the NewProd model. NewProd now has a history of use in industry that seems to be fulfilling its original research promise. Professor Cooper shows how managers can build their own screening models and outlines how such models can contribute in an important way to better new product selection decisions. Over the years, Professor Cooper has conducted a series of major research projects that have aimed at improvements in the new product process. Their hallmark has been managerial relevance and a sound theoretical foundation. This article, the third that Professor Cooper has published in JPIM , is in the same tradition.     

Issues for Management Thought and Research

One of the tenets of the editors of The Journal of Product Innovation Management is the principle, probably first enunciated by social scientist Kurt Lewin, that there is nothing more practical than a good theory. That principle is one that draws together academics and practicing managers to the journal's task of advancing the management of product innovation. It is a principle that says to academics that their theories must meet the test of utility, and to managers that it can be useful to develop a theoretical perspective.
Questions of practice and theory emerged in the first two issues of the journal when members of the Editorial Board presented a series of viewpoints on the issues they thought would be significant for the future of product innovation management. These were viewpoints that questioned our current practices and suggested     

How industrial salespeople gain customer trust

This study investigated how industrial salespeople gain the trust of their customers. Results show that trust increases as the customer gains the impression that the salesperson is dependable, honest, competent, customer oriented, and likeable. Based on the results, a general model of trust building is suggested.     

Organize around end-use markets

Companies can gain by changing their organization structure toward a market centered one clustered around market groups. An analysis is made of the gains and certain trade-offs that occur. The recommended new organization structure is illustrated. A number of questions and areas that deserve in-depth concern are pinpointed.     

Problems in Demand Estimation For a New Technology

It is difficult to estimate demand for a new product or service when a prelaunch test market is not practical. This is often the case for products that incorporate advanced technology. In this article, Robert Thomas reviews 29 different research methodologies used to measure demand for a new telecommunications service. He found several problems in how the research was designed and executed and offers a number of suggestions for improving the accuracy of demand estimates.     

New Product Strategies: What Distinguishes the Top Performers?

In this second article for The Journal of Product Innovation Management , Robert G. Cooper shows that firms can be clustered according to five general types of new product strategies. Depending on the measure of success, some strategies are more successful than others. One strategy, however, stands out for its success on all measures. Others are consistently unsuccessful. The strategies are described in such ways that managers can position the strategies of their own firms and compare their results with those of the firms Professor Cooper studied.     

Effect of time on a marketing strategy

A firm that had enjoyed considerable success in the marketplace during the early stages of the product life cycle found itself losing market share. The firm and its competitors had not changed their marketing strategies since the introduction of the product. This article describes the results of research examining possible causes for the market reversal. It Was discovered that the nature of the organizational buyer and his buyer behavior changed in a predictable manner since product introduction progressed. These changes made the competitors' marketing strategy more effective and probably caused the market reversal. The implications for this firm and for firms marketing innovative products in general are discussed.     

Significant Issues for the Future: Some Additional Perspectives

The rational elements of management dominated the questions raised by our Editorial Board members in the previous issue of JPIM when they offered their ideas in, "Significant Issues For the Future of Product Innovation." In this article, the discussion is continued with some other Board members but this time the human side of managements gets its due attention. The issues presented here add to the picture of complexity that is the reality of product innovation but they also may provoke the thinking that can lead to an improvement in management performance.     

Overall corporate strategies for new product programs

The strategy an industrial firm elects for its product development program is increasingly viewed as a critical element of the firm's total corporate strategy. New product development and technology bear an integral relationship to an industrial company's strategic direction by helping to define the range of its possibilities [13]. This article reports the results of an empirical study whose purpose was to identify the major types of innovation strategies that firms pursue—strategy scenarios. A second purpose was to assess which strategies yield the best results.     

R & D and marketing dialogue in high-tech firms

Based on an empirical study of more than 200 R & D and marketing managers from high-technology companies, we conclude that (1) there is a great deal of consensus between R & D and marketing managers on the relative importance of the areas requiring integrated efforts; (2) companies successful in their new product program achieve a significantly greater degree of R & D marketing integration; (3) company size does not affect the level of integration achieved; and (4) the companies that achieve a high degree of R & D/ marketing integration do so by concentrating on all 19 areas proposed in the article and do not merely focus on a few key areas.     

Compensation plans that link management and salesman's objectives

In many companies, sales management pursues several objectives through the sales force compensation scheme, some of them qualitative and long-run. On the other hand, salesmen within the same sales force are likely to display heterogeneous preference patterns for compensation formulae. In this frequent occurrence, a jointly optimal compensation plan is not likely to be found (or even to exist), and a sales manager can only hope to find one of the best possible compromises between management's and salesmen's objectives. This paper proposes a seven-step procedure for finding such a compromise. An actual application is reported, and operational procedures are discussed.     

Significant Issues for the Future of Product Innovation

What's happening in the world of product innovation? What are the tough issues that managers are facing? And what's going to happen in the remaining years of this decade? In this article, several members of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Product Innovation Management offer their ideas about where the important problems lie. This is the fodder for a good round table discussion and through the medium of this journal we'll engage in such a discussion in this and a subsequent issue.     

Developing better industrial advertising

This paper reports on various factors that should be applied by industrial advertisers in order to improve their advertising effort. Topics on setting objectives, developing copy, designing the layout, and selecting media are covered in an applications-oriented way. The result is a concise approach of how industrial advertising can be more effective.     

A framework for strategic industrial pricing

A model for pricing decision making in an industrial setting is described. Written from the perspective of a price setter, the model starts with an evaluation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both buyer and seller. These evaluations are then input into a strategic framework, which integrates tactical considerations with several environmental concerns. The article concludes with a set of strategic pricing alternatives, in a matrix form, to be used by price negotiators and pricing executives of industrial companies.     

Increase salespeople's prestige with a new title

The public tends to view sales occupations as relatively low in prestige. The authors present the findings of their study that alternative job titles enhance the prestige awarded sales occupations and suggest how sales titles should be changed.     

Managing Research and Development for Results

Companies seeking excellence in R&D have discovered that the role of R&D has to be understood throughout the firm and that R&D has to be a fully integrated part of corporate strategy. In this article, Peter Richardson provides a framework for building a strategic view of R&D, using five conceptual building blocks that have to be cemented together to get good results.     

Factors that influence the length of industrial channels

This article is concerned with the length of channels utilized to market industrial products. Several marketing scholars have proposed that the appropriate channel structure is a function of conditions associated with the market for the product, the nature of the product itself, and characteristics of the producer and middlemen. By means of a survey of industrial product manufacturers, this study identified six characteristics of middlemen, industrial markets, and industrial customers that appear to be significant influences on the length of channels used to distribute industrial products.