Industrial exhibitors' resource commitment to booth personnel: A study of select predictors and consequences

Within the context of industrial exhibitions, few researchers have explored how booth staffing decisions affect the booth personnel's reactions and conduct at trade shows. In the current study, Narver and Slater's market orientation dimensions are considered as the predictors of exhibitor's booth personnel commitment. Besides, this study explores the impacts of exhibitor's booth personnel commitment on booth worker's role clarity, goal acceptance, and work effort. Finally, the influences of work effort on three forms of booth staff's information behavior are tested. The data collected from five different B2B exhibits in Taiwan support eleven of the twelve hypotheses. Based on the analytic results, the present research adds theoretical and managerial implications to the existing literature of industrial exhibitions. In particular, it highlights three issues for exhibitors to consider, which include process ambiguity, interaction adaptation, and informational paradox.     

Market orientation, employee development practices, and performance in logistics service provider firms

Although the utilization of logistics service provider firms is growing exponentially in business-to-business markets, little is known about what enables some of these firms to perform better than others. Building on the resource-based view of the firm, this research proposes that market orientation and certain employee development practices (service-related training, coaching, and empowerment) influence both employee and organizational performance. The hypotheses are tested using data from 123 large logistics service provider organizations. A multi-survey design was utilized wherein managers as well as the frontline service employees who interact directly with customers represented each organization. The findings suggest that (a) market orientation influences organizational and employee performance, (b) coaching moderates both links, (c) service-related training moderates the link with employee performance only, and (d) empowerment does not moderate either link.     

The roles of service encounters, service value, and job satisfaction in achieving customer satisfaction in business relationships

Along with variables like the service process, perceived service value and customer satisfaction, job satisfaction of service employees plays a vital role in customer evaluation of service result. However, there has been little in-depth research into the nature of this relation, in particular in the context of B2B relations. In the sphere of an organization providing financial intermediation services to the banking sector and on the basis of a literature review, hypotheses are developed which establish the mediator role of service value and the moderator role of job satisfaction of service employees when delimiting customer satisfaction. Reliability and validity analysis give satisfactory results and our conclusions establish firstly that service encounter directly and significantly affects perceived service value which is the final antecedent to customer satisfaction and secondly, that the level of employment satisfaction moderates its effect on service value.     

Market Orientation and Innovativeness in Supply Chains: Supplier's Impact on Customer Satisfaction

As today's firms increasingly outsource their noncore activities, they not only have to manage their own resources and capabilities, but they are ever more dependent on the resources and capabilities of supplying firms to respond to customer needs. This paper explicitly examines whether and how firms and suppliers, who are both oriented to the same customer market, enable innovativeness in their supply chains and deliver value to their joint customer. We will call this customer of the focal firm the “end user.” The authors take a resource‐dependence perspective to hypothesize how suppliers' end‐user orientation and innovativeness influence downstream activities at the focal firm and end‐user satisfaction. The resource dependence theory looks typically beyond the boundaries of an individual firm for explaining firm success: firms need to satisfy customer demands to survive and depend on other parties such as their suppliers to achieve customer satisfaction. Accordingly, the research design focuses on three parties along a supply chain: the focal firm, a supplier, and a customer of the focal firm (end user). The results drawn from a survey of 88 matched chains suggest the following. First, customer satisfaction is driven by focal firms' innovativeness. A focal firm's innovativeness depends, on the one hand, on a focal firm's market orientation and, on the other hand, on its suppliers’ innovativeness. Second, no relationship could be established between a focal firm's market orientation and a supplier's end‐user orientation. Market orientation typically has within‐firm effects, while innovativeness has impact beyond the boundaries of the firm. These results suggest that firms create value for their customer through internal market orientation efforts and external suppliers' innovativeness.     

The relationships among leadership,goal orientation,and service quality in high-contact service industries: An empirical study

High-contact service industries are characterized by close interaction between service employees and customers, and diverse customer needs. Such characteristics pose a great challenge to the delivery of services of superior quality. In this research we conceptually explore and empirically examine several attitudinal and motivational factors of customer-contact employees, and the management style of managers as antecedents to service quality in high-contact service sectors. Based on dyadic data collected from 230 service firms in Hong Kong, we examine the relationships among transformational leadership, transactional leadership, affective organizational commitment, learning goal orientation, performance goal orientation, and service quality. We find that learning goal orientation is more effective than performance goal orientation in fostering service quality in the high-contact service context. We also observe that transformational leadership tends to be more effective than transactional leadership in influencing employee attitude in high-contact service firms. This research pioneers theory-driven examination of service quality in high-contact service firms using data collected from service employees and shop managers for hypothesis testing.     

CEOs’ Transformational Leadership and Product Innovation Performance: The Roles of Corporate Entrepreneurship and Technology Orientation

Product innovation is an important research topic that has stimulated significant interest among management scholars and practitioners. Leadership has been suggested to be a critical factor affecting product innovation. Numerous studies have documented that transformational leadership positively influences product innovation performance, which is conceptualized as the degree to which a new product and/or service has achieved its market share, sales, rates of asset return, rates of investment return, and profit objectives. However, there is a lack of studies examining the specific means through which transformational leadership influences product innovation performance at the firm level. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the processes through which such effect is achieved and to determine whether corporate entrepreneurship and technology orientation as intervening factors influence this effect. To test the hypotheses, data were collected from 151 matched top management team (TMT) members and chief executive officers (CEOs) from Chinese manufacturing firms. Two separate questionnaires were used to collect the data. TMT members’ questionnaire included measures of CEO's transformational leadership, whereas CEOs’ questionnaire included questions about corporate entrepreneurship, technology orientation, and product innovation performance. Hierarchical linear regression was used to test the hypothesized effects. The results of the analysis provided the support for the fully mediating role of corporate entrepreneurship on the relationship between CEOs' transformational leadership and product innovation performance. In addition, technology orientation was found to significantly moderate the CEOs' transformational leadership–corporate entrepreneurship linkage. Furthermore, the mediated moderation effect of corporate entrepreneurship on the relationships among CEOs’ transformational leadership, technology orientation, and product innovation performance was significantly supported. By studying leadership among CEOs, this study contributes to the research by elucidating the mechanisms through which transformational leadership influences product innovation performance. The mediating role of corporate entrepreneurship encourages managers to improve their leadership style so as to enhance the development of corporate entrepreneurship and innovation practices. The findings also show that technology orientation provides the conditions for the smooth translation of the CEO's transformational leadership into actual entrepreneurial activities. Hence, firms should prioritize technology orientation to optimize the implementation of transformational leadership so as to emphasize innovation and new venture creation.     

A rolling stone gathers no moss: the effect of customers' perceived business model innovativeness on customer value co‐creation behavior and customer satisfaction in the service sector

Both researchers and practitioners have been focusing extensively on business model innovation, as it has shown to positively influence business performance. Although the effect of business model innovativeness on customer behavior might be an important mediator between business model innovation and business performance, it has not yet been analyzed. In line with recent calls to consider the customer side in business model innovation research, our paper addresses this problem by studying the influence of customers' perceived business model innovativeness (CPBMI) on customer satisfaction and customer value co‐creation behavior in the service sector. We, therefore, emphasize customers' perceptions and reactions to business model changes. Relying on data from a large‐scale survey of restaurant customers, we find that perceived value creation innovativeness and value proposition innovativeness positively affect customer satisfaction and customer value co‐creation behavior. In addition, we identify a significant indirect effect of CPBMI on customer satisfaction via customer value co‐creation behavior. Our findings allow deriving concrete implications for both researchers and practitioners.     

Interaction Orientation and Product Development Performance for Taiwanese Electronics Firms: The Mediating Role of Market‐Relating Capabilities

While academics and practitioners are increasingly aware of the value of including the customer in new product development (NPD), processes for doing so effectively remain unclear. Therefore, this study explores the process through which a firm's interaction orientation (the ability to effectively interact with customers) influences product development performance. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study develops a research model in which two market‐relating capabilities—market‐linking and marketing capabilities—mediate the effect of interaction orientation on product development performance. The validity of this model is examined by analyzing primary data gathered from 167 Taiwanese electronics companies. The model results provide support for a process link between interaction orientation, market‐relating capabilities, and product development performance, such that a firm's capabilities enable the conversion of customer‐based resources into productive new product outcomes. More specifically, the interaction orientation–product development speed relationship is mediated by both marketing and market‐linking capabilities, while the interaction orientation–product innovativeness relationship is partially mediated by marketing capability. That is, interaction orientation has indirect effects on product innovativeness and product development speed by strengthening both marketing and market‐linking capabilities that in turn improve product development performance. In addition, the results suggest that a firm's interactive rationality moderates the relationship between interaction orientation and marketing capability. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of how firms achieve superior product development performance by developing effective customer interaction. The findings of this study provide important strategic insights into NPD.     

What drives customer Re-engagement? The foundational role of the sales-service interplay in episodic value co-creation

As existing business-to-business value co-creation (VCC) contracts approach their planned expiration, customers evaluate incumbent suppliers when forming their decisions to re-engage or defect. During this late stage of VCC, supplier sales and service personnel perform unique activities to support one another and foster VCC re-engagement. To investigate this sales-service interplay, the authors employ an exploratory inquiry consisting of 115 depth interviews across 63 customer accounts. Interviews were conducted with customers following the decision to re-engage or defect from an incumbent supplier. Findings suggest that sales' efforts to renew the VCC contract depend on tactical insights provided by service. Through their involvement with customers, service holds a tactical perspective that can extract micro-level customer insights. Findings also suggest that service's ability to influence supplier-specific knowledge stores within the customer organization depends on macro-level strategic customer directives that may be shared by sales. Further, service's activation of such knowledge stores moderates the relationship between sales' RFP response and the customer's VCC re-engagement decision. The results have implications for the industrial sales and service fields, since the integration of the sales and service teams is critical for garnering intrafirm knowledge flows that drive recurrent VCC within collaborative customer-supplier relationships.     

Incorporating human resource management initiatives into customer services: Empirical evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

The existing operations management literature has extensively investigated the associations between customer satisfaction and firm performance. However, how to improve customer satisfaction through employee empowerment, service reward, and service training has rarely been investigated. In this research, we tied human resource and service operations management to each other and examined the relationships among employee empowerment, service reward, service training, employee satisfaction, customer service and customer satisfaction based on empirical study of 214 Chinese manufacturing companies. Using structural equation modeling, we found that both employee empowerment and service training have significant impacts on employee satisfaction and customer service, while service reward only has significant impact on customer service. We also found that both employee satisfaction and customer service have significant impact on customer satisfaction. However, the impact of employee satisfaction on customer service is insignificant. The findings suggest that employee empowerment, service reward and service training are important considerations for operations managers to boost employee satisfaction and customer service, which in turn improve customer satisfaction. We provide empirical evidence that employee empowerment, service reward and service training play significant roles in increasing customer satisfaction in the context of manufacturing businesses.     

The Interplay of Customer and Product Innovation Dynamics: An Exploratory Study

The challenges of successfully developing radical or really new products have received considerable attention from a variety of marketing, strategic, and organizational perspectives. Previous research has stressed the importance of a market‐driven customer orientation, the resolution of market and technological uncertainty, and organizational processes such as cross‐functional teams and organizational learning. However, several fundamental issues have not been addressed. From a customer's perspective, a more innovative product tends to have uncertain benefits and requires customers to learn new behaviors. Customer preferences can, therefore, change as product experience and learning increase. From a firm's perspective, it is unclear how to be customer‐oriented under such dynamic preferences, and product strategies using evolving technologies will tend to interact with how customers learn about an innovation. This research focuses on identifying unresolved issues about these customer and product innovation dynamics. A conceptual framework and series of propositions are presented that relate both changing technology and customer learning to a firm's strategic decisions in developing and launching really new products. The framework is based on in‐depth interviews with high‐tech product managers across several sectors, focusing on the business‐to‐business context. The propositions resulting from the framework highlight the need to consider relevant customer dynamics as integral to a firm's product innovation process. Successful innovation strategies and future research challenges are discussed, and applications to better understanding customer needs and theories of disruptive innovation are examined. Several key insights for innovation success hinge on a broad, downstream orientation to customer needs and product innovation dynamics. To be effective innovators, firms must know their customers' customers and competitors as well as or better than their immediate customers do. Market research must extend downstream for a comprehensive understanding of customer needs dynamics. In the context of disruptive innovation, new dimensions of customer needs may become more valuable based on perceived downstream customer trends. Firms may also innovate on secondary needs because mainstream customers do not always give firms the design freedom to radically innovate on primary features. Understanding customer commitments and how they develop under evolving needs can help firms focus resources on innovative efforts more likely to be accepted by customers.     

Service leadership for adaptive selling and effective customer service teams

Companies are increasingly relying on customer service teams to deliver quality service critical for repeat business and profitability. But these teams need leadership to be effective. This study proposes that service leaders promote quality customer service by encouraging teams to develop adaptive selling capabilities. Data were collected from 113 customer service team leaders and 285 team members from a sample of consumer electronics retailing firms in Beijing, China. Data support the reasoning that by espousing service values, listening to customers, and encouraging improvements, service leaders help their teams become capable adaptive sellers. Results further suggest the contribution of team adaptive selling on customer team task performance, orientation to customers, and ability to recover from shortcomings in service. Findings extend recent research that leaders can have substantial impact by strengthening teamwork among followers by finding that service leaders develop customer service teams to be effective adaptive sellers.     

The effects of incentives and personality on salesperson's customer orientation

Numerous strategies for increasing customer orientation of salespeople, including customer satisfaction-based incentives and selective recruiting, have been suggested; however, little is known about their effectiveness. This study replicates and extends findings from two previous studies by testing the effects of customer and sales volume-based compensation and personality characteristics on the customer orientation of salespeople. Customer satisfaction incentives and salespeople's level of empathy were positively related to customer orientation. Sales volume incentives and job tenure were negatively related to customer orientation. Empathy moderated the effect of customer satisfaction and sales volume incentives on customer orientation. A discussion of the findings, managerial implications, and suggestions for future research are all presented.     

Determinants of customer loyalty in the wireless telecommunications industry

This paper reports the results of research investigating the determinants of the propensity to switch wireless service providers. A model generated from the data rather than from a priori theory is presented, and it is found to uphold the strong relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty exhibited in prior studies. In sharp contrast to the prevailing industry practice of ‘locking in’ customers by means of restrictive contracts, this research suggests that wireless service providers are better off improving customer satisfaction in order to minimize customer defection. This would imply shifting scarce resources to customer retention through improved service, saving costs of expensive customer acquisition campaigns. The paper also proposes two methodological innovations. First, the research employs the ‘Tetrad methodology’ as an exploratory technique prior to building a Structural Equation Model (SEM) making it possible to identify drivers of loyalty—direct or indirect—when it might not be known a priori what these drivers might be. Secondly, the paper proposes an approach to estimating moderator effects on the relationship between satisfaction and customer loyalty.     

Impact of Knowledge Type and Strategic Orientation on New Product Creativity and Advantage in High‐Technology Firms

As different types of knowledge may have different effects on new product positional advantage, knowledge portfolio management in concert with the firm's strategic orientation is indispensable for new product success. However, previous research has not dealt with the knowledge resources and strategic implementations that affect new product development (NPD). To fill in this gap, the current study focuses on two dimensions of knowledge type (knowledge complexity and knowledge tacitness) and two forms of strategic orientation (technological orientation and market orientation), which influence the positional advantages as determinants of NPD outcomes. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study explains how these knowledge and strategic orientation variables influence new product creativity, which comprised the novel and meaningful characteristics of new products. Finally, it demonstrates how these two dimensions of new product creativity differentially provide product advantages in terms of customer satisfaction and product differentiation, which lead to superior new product performance. A conceptual framework is developed and the related hypotheses provided to incorporate the study variables and to test their relationships in a sample based on data collected from both marketing and project managers from 100 U.S. high‐technology firms. The model estimation results from path analysis demonstrate that reliance on knowledge of high tacitness harms meaningfulness, while reliance on knowledge of high complexity increases both novelty and meaningfulness of new product. As expected, market orientation and technological orientation improve the meaningfulness and novelty dimensions of the new product, respectively. New product novelty and meaningfulness are shown to enhance new product advantage in terms of product differentiation and customer satisfaction, both of which contribute to new product performance. It is also found that the combinative use of market orientation and knowledge complexity, and technological orientation and knowledge tacitness positively influence both the novelty and meaningfulness of new products. This study, using the product‐level analysis, contributes to the literature by clarifying how the firm's different knowledge properties and strategic orientations both play a role as a source of new product creativity, and how new product creativity, as a valuable and rare resource, enhances new product advantage. The study results suggest that project/product managers should increase the transferability and codifiability of unstructured knowledge by stimulating intraorganizational knowledge sharing among NPD team members, and that they should promote both technology and market‐orientated practices to fully develop creativity of new products.     

Managing customer engagement at trade shows

Customer engagement is a buzzword in today's business landscape. It is a key driver of a firm's long-term success. Marketers overwhelmingly agree that engaged customers are valuable because, in all likelihood, they will keep coming back to transact business. In this study, which uses the novel context of B2B trade shows, the authors link engagement with two outcomes – intention to attend the next show and intention to purchase from exhibitors. Based on data collected from attendees before and after the show, they propose and test a conceptual model of customer engagement. They show that satisfaction with the trade show fully mediates the impact of behavioral engagement on the two outcomes. They also find that marketers i.e., the show organizer and exhibitors, benefit when visitors become engaged with the trade show in a fully comprehensive manner, even if some visitor segments may initially have low anticipation with regard to the upcoming event and the activities involved.     

Criteria involved in evaluation of trade shows to visit

An organizer of trade shows (TSs) need to know the framework of criteria used by potential visitors in their ex-ante evaluation of trade shows. This paper comes to fill a gap in the published research, aiming to answer two research questions: which criteria are important for visitors in evaluating TSs to visit? And which is the underlying structure of criteria? A sample of retailers was interviewed and, after using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis, a measurement model was identified. The results confirm the underlying structure suggested by the integration of separate criteria or elements previously identified in other studies. Also, that the changes in the marketing orientation of companies have affected the evaluation criteria used by visitors. Additionally, the results show differences between visitants and exhibitors. The main disparity is the non-relevance of the marketing research criteria: TSs are a good marketing research tool for exhibitors but much more limited for visitors.     

Lifting the veil on the link between absorptive capacity and innovation: The roles of cross-functional integration and customer orientation

Drawing on the integration of organizational learning, contingency theory, and theory of jobs to be done, this study develops a moderated mediation model of how a firm's absorptive capacity influences innovation performance. We hypothesize that cross-functional integration may mediate the absorptive capacity-innovation performance link and that customer orientation may positively moderate the mediating effect of cross-functional integration. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a mail survey of manufacturing firms, obtaining 456 valid responses for data analysis. Regression and bootstrap analyses reveal that cross-functional integration partially mediates the effect of absorptive capacity on innovation and that customer orientation enhances the mediated effect. Specifically, the mediating effect of cross-functional integration is stronger and significant when customer orientation is high. In contrast, the mediating effect of cross-functional integration is weaker and insignificant when customer orientation is low. Overall, this study's findings contribute to advances in marketing theory on innovation by identifying cross-functional integration and customer orientation as two key factors that together explain why and under what conditions absorptive capacity affects innovation. The findings also advise managers that in addition to developing absorptive capacity, firms should cultivate a strong customer orientation, which directs cross-functional integration toward converting external knowledge into increased innovation performance.     

Evaluating Customer Support During New Product Development—An Exploratory Study

Anyone who has struggled with a balky computer understands the importance of product support. Useful support for a high-tech product may take various forms, including installation, documentation, field service, user training, and product upgrades. All these forms of support share a common goal: achieving customer satisfaction with the product. To increase the likelihood of customer satisfaction with a high-tech product, a firm must carefully consider the product's support requirements during the design stage of the new-product development (NPD) effort. As Keith Goffin points out, however, relatively little research has been published about the manner in which product design influences product support. He suggests that firms may benefit from considering product support requirements during the design stage, in much the same way as design for manufacturability (DFM) techniques enable firms to increase ease of manufacture. In a survey of high-tech firms, he explores the ways in which companies evaluate product support requirements during the design stage. The study also examines whether firms use quantitative goals to focus the design team's attention on a product's support needs. To provide deeper understanding of the interrelationship between support requirements and product design, he also presents a case study involving Hewlett-Packard's development of a complex medical device. With responses from 66 companies, the survey offers the first empirical data on how companies plan for product support. Whereas DFM techniques involve consideration of manufacturability during the early stages of design, more than two-thirds of the companies in the study begin planning for support during the second half of the product development process. Only slightly more than one-half of the respondents report the use of a formal product support plan, although use of this type of document is more prevalent among the computer firms in the study. The companies in this study do not consider all aspects of support during product planning. The respondents also do not set quantitative goals for all aspects of support during the design stage. They typically set quantitative goals for service-related aspects of support—for example, product reliability targets such as annual failure rate—rather than for such support areas as user training. The survey responses identify a range of measures which could be used for performing a more comprehensive evaluation of support requirements during the design stage.     

The impact of service worker personal resources on relationship quality in business solutions

Service workers are vital in business solution implementations due to their importance to customer outcomes. However, service workers face time and resource constraints that limit their ability to address the multiple requirements of individual customer firm members. Therefore, achieving relationship quality can be stressful. Surprisingly little research exists in this area, so it is, therefore, the focus of the present study. Drawing on the results of a survey of 220 members of customer firms, the study first explores the impacts of three types of personal resources (flexibility, reputation and empathy) on relationship quality. The results suggest all three personal resources have positive effects. The study also considers the mediating effects of task alignment (i.e. when personal resources are appropriate for specific job demands) and the moderating effects of team membership (customer delivery team versus customer management team). The results suggest task alignment dampens the effects of the three personal resources on relationship quality, which implies that specific tasks do not necessarily affect relationship quality as a whole. Team membership moderates all hypothesized effects, suggesting a more operational focus for customer delivery team members and a more strategic focus for customer management team members.