Perceived Discrimination, Cashier Metaperceptions, Embarrassment, and Confidence as Influencers of Coupon Use: An Ethnoracial-Socioeconomic Analysis

This research investigates how in-store interactions with cashiers and other retail personnel influence consumers’ use of coupons. To explore this phenomenon, we develop and test a model whereby perceived discrimination and customer metaperceptions of cashier attitudes influence both embarrassment and confidence in using coupons which, in turn, affect the number of coupons redeemed. Importantly, results differ for different ethnoracial-socioeconomic groups and show that perceived discrimination influences some consumers’ coupon use. Moreover, the role of the cashier is crucial in encouraging coupon use among some groups of customers. The managerial implications for supporting coupon use at the point of purchase among diverse consumers are discussed.     

Factors Affecting Skepticism toward Green Advertising

Abstract

Despite the growth of green marketing, there is a shortage of studies on green communication. Thus, this research aims to understand whether consumers who are concerned about the environment conserve resources and have environmentally friendly buying habits and whether they are skeptical about the green communications conveyed by companies. Using a proposal of a model about skepticism toward green advertising, several hypotheses are tested. The results indicate that the more environmentally concerned an individual is, the more skepticism he or she will be toward green claims exhibited on packages or featured in ads. In addition, results indicated no significant differences between men and women regarding this skepticism.     

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.     

Being ‘Green and Competitive’: The Impact of Environmental Actions and Collaborations on Firm Performance

In this paper, we seek to enhance the understanding of the link between environmental management and firm performance, so contributing to the debate of being “green and competitive”. Relying on the resource‐based view, we study the effect of different environmental management capabilities on a firm's market and image performance. In particular, we analyze the capabilities to implement product and process‐related environmental actions with different types of environmental focus (materials, energy, pollution) and the capabilities to develop environmental collaborations with different types of actors (both business actors and non‐business actors). To this aim we conducted a survey on 122 Italian companies. Results show that market performance and image performance have partially different antecedents. Specifically, a firm's market performance is positively affected by the capabilities to implement environmental actions with a focus on energy and pollution and to develop environmental collaborations both with business and with non‐business actors. On the other hand, a firm's image performance is positively affected by the capabilities to implement environmental actions with a focus on materials and to develop environmental collaborations with non‐business actors. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Relevance of trade facilitation in emerging countries' exports

The objective of this article is to analyse trade flows in emerging nations with a maritime boundary, where trade facilitation plays a decisive role in their international development. In order to detect possible patterns in performance, we apply the economic approach of gravity models using the World Bank Logistic Performance Index (LPI) as a good proxy of trade facilitation. The results of the estimation lead to the conclusion that the more complex the transportation of goods is, the more influential the logistics indicator, trade facilitation being most prominent in Middle East exporters.     

The relationship between research funding and academic consulting: An empirical investigation in the Spanish context

This paper investigates the relationship between sources of funding for research activity and the engagement of scientists in a specific type of knowledge transfer, that is, academic consulting. We rely on a sample of 2603 individual scientists from five Spanish universities, who have been awarded public funding or have been principal investigators in activities contracted by external agents, over the period 1999–2004. We find that externally contracted research is positively related to the amount of monetary income from consulting contracts, but that international competitive funding has a negative effect. Our results show that this negative effect is positively moderated by the size of contract funding: the effect of international competitive funding becomes positive for moderate and high levels of contract funding. By investigating the relationship between academic consulting and different types of research funding, our paper sheds light on the conditions that favor academic consulting.     

University-level mechanisms supporting the creation of new companies: an analysis of Italian academic spin-offs

In this paper we address the role of university policies in the creation of academic spin-offs. We focus on university technology transfer units (UTTUs) in Italy and on the mechanisms they have implemented to support academic entrepreneurship. We gathered data relating to their strategies for technology transfer and to the mechanisms they had implemented to support new venture creation. Results show that the number of people dedicated to technology transfer activities, strong relationships that UTTUs have with external organisations involved in technology transfer activities, and finally support services provided by universities and UTTUs have a significant influence in fostering the generation of new ventures.     

Half a century of mass tourism: evolution and expectations

This paper presents a retrospective analysis of the service sector focusing on the hotel industry with reference to how internationalisation and globalisation are having a major effect on demand, and as a result how changes must be made to what is offered. The so-called mass tourism must evolve; we are about to enter the second decade of the twenty-first century and mass tourism needs to be transformed. A large number of issues need to be borne in mind, such as the influence technological progress is having on the ways of travelling and booking and on sustainable, environmental tourism. Also to be taken into account is the competitiveness of the so-called emerging nations, for which a mature country like ours can provide new tourist packages.     

Layout problem for an aircraft maintenance company tool room

A tool room of an aircraft maintainance company with 10000 tools is considered. These tools are borrowed by the mechanics when needed and must be returned before the end of shift. About 400 in-out transactions are handled by the storekeepers of the room. However, since the room is usually crowded with mechanics at their shift start/end times, the storekeepers are overloaded and significant productive manpower is held up in waiting for the tools. Therefore, the racks and tools in the tool room are required to be rearranged so that the handling time of the in/out transactions can be reduced.The racks are rearranged by heuristics and then tools are allocated to the racks according to request probabilities, which are estimated by the proportion of each tool's on-loan frequency to the total on-load frequency during December 1992. Effectiveness is measured by comparing the total rectilinear distance travelled to fetch the tools requested during 11–15 January 1993 based on the proposed changes, to that based on existing rack and tool arrangement. It was found that improvement by tool allocation according to the request probabilities could reach up to 39% with the existing rack arrangement. Furthermore, minor rearrangement on the racks could also reduce the distance travelled by 12%.