Market-oriented sustainability: a conceptual framework and propositions

Utilizing Resource-Advantage Theory as the underlying theoretical foundation and drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, we develop a market-oriented sustainability framework. By incorporating sustainability into market orientation, the goal of strategic alignment of sustainability with marketing strategies is achieved to create a competitive advantage. Three constructs identified in the model are DNA, stakeholder involvement, and performance management. These three constructs are the drivers of sustainability. DNA is used as an extended metaphor to clarify and illustrate the workings of an organization and how sustainability may be implemented. This construct includes core ideology, dynamic capabilities, and societal engagement. The firm’s DNA is communicated to both internal and external stakeholders, and stakeholders’ concerns should be an influence on strategic marketing planning. Performance management is the third major construct in the model and includes corporate social performance and corporate financial performance metrics. Within the model explication, we offer propositions to support market-oriented sustainability research and provide directions for sustainability theory, research, and practice.     

Customer relationship management and company performance—the mediating role of new product performance

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is widely accepted as an effective approach for collecting, analyzing, and translating valuable customer information into managerial action. However, the potential of CRM has been investigated only in the context of existing products. CRM’s potential to aid in future new product development (NPD) has been neglected. We develop a conceptual framework in which multiple facets of CRM are linked to new product and company performance. We test this model based on a cross-functional sample consisting of 115 R&D and 122 Marketing managers from firms spanning multiple industries. The results provide evidence that CRM has a positive effect on new product performance and further, that this effect is moderated by CRM reward systems but not CRM technology. We also show that new product performance mediates the relationship between CRM and company performance. These findings have important implications for research and practice in both the CRM and NPD areas.     

Extending the service-dominant logic: from customer centricity to balanced centricity

This is a contribution to the reorientation of marketing. It aligns the service-dominant logic with other developments in marketing and management. It claims that the marketing concept and customer-centricity are too limited as a foundation for marketing and have not—and cannot—but partially be implemented in practice. It urges marketing scholars and educators to accept the complexity of marketing and develop and teach a network-based stakeholder approach—balanced centricity—epitomized by the concept of many-to-many marketing.     

Hold-up and externality: the firm as a nexus of incomplete rights?

The Coasean theory of the firm (Coase in Economica 4:386–405, 1937) has flourished with the theory of incomplete contracts. Transaction costs in the form of enforcement costs have been deemed to be the main determinants of the decision to ‘make’ versus ‘buy’. Surprisingly, this stream of literature has almost neglected that transaction costs may also generate incomplete property rights (Coase in J Law Econ 3:1–44, 1960). As firm’s activities entail both contractual and property rights, these two domains interfere each other on the decision to carry out a transaction within the firm. When property rights are incomplete, potential externalities may increase the cost of using the price mechanism to procure the assets needed in a given transaction. The resulting ‘Coasean firm’ would not only centralize incomplete contracts under a unified governance system, but it will also aggregate incomplete property rights under a unified ownership structure.     

Public debt and economic growth in Spain, 1851–2013

In this paper we investigate the long-run relationship between public debt and economic growth in the Spanish economy for the period 1851–2013. We develop a cliometric analysis of the debt–growth nexus using novel time series methods. We find some support for a negative relationship between both variables, but no clear evidence of a debt threshold. The estimated long-run elasticity in a one-break model shows a tendency to decrease over time from a nonsignificant 0.011 to a ?0.070, indicating that a 10 percentage increase in the public debt-to-GDP ratio is associated with 0.70 percentage points lower real economic growth. Indeed, we find for the first subsample (1851–1939) either “decoupling” or “saturation,” while in the second subsample (1940–2000) the long-run elasticity coefficient becomes negative and significant. When we extend our analysis up to 2013, we find a break in 1971 coinciding with the twilight of Franco’s dictatorship and the Spanish transition to democracy.     

A city of trades: Spanish and Italian immigrants in late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires,Argentina

The city of Buenos Aires in the 1890s is an extreme case in immigration history since the native workers accounted for less than one-third of the labour force. In this paper, we look at the labour market performance of Argentineans vis-à-vis the largest two immigrant groups, Italians and the Spaniards. We find that, on average, Argentineans enjoyed higher wages, but workers specialised in particular occupations by nationality. Immigrants clustered in occupations with lower salaries. Despite higher literacy levels and the language advantage, Spaniards did not outperform Italians in earnings. Ethnic networks facilitated the integration of immigrants into the host society and played a role in the occupation selection of immigrants. Our results suggest that Italian prosperity in Buenos Aires was not based on superior earnings or skills but on older and powerful networks.     

Gamified interactions: whether,when, and how games facilitate self–brand connections

Firms increasingly use games to interact with their customers. Yet, surprisingly little is known about whether, when, and how such “gamified” interactions engage consumers with a firm’s brand, thereby facilitating self–brand connections. Building on flow theory, we show that gamified interactions that are highly interactive and optimally challenging facilitate self–brand connections, because such games lead to emotional and cognitive brand engagement. A field study and three experiments across various product domains and game designs support our theory. We also identify conditions under which consumers do not become engaged with a brand, namely when firms restrict their decisional control either to voluntarily participate in the game (i.e., compulsory play) or to spend as much time as desired playing the game (i.e., time pressure). Our findings advance existing knowledge about the use of games in marketing and provide important implications for how marketers can harness their potential to build self–brand connections.     

Effects of offline ad content on online brand search: insights from super bowl advertising

Individuals watch TV shows while simultaneously and/or immediately searching online. Thus, the content of offline TV ads can affect online brand search, a key predictor of sales. Yet there are few insights on the effect of offline ad content on online brand search. We develop hypotheses relating the informational and emotional content of TV ads on online brand search, independently, and in conjunction with two attentional content elements of the ad campaign, prior media publicity and brand website prominence in the TV ad. We test the hypotheses using a quasi-experimental study, the telecast of TV ads on the annual Super Bowl event between 2004 and 2012 (n = 293 observations). We measure online brand search by online brand search lift, i.e., the growth in online brand search following the telecast of the brand’s ad on Super Bowl. The findings indicate that the informational content of the TV ad increases online brand search, while both attentional content elements decrease this effect. We find no support for the effect of emotional content of the TV ad on online brand search. Our findings extend marketing theory on online search and generate managerial implications for designing TV ads to increase online brand search.     

The role of leadership in salespeople’s price negotiation behavior

Salespeople assume a key role in defending firms’ price levels in price negotiations with customers. The degree to which salespeople defend prices should critically depend upon their leaders’ influence. However, the influence of leadership on salespeople’s price defense behavior is barely understood, conceptually or empirically. Therefore, building on social learning theory, the authors propose that salespeople might adopt their leaders’ price defense behavior given a transformational leadership style. Furthermore, drawing on the contingency leadership perspective, the authors argue that this adoption fundamentally depends on three variables deduced from the motivation–ability–opportunity (MAO) framework, that is, salespeople’s learning motivation, negotiation efficacy, and perceived customer lenience. Results of a multi-level model using data from 92 salespeople and 264 salesperson–customer interactions confirm these predictions. The first to explore contingencies of salespeople’s adoption of their transformational leaders’ price negotiation behaviors, this study extends marketing theory and provides actionable guidance to practitioners.     

Customer query handling in sales interactions

Using a novel approach with video-recordings of sales interactions, this study focuses on a dynamic analysis of salesperson effectiveness in handling customer queries. We conceptualize salesperson behaviors, namely, resolving, relating, and emoting, as separate elements of customer query handling and empirically identify the distinct verbal and nonverbal cues that salespeople use to display these behaviors during sales interactions. We draw from compensation effects in social cognition theory to propose that customers’ perceptions of a salesperson’s effectiveness are prone to trade-offs between competence (resolving behaviors) and warmth (relating and emoting behaviors). Results, robust to endogeneity corrections, support the proposed tradeoffs such that the effectiveness of salesperson’s resolving behavior is significantly curtailed, even neutralized, by the salesperson’s relating and emoting behaviors. We situate these counterintuitive results within the extant theory and research on sales interactions, and outline implications for practice.