Impediments to Adoption of Green Products: An ISM Analysis

During the last decades of the twentieth century, industry and business leaders have recognized the importance of incorporating environmental sustainability in their business practices. This has resulted in emergence of new concepts such as green marketing and green consumerism. Over the years, various studies have explored the concept of green consumer behavior and have listed out factors that work as either barriers or enablers to consumer adoption of environmentally sustainable products. The present study identifies such barriers from the available body of literature and tries to construct a model using ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling) to show how these different barriers interact and affect the consumer decision making regarding green products.     

Shedding light on the CMO revolving door: a study of the antecedents of Chief Marketing Officer turnover

Investigating Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) tenure through a longitudinal study of the antecedents of CMO turnover, the authors find that CMO turnover increases if firms’ sales growth is poor, while profitability has a similar though smaller effect when a new CEO is appointed, highlighting marketing’s contextual role vis-à-vis performance metrics. Coupled with other results related to industry sales growth and stability that make CMO turnover less likely, these findings underscore marketing’s demand- or customer-facing role in the firm. The authors also show that some of these results are distinct to turnover among CMOs compared to other top management team (TMT) executives. While this research does show support for extant theory, its focus on the CMO within the TMT results in important contributions to the turnover literature. These include the inverted-U effect of TMT marketing experience on CMO turnover and the nuanced attenuation by CMO insider-ness of a similar relationship between CMO tenure and turnover. Overall, the results lead to important practical implications for managing CMO turnover.     

The impact of marketing capability, operations capability and diversification strategy on performance: A resource-based view

Using resource-based view (RBV) of the firm as a theoretical backdrop; we aim to find out the relative impact of a firm's functional capabilities (namely, marketing and operations) and diversification strategies (product/service and international diversification) on financial performance. We hypothesize that this linkage depends on the firm's relative efficiency to integrate its resource-capabilities-performance triad. Using archival data of 102 UK based logistics companies, we find marketing capability is the key determinant for superior financial performance. This study highlights that a market-driven firm is likely to have better business performance than a firm focusing solely on operational capabilities. Also, firms are better off when they focus on a narrow portfolio of products/services for the clients and concentrate on a diverse geographical market. Our findings provide a new perspective to model a firm's functional capabilities and diversification strategy on its financial performance and offer a benchmarking tool to improve resource allocation decisions.     

Why do off‐shored Indian call centre workers want to leave their jobs?

Employee turnover is a major problem in off‐shored Indian call centres. Agents who service Western customers often face hostility and racial abuse because of who they are and where they are located. A substantial part of job‐related training focuses on teaching employees to manage their identity and modify their accent. Based on a sample (n = 211) of Indian call centre workers servicing international customers, we explore these issues and investigate how they affect employee turnover intentions. The study utilises Taylor and Bain's (2005) distinction between factors particular to the Indian context and those more generic to the call centre labour process to better understand the drivers of turnover. We found that a number of distinctive factors including accent modification difficulty, stigma consciousness, racial abuse and perceived favouritism were associated with turnover intentions. The study also revealed that certain job‐related factors related to intentions to leave, including routinisation and poor promotional opportunities.     

The impacts of marketing and operations capabilities on financial performance in the UK retail sector: A resource-based perspective

Drawing upon the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, this study investigates the relationships among marketing capability, operations capability, and financial performance. Using archival data of 186 retail firms in the UK, we find that that marketing capability has a significant impact on operations capability, and that operations capability is significantly and positively related to retail efficiency. The results also suggest that operations capability fully mediates the relationship between marketing capability and financial performance. The findings of this study provide practical insights for practicing managers to consider when developing functional capabilities in order to achieve superior financial performance.     

Reverse auctions for relationship marketers

Reverse auctions in logistics and procurement have grown dramatically since the advent of widespread Internet usage in the late 1990s. A literature review indicates that scholars and practitioners are reaching a consensus around a trade-off between the value and benefits of gaining lower prices versus losing long-term relationships with suppliers. Yet at the same time, a quiet evolution has come about in the economics and management literature, opening the way for new, more relationship-friendly auction designs. Based on this new work, a series of guidelines and principles are developed which describe how managers may collect the economic pricing advantage of reverse auctions—yet retain the long-term benefits of relationship marketing.     

Sustainability Reporting by New Zealand's Local Governments

This study examines New Zealand (NZ) local government's sustainability disclosure during the five years prior to changes in the legislative environment through the introduction of the Environmental Reporting Bill. Local councils appeared to persistently increase their social and environmental disclosure practices in view of the forthcoming Bill. This is consistent with the underpinnings of legitimacy theory in that pending legislation may introduce restrictive policies and rules in the future that are not consistent with current reporting practices. The highest reporting categories were public agency and the environment, which indicates councils’ drive to maintain legitimacy. Further, the results show that local government environmental reporting focused on non‐monetary, and to a lesser extent monetary, information. In the absence of mandatory guidelines, the results also indicate that NZ local councils have voluntarily reported sustainability information consistent with GRI indicators.