Rethinking marketing: Peter Drucker’s challenge

Just as Peter Drucker pointed out the importance of assessing whether a company’s “theory of business” is relevant, marketers need to consider whether the current “theory of marketing” still fits in a world of rapid change. The author examines how Drucker challenged the theory of business at financial services firm Edward Jones, helping to identify new market opportunities. For example, he urged the company to move into metropolitan areas, which now account for 60 percent of the firm’s business. The article then considers how the field of marketing needs to reexamine its own mental models. Finally, the article considers how Drucker’s seminal insights on marketing, particularly his emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach, might point the way to new approaches.     

International joint ventures in the United States: An examination of factors related to their effectiveness

The increasing popularity of international joint ventures (IJVs) and their high failure rate prompted this examination of pre- and postincorporation factors related to IJV effectiveness. Interviews with IJV CEOs, and the findings from a questionnaire administered to CEOs of 81 IJVs in the United States, suggest which pre- and postincorporation factors can be important to IJVs' effectiveness. Why these factors are important, and how they interact with other factors in the general context of IJV experiences are also explored in this article. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Successive retention of funds,loan profitability and marketing implications in banking

This paper analyzes potential effects of successive retention of funds, induced by portions of funds granted as loans being successively redeposited via a chain of market transactions in the same bank, on loan profitability. It identifies sets of market conditions and loan terms under which the magnitude of the fund retention phenomenon could be significant, derives formulae to measure its magnitude, and suggests loan marketing strategies potentially capable of exploiting successive retention of funds to improve loan profitability. The potential role of the loan-induced retention process as an additional explanatory factor in the relationship between market structure and market performance in banking is also discussed.     

The linking pin role in organizational buying centers

The buying center concept has been widely accepted in the organizational buying behavior literature. Nevertheless, the application of the concept in empirical investigations has been limited in scope. Most research has examined either the composition of the buying center or the influence processes operating within it. The intraorganizational dynamics (among members of the buying center) and the interorganizational dynamics (between buying center members and outside organizations) have been ignored in buying center research. Common to these two sets of relationships is the presence of a “linking pin” or “boundary role” person.The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first is to suggest the concept of the “linking pin” role in a buying center and to highlight the conceptual importance of this role in furthering the understanding and prediction of organizational buying processes and outcomes. Explication of this role should also lead to an enriched conceptualization of the relationships between the buying and selling organizations. The second objective is to report on the results of some initial empirical investigations into the role of a designated linking pin in hospital buying centers. These results offer preliminary evidence of the value of the linking pin concept.     

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.     

Predicting IJVs＇ effectiveness based on their autonomy levels and the characteristics of their parent companies

Separate research streams have identified relationships between IJV autonomy and IJV effectiveness, and between functional/dysfunctional parent-company differentiation and IJV effectiveness. This study attempts to integrate these two literature streams by examining how these two sets of independent variables interact in terms of predicting IJV effectiveness. Results partially support our hypotheses that the autonomy-effectiveness relationship is less positive with greater functional differentiation and more positive with greater dysfunctional differentiation. The results provide strong support for our hypotheses that activities closer to the local operating environment will influence these relationships such that autonomy becomes more important to effectiveness when an activity has strong local ties.     

Does Technological Innovation Really Reduce Marginal Abatement Costs? Some Theory,Algebraic Evidence,and Policy Implications

The existing literature models innovation in pollution control as a reduction in marginal abatement costs. We show that this assumption is inappropriate for production process innovations such as fuel switching. Algebraically, we examine the effects of different innovation types on marginal abatement cost curves, showing that some desirable innovations increase marginal abatement costs. Empirically, we estimate marginal abatement costs for sulfur dioxide by measuring the output distance function for electric power in Korea. Regression results confirm that production process innovations did raise marginal abatement costs in this case. One policy implication: economic instruments do not always provide stronger innovation incentives than command-and-control policies.