Staying with the ingroup or outgroup? A cross-country examination of international travelers’ home-sharing preferences

This paper examines the joint effect of host’s cultural identity (i.e., ingroup vs. outgroup), presence of a travel companion, and consumer’s country of origin on international travelers’ evaluations of home-sharing services. A quasi-experimental design was implemented to collect data from U.S. and Chinese consumers. Results indicate a significant three-way interaction: In a culturally different destination, Chinese consumers prefer home-sharing services provided by ingroup hosts whether traveling alone or with a companion, whereas American consumers only show ingroup preference if they travel alone; when traveling internationally with a travel companion, American consumers prefer home-sharing services provided by an outgroup host. Further, psychological closeness and perceived experience authenticity are found to be the mediators underlying international travelers’ home-sharing preferences. Findings of this study offer new insights to the research and management of sharing economy.     

页听“上帝”的声音——消费者对本土柑橘品牌的认知及购买行为调查

柑橘销售不理想让果农蒙受损失，如何提高销售量，浙江大学通过时国内知名柑橘品牌进行消费者调研，提出了柑橘品牌建设以及销售的症结和几点建议。     

Storytelling during retail sales encounters

Many researchers have emphasized the importance of communication in personal selling. Psychologists and researchers in management and advertising have recognized the importance of communication via stories, but this has not extended to research in sales. This paper uses a framework developed from exploratory field work and the literature on stories to investigate storytelling by retail salespeople in three similar experimental studies. The experiments manipulate personal versus business stories across three different topic areas: entity, product, and digression. The results suggest that product stories told from a business point of view may be most effective in enhancing consumers’ purchase intentions in onetime sales encounters.     

Exploring communication differences between women and men sales representatives in a relationship selling context

The purpose of this exploratory research is to investigate the different styles of communication used by women and men sales representatives in relationship selling. An analysis of in-depth interviews revealed that the language used by women sales representatives is more conducive to building customer trust and more suggestive of relationship selling behaviour than the language used by their male counterparts. That women sales representatives may draw upon nurturing language and behaviour learned in developing other relationships (wife, mother, daughter, sister or friend) to build customer relationships is consistent with role theory and supports a theoretical explanation for the lower levels of role conflict surprisingly reported by women sales representatives in previous research. The results suggest that in a relationship selling task, marketing managers should consider using sales representatives with a 'feminine' style for sales jobs requiring extensive customer relationships. Directions for future research are also suggested.     

How retailer and competitor decisions drive the long-term effectiveness of manufacturer promotions for fast moving consumer goods

While both retailer and competitor decisions contribute to long-term promotional effectiveness, their separate impact has yet to be evaluated. For 75 brands in 25 categories, the author finds that the long-term retailer pass-through of promotions is 65 percent, yielding a long-run wholesale promotional elasticity of 1.78 before competitive response. However, competitors partially match the wholesale price reduction by 15 percent, which decreases promotional elasticity by 10 percent. The range of retailer and competitor response across the analyzed cases is very wide, and is affected by category and brand characteristics. As to the former, large categories yield stronger retailer response, while concentrated categories yield stronger competitor response. As to the latter, smaller brands face a fourfold disadvantage compared to leading brands: they obtain lower retail pass-through, lower retail support, and lower benefits from competing brand's promotions, while their promotions generate higher benefits to competitors. Interestingly, the mid-1990s move from off-invoice allowances towards scan-back deals only partially improves their promotional effectiveness compared to that of leading brands.     

Factors Influencing Intercultural Sensitivity of Hospitality Employees

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the factors influencing the development of intercultural sensitivity among hospitality employees. The study particularly looks at the relationship between intercultural sensitivity levels of hospitality employees and their previous educational work experiences. Based on a survey (Intercultural Sensitivity Scale) scale with 443 hospitality employees overall means were calculated. Results of the analysis show that exposure to other cultures by participating previously in student exchange programs (e.g. ERASMUS), work and travel programs, and spending long periods of time abroad increased people’s intercultural sensitivity. Interestingly though, the study found that having formal tourism and hospitality education did not have any influence on the level of intercultural sensitivity of hospitality employees.     

Optimal pricing, production rate, and quality under learning effects

This study investigates the marketing and production problem for a monopolist firm where price, quality and production rate are simultaneous dynamic decision variables under the condition of a dynamic demand that depends on price, quality and cumulative sales. The formulated continuous profit maximization model follows the steps for dynamic optimization to derive optimal price, quality and production policies, wherein a unit production cost that decreases with cumulative production reflects the cost learning effect. Through the differentiable multiplicatively separable demand function, this study analyzes optimal trajectories for determining price, quality, and production rate. The results specify several optimal policies and policy makers would gain insight into the consequence of their decisions that otherwise might have been obscured by sub-optimal analysis.     

Innovation novelty and (commercial) performance in the service sector: A Canadian firm-level analysis

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether innovation novelty has an impact on the firms' performance in selected service industries. The principal interest in this paper lies in incorporating two different dimensions of innovation radicalness – market-entry and originality of the innovation – to assess firms' commercialization performance. The results show that to derive more sales from innovation, service firms need to enter the market early (world-first and to some extent, Canada-first) or to introduce new products with high level of novelty. Importance of early-entry (world-first) or novel content in commercialization performance differs by industries.     

The game plan for aligning the organization

Better-aligned operational and strategic plans and a better balance of supply and demand bring tangible benefits to firms. However, functional departments in firms often operate without vertical and horizontal alignment. The outcomes are delays and amplification of the information flow, suboptimal corporate plans, uncoordinated reactions within the business, insufficient operational flexibility, and discrepancies in supply and demand. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) can circumvent these negative consequences and align the organization. Our multi-method research develops a holistic S&OP maturity model that firms can use for the assessment of their internal S&OP processes and shows the pathway to an integrated S&OP approach for the achievement of a better-aligned organization. We present a case study of a medium-sized, Swiss-based pharmaceutical company that has recently implemented S&OP to highlight why companies implement S&OP, the prerequisites and roadblocks encountered during implementation, and the benefits envisioned and achieved. Finally, we reveal the great relevance of the topic by means of a questionnaire survey which shows that organizations’ current S&OP performance is underdeveloped and that many improvements are indispensable to enjoy all benefits associated with the alignment process.     

Organizational variables, sales force perceptions of readiness for change, learning, and performance among boundary-spanning teams: A conceptual framework and propositions for research

Sales organizations are continuously developing new ideas and approaches to be more competitive. One of the approaches taken by most successful organizations is the move from individuals to boundary-spanning, cross-functional teams. Sales teams are being employed to counter efforts by buying organizations to form buying centers. It is proffered in this paper that organizations that are ready for change are conducive to enhancement of sales team learning. Organization readiness for change is a condition impacted by a variety of organizational antecedent variables such as culture and climate. This paper proposes that sales team learning is impacted by team members' perceptions of the organization's readiness for change. In addition, we also posit the moderating influence of two environmental variables: turbulence and competitive intensity on the relationship between readiness for change and sales team learning. Sales team learning is then proposed to be related to a variety of sales outcomes. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for understanding the contexts in which team learning occurs and the impact of team learning on team effectiveness. Throughout the paper, we present research propositions that provide opportunities for future examinations of team learning.