Customer value impact of sales contests

Although firms spend more than $26 billion annually on sales contests, no empirical research has investigated the effects of contests on individual customers. While some short-term firm effects of contests have been documented, the impact on long-term customer value has remained a matter of speculation. This research investigates the long-term customer impact of sales contests, by applying the customer value framework. We add to previous research that has used customer value of marketing programs by employing the acquired, retained, and add-on framework to segment customers based on their purchase history. We develop hypotheses drawing on theories in the buyer behavior, customer loyalty, and sales management domains. By disaggregating the overall customer value into initial and subsequent components, we demonstrate a greater long-term value per customer in the retained customer cohort and lower short-term and long-term value per customer among the two other cohorts (acquired and add-on customers). There is no adverse impact on other drivers of customer value such as customer churn and purchase frequency. While our study focuses on individual customer effects, we note the significantly higher volume of customers during the contest leads to a positive aggregate-level assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for managers and researchers.     

Exploring booth design as a determinant of trade show success

Purpose: Marketing scholars have joined managers in recognizing the significance of design in many domains. Superior design can enhance products, communications, packaging, and retail settings. However, no scholarly research has investigated design effects in a business-to-business (B-to-B) context. This research will explore the impact of design decisions in trade shows, a key component of the B-to-BB-to-B marketing mix. Trade show success depends on attracting attendees to an exhibitor’s booth because buyer preferences and business relationships are formed and nurtured in that space. The design of a booth plays an important role in attracting visitors and providing a positive business atmosphere.

Methodology/approach: The present study draws upon several streams of literature to examine this neglected aspect of B-to-B research. We offer a conceptual framework, followed by an empirical study of trade show attendees. Respondents evaluated various booth prototypes representing different combinations of key design elements via a conjoint-based method.

Findings: Findings suggest that design matters in a B-to-B trade show setting. Our results indicate that specific design elements affect an attendee’s willingness to enter different booths. Our sample displayed a coherent set of preferences for exhibit design features. Finally, we found that some attendee characteristics moderated the effect of design on preferences—notably the theory-driven characteristics of product agenda breadth and CVPA, rather than simple demographics produced these moderating effects.

Research implications: We have shown that the topic of design is relevant for B-to-B researchers. This research has identified meaningful and managerially relevant design preferences. In addition, we constructed a research framework for investigating behavioral responses to trade show booths, including four key design attributes. We empirically examined this framework with an easily reproducible conjoint methodology that may be useful for future research.

Practical implications: Our results provide actionable managerial guidance on the aesthetics of booth design. There is a general preference for closed designs i.e., attendees prefer having an intercept point in the booth where they may gain information. In addition, the closed design signals a higher density of things to see in the booth, while offering a private, safe environment as well as more spatial comfort. Attendees preferred higher amounts of surface decoration. Booths with low decoration tend to be perceived as less complex, and therefore less stimulating.

Originality/value/contribution: We examined long neglected implications of design to B-to-B marketing and investigated a key determinant of trade show performance. We believe this study has relevance to both scholars and practitioners while setting a roadmap for future research.     

Organizational Wrongs,Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis

By engaging with multiple narratives of a police killing involving questionable legal procedures, known as a police encounter in India, we attempt to narrate stories of what happens to those who resist organizational wrongdoing by displaying moral anger against unethical actions. The State enables police encounters to occur by arguing that exceptional and alternate methods are required to engage with the crisis of terror and crime that the nation faces. Thus, police encounters are executed in the name of the collective morality of the greater common good. Those who resist police encounters argue from the standpoint of a democratic morality by suggesting that the very efficacy of democratic institutions will be eroded if encounters are normalized. We explore questions of organizational ethics from a temporal perspective while navigating between contending moral positions regarding police encounters.     

Assessing sales contest effectiveness: the role of salesperson and sales district characteristics

Sales contests are widely employed to improve short-term sales performance, but knowledge about their effectiveness at the individual salesperson level remains sparse. Proponents argue that contests increase sales by stimulating salespeople, while critics say that contests merely encourage strategic timing of sales efforts. The authors draw on the strategic sales timing literature and goal theory to hypothesize that in a consultative selling scenario, sales will dip below the baseline before the contest but increase above the baseline during and after the contest. They posit that sales district potential and salesperson ability moderate the pre-contest sales dip, contest sales boost, and post-contest sales. Results from a model based on individual-level data on 1180 salespeople in 78 sales districts are largely supportive of the hypotheses. They highlight the need for researchers to integrate the role of strategic timing, salesperson, and sales district characteristics to assess sales contest outcomes. For practitioners, the findings show that in consultative selling situations, contests can generate a net sales increase despite the occurrence of timing games, and the sales gain is higher in districts with lower sales potential and among salespeople with higher sales ability.     

Sales force modeling: State of the field and research agenda

Inspired by Erin Anderson’s contributions to sales force research, this paper focuses on research that utilizes quantitative models to investigate important questions in sales force management. The purpose is to summarize several significant developments in knowledge over the last 40 years and identify major opportunities for impactful theoretical, empirical, and decision model-based research in the future.     

Estimation of variance in multi-stage sampling

In multi-stage sampling when selection is without replacement at the first stage, estimation of the variance of the estimate of the population total is often done assuming sampling with replacement. This estimate is biased and the degree of bias is not negligible. In this paper, a procedure which gives unbiased estimates of the variance making use of only estimated primary sampling unit totals is suggested for the case when sampling at the second and subsequent stages is simple random without replacement. This procedure is based on sub-samples drawn from the selected second and subsequent stage units.     

Worlds of demonetisation and delegitimising the grief of the marginal

ABSTRACT

In late 2016, the Indian state announced a policy of demonetisation whereby high denomination currency was legally rendered as invalid. The official aim of the policy was to confront the problems of black money and corruption that India faces. However, currency shortage resulting from the withdrawal of nearly 85% cash adversely affected the large informal economy in India. We explore how demonetisation affected marginal actors in one such informal economy space, the scrap market in some cities in south India. By accessing the narratives of these marginal subjects, we hope to show how the consumption of the governmental-corporate discourse of utopia is simultaneously implicated in the injustices and violence being experienced by several people. We contribute to ongoing theoretical conversations about the linkages between marketing and hegemonic practices of development by contending that hegemonic imaginations of development are linked to delegitimising the grief of marginal subjects. Such delegitimisation is linked to the desires of consumer-citizens in making them feel aligned with utopian fantasies and the reproduction of identity-based inequalities against marginal subjects.     

Fear and Violence as Organizational Strategies: The Possibility of a Derridean Lens to Analyze Extra-judicial Police Violence

Journal of Business Ethics - Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and...     

Integrating Production Costs in Channel Decisions

Production costs are critical in every business. In this research, we explore how variations in the manufacturer's production cost affect both the manufacturer-retailer channel relationship and the manufacturer's and the retailer's choice of a price-setting rule (e.g., a dollar-amount margin or a percentage-based margin). We employ a multidisciplinary approach that combines executive interviews, survey research, and a game-theoretic analytical model. The analytical model shows that both the manufacturer's and the retailer's price-setting rule influences the other party's approach to production cost. Therefore, the manufacturer's and the retailer's optimal choice of a price-setting rule is not invariant, as previous marketing literature has suggested; such choices depend on the shape of the production cost function. Overall, the results offer new insight into the channel outcomes in light of production costs. The empirical results support the analytical results.     

Category management,product assortment,and consumer welfare

In this article, we endogenize product assortment decisions under a category management (CM) framework in a channel setup. We find that (1) product assortment is polarized more under CM than under a non-CM regime; (2) the price of a high-end (low-end) product in an assortment increases (decreases) under CM than under a non-CM regime; and (3) a high-quality manufacturer makes more profit than a low-quality manufacturer. In our model, the manufacturer’s choice of quality and its polarization is driven by the existence and the decisions of the retailer (CM or non-CM). Finally, we have an interesting result on consumer welfare. We find that the total consumer welfare, as measured by consumer surplus, worsens under CM only when there is sufficient heterogeneity in consumers’ tastes.