Marketing

The organization's effectiveness can be measured based on sales, market position, customer satisfaction, and profits, relative to competition and internal objectives. Effectiveness is a summary assessment of the sales organization's outcomes, and may be determined for the entire organization or for smaller units such as regions and districts. Sales unit effectiveness is a composite assessment of the unit's performance. Importantly, effectiveness and salesperson performance are distinct although closely related constructs. The salesperson contributes to unit effectiveness along with other determinants including the sales manager, business competencies, and the market and competitive environment. This article proposes and examines a conceptual framework for analysis and decision-making concerning sales organization effectiveness. It discusses important determinants of effectiveness including sales management control, salesperson performance, and sales unit design. Sales management is a core determinant of effectiveness, including management processes, design of the organization, and manager performance. Each salesperson also contributes to effectiveness.

This article considers the importance of job stress in the sales force to be an important management concern in many sales organizations. The complex business environment faces salespeople with escalating demands and expectations. There is continuous pressure to perform in the sales forces of most organizations. Stress is further compounded as salespeople regularly face non-routine situations, and often must work without the support that comes with supervision on a daily basis. The objective of this article is to examine the antecedents and consequences of job stress and to consider initiatives for reducing job stress among salespeople. While eliminating job stress in most sales organizations may be unfeasible, impractical, or even undesirable, the major negative effects of job stress require management initiatives to gain a reasonable level of control over salespeople's job stress. Finally, this article also develops a framework of salesperson job stress including antecedents, role stressors, and consequences.

Brokerage roles in creative industries have been widely recognized but rarely studied systematically. In the research that has been done, the term gatekeeper has been used to define actors at many different positions in the networks that connect creative producers with audiences for their products. Using the concept of brokerage from social network theory, we clarify existing research on gatekeepers and cultural intermediaries by distinguishing among different structural positions, functions and motivations of brokers in creative industries. In addition to the familiar tertius gaudens and tertius iungens orientations identified by Burt (1992) and Obstfeld (2005), we add a third tertius transferens (‘the third who translates’) brokerage motivation which captures the translation and symbolic work of intermediaries in creative industries. We offer several empirical examples from the music industry and new service professions that highlight unanswered questions about the operation of modern cultural brokers.

The purpose of this article is to provide a general summary of the key value propositions evident in the research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR), described as four general ‘types’ of the business case, or four modes of value creation. It then presents a critique of these approaches (including identifying some problems inherent in the construct of CSR itself) and offers some principles for constructing a ‘better’ business case. Its intent is not to conduct a thorough review of studies analyzing the relationship between CSR and financial performance, as that has been well done elsewhere. Rather it seeks to unearth assumptions underlying dominant approaches in an effort to build a more robust business case for CSR that can move beyond existing limitations.

This article reviews the rapidly changing business environment, and highlights it as an important and challenging influence on sales organizations. It examines the dynamic environment impacting the sales organization. A core characteristic of the changing sales environment is its complexity. Dimensions of the environment include globalization, changes in channel delivery and information provision, customer co-production and de-massification of the marketplace, hyper-competition and buyer concentration, sales force automation, customer expectations, ethics expectations, and increased emphasis on wellbeing in the workplace. Each of these environmental forces interacts with the others, significantly compounding analysis of the effects on the sales organization. This article examines a number of key changes in the contemporary business and social environment and discusses their implications regarding sales and sales management research and practice. It also considers psychological levels of analysis from the perspective of the individual salesperson or sales manager, possible dyads, teams, and stakeholder or wider society.

This chapter examines collaboration—the shared commitment of resources to the mutually agreed aims of a number of partners—and innovation management. Very few organizations, if any, can innovate alone, and collaboration with a select number of partners creates the complementarities necessary for innovation, encourages learning, and better equips organizations to deal with uncertainty and complexity. The chapter explores collaborations between firms and between businesses and universities, government policies for collaboration, the role of brokers, and collaboration and technical standards. The management of collaboration has to deal with the instabilities and tensions inherent in this organizational form. Critical tasks include partner selection and structuring and organizing the collaboration. The chapter argues the advantages of managing collaboration as part of the architecture of innovation ecosystems.

Counterfeit goods are perceived to be a substantial threat to various industries, especially those in the luxury sector, and the globalisation of trade and communication has offered incomparable opportunities for criminals to engage in such illicit trade. Demand for counterfeit products/brands has grown immensely in terms of variety, market size, geographical dispersion, and sophistication. To contain the proliferation of counterfeits and the relative negative impact on society, a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour is needed. An updated literature review on counterfeiting from the demand side, particularly analysing determinants of consumers’ buying decisions and counterfeit product consumption habits, provides such an understanding. Considering that fake products have no context without the originals’ existence, contributions highlighted here adopt a joint perspective in analysing the phenomenon, especially in the consumption domain. An examination of the actual counterfeit supply chain rounds out our view.

International business research is probably more influenced by various forces of the economic and political climates than its domestic (or generic) counterpart. The emergence of new market economies in Eastern Europe, China, India, and Brazil, the consolidation of the European Union, as well as a decade of economic stagnation and recent resurgence in Japan's economy has given global competition greater significance. This article looks at research in international marketing to see if the discipline has overcome the deficiencies outlined in the previous studies. It examines the state of the art in international marketing research, with particular emphasis on conceptual frameworks and theory development. Its primary focus is on studies published since the year 2000 because the first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterized by changes in virtually all aspects of businesses and personal life.

Building on socio-structural explanations, this article elaborates on the tension between individual actors’ positions along the core-periphery continuum of the social field and their ability to gain legitimacy for their creative work. Peripheral actors are less constrained by the field’s normative pressures and free to experiment with un-conventional ideas and solutions, but they may struggle to mobilize attention and harness the symbolic and material resources needed to legitimate their work. By contrast, core players are more effective at leveraging networks to build consensus, but they often exhibit a propensity toward more incremental work due to their higher levels of assimilation into the conventions of the field. To resolve this tension this article advances a strategy which we term optimal network structuration strategy. This strategy implies forming ties that link the two ends of the core-periphery spectrum, in the attempt to increase the likelihood of generating novelty while also enhancing the ability to make such novelty manifest and visible to the field. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Critical theory is a central concept in the study of society, politics, history, and business as an innovative academic field and intellectual tradition. This chapter offers readers an encounter with critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s crucial writings on an important philosophical debate of the twenty-first century: the dual character of luxury. In exploring Adorno’s ideas concerning luxury and their possible impact on ‘the singular instant of luxury’, the chapter traces Adorno’s engagement with other key thinkers of luxury such as Thorstein Veblen. Investigating a significant business text on luxury by Wided Batat, the chapter presents an in-depth understanding of contemporary conceptions of luxury customer experience from the perspective of critical theory.

This article examines the role of the direct sales force as a core enterprise strategy and capability relative to the organization's customer relationship management (CRM) system. It discusses the CRM models implied by product leadership, cost leadership, and customer intimacy strategies. These CRM models provide a basis for defining the role of the sales force compared to alternative go-to-market channels in accessing and relating to customers. This article examines the role of the sales force for four customer archetypes: transactional, solution selling, relationship selling, and strategic partnerships. Market-driven companies are likely to be more competent in organizational learning about markets and customers compared to internally-oriented competitors. In examining this issue, this article discusses the role of the direct sales force concerning four specific CRM processes: market sensing, customer sensing, customer linking, and cross-functional spanning.

This article synthesizes current knowledge in the area of customer management, and encourages the organization to be proactive in this essential role, which is an important contributor to business success. It addresses the necessary task of how the organization should identify the right customers from the existing customer base. It reviews the available metrics used for customer analysis and decision-making. Furthermore, it also examines the relevant measurement issues associated with the composite profitability measure, customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV can contribute important insights in selecting the right customers to include in the organization's portfolio. This article also discusses customer portfolio analysis. Significant value is gained from systematic customer assessment for acquiring, growing, and retaining the best mix of customers to generate the strongest return on investment. The process of managing the customer portfolio guides the firm in directing the right marketing efforts to the most appropriate marketing strategies.

This article examines the opportunities and constraints for entrepreneurship offered by the evolving institutional environment and the characteristics of the people who stepped up to the challenge. It places the concept of entrepreneurship in a transition context, before identifying in the third section the unique features of entrepreneurship in transition economies. The article discusses the evolving business environment, and reports the scale and nature of entrepreneurship in transition economies. The personal characteristics and the business strategies of entrepreneurs in transition economies are also discussed. The article concludes by outlining directions for future work.

This article covers the role of marketing for the natural environment in catalyzing environmentally sustainable consumption. It outlines the four decades of “green” marketing. Environmental disasters continued to amplify public awareness during the 1980s and 1990s. During the 1990s, environmental problems were increasingly reframed as economic problems. A smattering of academic papers addressed managerial issues in environmental marketing. The opportunism and reactivity of green marketers in the twentieth century gave way to the beginnings of a more mature and sophisticated approach in the new century. The article discusses the definition of marketing, its dominant logic, and the role of the marketing mix, all of which raise unresolved issues. The sustainable levels of consumption and the need for systemic integration in marketing for the natural environment are explored. Finally, specific directions for future work are given.

From the Stoics into Christian teaching and on into the Renaissance, luxury belonged in a moralised vocabulary of virtue, characterised by living the simple natural life and rational control of bodily desires. This framework was overturned; luxury was demoralised. Though the product of many causes over at least a couple of centuries, two background conditions or developments stand out. The first is the post-Galilean “revolution” in physics and the associated but fundamental rethinking of epistemology and ethics. Reason’s controlling and motivating force was rejected in favour of that role being played by passions or desires. The second development was a defence of commerce. This was defensive because it too had to combat the assumptions and prejudices of the Greek and Roman moralists who saw implicit in commerce conduct and values antipathetic to virtue. The defence had begun in the seventeenth century in pamphlets on “trade”, but what was decisive was a philosophical demoralisation of luxury as a source of individual and social corruption. Though begun earlier, this reevaluation achieved its definitive expression in the eighteenth century. At the heart of this shift was a defence of the modern world of commerce in which luxury was a positive force because it served to enhance social well-being, including the rightful enjoyment of material benefits by all.

Many luxury brands place their heritage at the core of their brand value proposition and identity. This chapter analyses heritage brand management by focussing on a specific business issue—the revival of sleeping beauties. Sleeping beauties are brands that are no longer active on the market but still have potential brand equity that can be conjured up in the minds of consumers by rearticulating their heritage. The chapter presents three branding strategies used to revive a sleeping beauty: brand revitalisation, brand copying, and retrobranding. These strategies differ in the way they associate the brand with its past and heritage. Finally, the chapter investigates three issues that play a key role in the success of a brand revival: brand awareness on the market before revival, heritage reinterpretation, and heritage authentication.

This article examines the importance of effective working relationships between sales and marketing. It provides a framework for analysis and discussion concerning this important organizational relationship. It reviews current thinking on sales–marketing cross-functional relationships, identifies gaps in academic literature, and discusses a range of controllable and uncontrollable factors that may influence this interface. Many organizations are unsure how to manage the sales–marketing cross-functional relationship. The few empirical studies published to date examine the contextual conditions under which such relationships are enacted, e.g., the level of functional interdependence, power relations, and cultural differences. This article discusses the main types of variable that influence the effectiveness of such relationships. These include organizational structure variables, the types of interaction and communication prevalent in the cross-functional relationship, and key variables such as interpersonal trust.

In business, luxury can be seen as a pronounced ambition of those companies that cater to the market of highly affluential consumers. Luxury branding is the critical managerial tool to express the individual company’s interpretation of that ambition. Branding has valuable inward- and outward-oriented functions, providing identification within and advertising outside the company. This mirrors luxury’s two-sided nature which integrates individual hedonism with ostentatious communication. This chapter introduces several facets and cases of luxury branding; outlines the contemporary research landscape on luxury branding (based on a review of 143 articles); proposes a system of five luxury branding core tasks leading from brand targeting to shaping, experience design, extension, and protection of luxury brands; follows modern publications’ roots to their most notable sources (based on analysis of 7,248 references); and discusses the topic from five stakeholder perspectives. The key insight for successful luxury businesses emerges on the subject of carefully balancing commercial growth with qualitative ambition.

Since the 1980s, Japan has been one of the largest markets for the luxury business. It made a large contribution toward shaping this global industry. Most international research in management and social sciences on the Japanese luxury market emphasises its specificities, regarding Western markets, in terms of consumer behaviour, distribution system, and adaptation of goods. Based on case studies of Burberry, Christian Dior, and Louis Vuitton, this chapter discusses the various strategies adopted by Western companies to enter the Japanese market, how they changed their strategy over time, and what they learnt from this market. At the same time, Japanese luxury companies faced difficulties to expand outside their domestic market. Exploring the examples of Mikimoto and Seiko, this chapter argues that cultural factors and brand management are the most important factors accounting for this weakness.

The complexity of luxury- and prestige-brand consumer behaviour combined with the relevance of “new prestige” has created a novel paradigm for luxury-brand strategies in emerging markets. As the luxury market in many emerging markets continues to grow, and in some cases approaches maturity, executives will need to consider appropriate tactics in order to achieve a sustainable advantage with luxury and prestige brands. With a focus on India, this chapter consequently applies the following principles of prestige brand building: (1) mission incomparable, (2) longing versus belonging, (3) from myth to meaning, (4) the product as manifestation, (5) living the dream, (6) unselling, and (7) never-ending growth. Examples include local and international brands with varying degrees of “luxuriousness”. Insights will provide luxury executives the option of using the principles of modern prestige branding to build the future of their brand on a robust foundation.