International Journal of Research in Marketing最新文献

The literature on pharmaceutical marketing devotes little attention to the promotion of branded drugs after generic competitors enter the market. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and explores how the sales of branded drugs respond to specific promotional strategies following generic entry. We focus on physician detailing, and specifically, firms’ post-generic-entry decisions regarding overall detailing spending and physician-level allocation (i.e., which physicians to visit). We utilize a novel, custom-built dataset containing information on aggregate-level sales, prescriptions, and promotional budget for 72 brands and their competitors; our dataset further includes detailed physician-level data on detailing visits and prescription behavior for 25 of these brands. We first describe the detailing strategies that brands use in practice, and then analyze the outcomes associated with changes in detailing spending and allocation. Our analyses reveal that, on average, brands’ detailing spending decreases after generic entry, yet the ROI on such spending increases compared to before generic entry. Refocusing of detailing efforts after generic entry such that physicians with higher brand preference are targeted is more likely to lead to an increase in detailing ROI than other allocation strategies post entry. However, in practice, many brands do not undertake such reallocation and do not enhance their ROIs. Our findings are of clear practical relevance to manufacturers of branded drugs, as well as to policy makers who wish to curb detailing efforts for branded drugs when generic alternatives are available, so as to lower healthcare costs.

Customer Success (CS) Management is an emerging B2B marketing strategy. The task of CS management is to increase customer retention through dedicated and ongoing proactive attention to improving the value customers realize from a product or solution. Leveraging a theories-in-use approach, we demonstrate the adoption of CS management across a wide range of B2B settings and unpack how the implementation of a CS strategy can complement existing sales and service efforts to increase customer retention. We find that a central element to CS management is the tracking of customer health, which is a new marketing metric that is viewed as the pulse of CS strategy. Customer health is a formative metric comprised of objective and subjective data points that track (1) relationship quality, (2) product usage, and (3) customer value realization. CS managers leverage customer health data to proactively manage B2B relationships and reduce churn. While CS management has been widely adopted, we also find that not all CS implementations are initially successful. As such, we describe contingency factors related to short-term ambiguities within the organization and long-term factors that impact implementation of CS management. Given the nascent nature of research on CS management in the marketing literature, our article closes with a comprehensive set of future research opportunities and emerging challenges for firms focusing on customer success.

Regular prices and temporary discounts are important elements for retailers’ and brands’ pricing decisions. These two variables need to be considered separately because consumer sensitivities to their changes typically differ. Although the scope and richness of retail datasets have grown rapidly in recent years, most of them only record actual prices paid by customers and lack direct information about regular prices and discounts. A systematic review involving close to five hundred publications that investigated pricing variables using retail scanner data confirms this, as 63% of them only observed actual prices. To solve this missing data problem, these studies often adopted heuristics to decompose actual prices into regular prices and discount depths. However, there are many such heuristics and their accuracies have not been assessed. This research introduces DEPART, a new machine learning approach based on regression trees with a publicly available R package and benchmarks it against previously used heuristics in two different datasets. The results show that on average the proposed method outperforms previously used heuristics by 26.5% or more. Additional analyses illustrate the potential economic benefits of adopting DEPART to improve pricing decisions.

A high volume of sales or online reviews can make a product seem more popular and established and consequently enhance its appeal. But is it advisable to display both metrics? We focus on the interplay between volume of sales and number of reviews and explore what happens when these signals are perceived as congruent versus incongruent. Five experimental studies and an analysis of field data demonstrate that consumers find products with congruent (vs. incongruent) ratios of reviews to sales more appealing. We distinguish between two types of incongruities: when the volume of sales clearly exceeds that of the reviews (over-purchased products) versus many reviews compared to sales (over-reviewed products). We argue that both reduce consumer confidence in the product’s merit, but that the latter has a more pronounced impact. However, the effects are attenuated when contextual cues explain the incongruities.

Many e-commerce retailers are adding “bricks to clicks” – that is, opening an offline channel in addition to their digital sales channel(s). Taking the perspective of such an online pure player, this research assesses the effects of offline channel additions on the financial performance (e.g., sales, profits) and customer behavior (e.g., basket size, return rate) in the extended channel network as well as the initial online channel of the retailer. Across two studies, one at the zip code level and the other at the customer level, we find that the channel addition of a fashion and lifestyle retailer is synergistic in terms of increasing not only overall sales but also profits. At the same time, the new offline channel does not significantly cannibalize the existing online shop, as new customers are attracted through the channel addition. The effects of channel additions, however, are influenced by characteristics of customers gained before the channel addition and of the trade area around the newly opened stores: among existing customers, those who bought more in the online channel do not react as positively to the addition of an offline channel, and trade areas with socioeconomic characteristics that are often viewed as disadvantageous for digital retailing (e.g., an older population, lower average income) show a stronger positive sales effect of a brick-and-mortar addition. The attractiveness of the offline channel for these customer segments highlights that adding bricks to clicks might be most attractive for those customers who were previously unwilling to purchase from an online-only retailer.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Eastern consumers respond more favorably to anthropomorphic products than their Western counterparts. In the present work, we examine the validity of this common intuition and uncover the specific cultural dimension underlying this difference in consumer response. Specifically, across a cross-national field study and three controlled experiments, we demonstrate that collectivistic consumers favor anthropomorphic products more than non-anthropomorphic products, whereas non-collectivistic consumers do not display this relative preference. This interactive effect holds across various product categories, regardless of whether collectivistic thinking is measured, manipulated, or operationalized based on nationality or ethnicity. We offer managerial and theoretical implications that stem from our findings.

Firms usually undertake layoffs to improve financial performance. However, layoffs often have negative effects on various stakeholders, including consumers. In this paper, we examine the magnitude and duration of the potential negative effect of layoff announcements on brand strength. We also examine how a firm's communication accompanying a layoff can potentially counteract the observed negative effect of layoff announcements on brand strength. We compare how advertising communication intensity, social media communication (i.e., brand-initiated tweets), public relation (PR) communication, and communication of CSR initiatives moderate the main effect of layoff announcements on brand strength. Using an error correction model and drawing on 366 announcements of layoff events in Germany, this study identifies the magnitude and duration of the main effect. An examination of five years of weekly consumer brand perception data across multiple industries and domestic and foreign firms shows that advertising communication intensity and social media communication amplify the negative impact of layoff announcements on brand strength. Conversely, PR communication and communication of CSR initiatives help mitigate the negative effect. These findings provide guidance on the best way for firms to design firm communication in the context of layoff announcements.