Industrial Marketing Management最新文献

Firms regularly seek to exert influence over their operating environments through market-shaping strategies. Such market-shaping strategies view markets as endogenously enacted environments and thus broaden firms' strategic repertoire from merely adapting to the changes in the operating environment to also proactively seeking to induce changes in relevant markets. Past research has delineated the market-shaping concept and identified various shaping activities that may induce market change. However, there is limited understanding of how these individual shaping activities are combined to form effective market-shaping strategies. Against this backdrop, focusing on the contents of market-shaping strategies, the authors put forward six elements of what is being shaped: Changes in offering, pricing, customer-side features, supply-side features, representations, and norms. The findings from a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 21 case firms reveal how these elements combine into six distinct configurations. These findings contribute to the nascent research on categorizations of market-shaping strategies and research on market formation. For managers, the authors provide normative and nuanced advice on which elements to include in market-shaping strategies, depending on the overall strategic intent.

The concept of Multi-Sided Platforms (MSPs) has significantly impacted the management field by facilitating interactions between distinct, interdependent groups, revolutionizing numerous industries. While extensive research has examined platform models, further exploration of MSPs in Business-to-Business (B2B) settings, particularly at the supply chain level, remains necessary. This paper critically examines the role of technology-enabled MSPs within B2B environments, highlighting their distinct challenges and opportunities for supply chain ecosystems. We review existing literature on B2B platforms, classifying studies according to the main platform typologies: transactional, innovation, and orthogonal. We identify three key roles these platforms play in supply chain management: enabling information sharing and collaboration, enhancing existing processes, and supporting transformation. Additionally, we investigate five central themes in B2B relationships: power dynamics and governance, resource allocation and optimization, communication dynamics, competence development and learning, and resilience and adaptability. The findings underscore the transformative potential of MSPs in B2B contexts, particularly in driving innovation, improving operational efficiencies, and creating new forms of value. These insights also serve to introduce the eight papers in this special issue and frame three propositions for future research.

Endogeneity due to omitted variable bias presents a significant challenge in empirical marketing research. The instrumental variable (IV) estimation is a prevalent technique to identify this bias, but its correct application can be complex and demanding. This study presents the impact threshold of a confounding variable (ITCV) as a valuable tool for assessing the likelihood of omitted variable bias. Instead of replacing IV estimations, we propose that the ITCV should precede such advanced techniques, as the IV approach may be unnecessary if the ITCV suggests no significant concern for omitted variable bias. This study contributes to the field of empirical marketing research by (1) detailing the theoretical foundations and practical applications of the ITCV, making it accessible to all researchers, regardless of their statistical expertise; (2) comparing the ITCV directly with IV estimation techniques across key metrics; (3) providing an interdisciplinary guide with step-by-step instructions on how to implement the ITCV using Stata and R; (4) demonstrating the ITCV's effectiveness through empirical evidence using a hypothetical research model, thus underscoring its practical utility and promoting its wider adoption; and (5) offering comprehensive reporting guidelines for the ITCV, complete with graphical illustrations, tables, and references to relevant studies.

Digital servitization is the process by which manufacturing firms transition from offering products to offering solutions that integrate products with services and digital technologies. Although previous studies have looked into the capabilities necessary for this transition, several topics need further exploration to advance the research field. The central issue is how digital servitization capabilities create value for the firm, followed by the need for a comprehensive and updated perspective on digital servitization capabilities to properly explain this relationship. Moreover, the effectiveness of different service delivery capabilities, the role of manufacturing capabilities in the offering of digital services, and how digital servitization capabilities evolve are topics that also need to be clarified. To address these issues, the present study developed a theoretical framework comprising four digital servitization capabilities (Integration, Provision, Orchestration, and Manufacturing) and conducted a multiple case study involving 24 Brazilian manufacturing firms. Employing a configurational approach, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) was used to analyze the data. The findings reveal that two configurations of digital servitization capabilities enable value creation: Integration, Provision, and Manufacturing or; Integration, Orchestration, and Manufacturing. The study demonstrates that each configuration represents a different way of operationalizing the same digital servitization strategy, advancing the knowledge on the relationship between digital servitization and value creation.

In recent years, several organizations have implemented customer success (CS) management to maximize customers' value in use. Despite the acknowledged benefits of CS management, challenges persist, particularly in understanding the involvement of CS managers in sales. Drawing from qualitative interviews with CS managers, this study reveals variability in CS managers' involvement in presales activities and responsibility for up- and cross-selling. These insights have led to the development of a taxonomy outlining different types of CS manager involvement in sales. This taxonomy provides more nuance to the analysis of CS managers' involvement in sales than previously assumed in the literature. Additionally, this research uncovers three CS manager-perceived sources of friction: short-term sales focus, conflicts over customer ownership, and poor handovers. These insights contribute to understanding the complexities of CS managers' involvement in sales and offer practical implications for improving alignment between both functions.

While trust is the cornerstone of marketing exchange relationships, even the best salespeople can damage a buyer's trust. Drawing on the relational selling literature, we hypothesize how a salesperson's repair strategies (words and actions) shape a buyer's perceptions of fairness after the buyer's trust has been damaged. We contend that behavioral repair strategies will be more effective than verbal repair strategies in increasing relational fairness, providing a reliable signal of whether the salesperson can be trusted again. We also argue that the efficacy of various behavioral repair strategies depends on the buyer's perceptions of the salesperson's level of culpability for damaging the buyer's trust. These behavioral repair strategies have positive relational implications for how the buyer perceives both the salesperson and the selling firm. A field survey results with 204 professional buyers and an experiment with 308 professional buyers provide evidence for our theory-based assertions.

Extant research suggests that ambidextrous salespeople (i.e., those who prefer to simultaneously engage in both hunting and farming activities) outperform monodextrous salespeople (i.e., those who prefer to engage in hunting over farming, or vice versa) to meet their sales goals. However, across two field studies of business-to-business salespeople, we demonstrate that ambidextrous salespeople are generally more stressed than their monodextrous counterparts. In addition, salesperson felt stress grows significantly stronger to the extent that ambidextrous salespeople also handle non-selling service requirements while working under an outcome-based control system. Study results also reveal that felt stress mediates the ambidexterity-job satisfaction relationship, suggesting that ambidextrous salespeople are less satisfied in their sales role because of the added stress from switching between the activities required in selling to both new and current customers. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications regarding salesperson well-being while also presenting avenues for future research.

Despite their joint responsibility for creating, communicating, and delivering customer value, relationships between marketing and sales (M&S) functions are often suboptimal and fraught with conflict. Yet, the complex nature of M&S conflict, as well as conflict management techniques, have been insufficiently explored. We collect data from 252 M&S managers at large US firms to test a moderated mediation conceptual model. This study explores M&S latent conflict and manifest conflict and empirically tests the link between them. We also examine flexible conflict intervention (FCI) as a mitigating factor in a conditional relationship between task conflict and firm performance. We find that both competition for resources and relative functional identification positively predict M&S task conflict, while divergence of goals has no such effect. Moreover, FCI attenuates the harmful effects of task conflict on firm performance. This study benefits practitioners and researchers with new insights regarding conflict management solutions at the M&S interface.

In today's dynamic industrial market, adoption of a value-based selling (VBS) has emerged as a crucial approach, which forces companies to establish cross-functional sales teams. Yet how sales task and team complexities, as challenging/hindrance job demands, require team social supports, as job resources, to buffer against them in implementing VBS, remains an under-researched topic. Based on job demands-resources (JD-R) model, we investigate how sales task and sales team complexities moderate the link between social supports and VBS. Findings reveal that, as challenge job demands, demand ambiguity and task non-routineness positively moderate the instrumental/emotional support–VBS link and the instrumental support–VBS link, respectively. Whereas, as hindrance job demands, team instability negatively moderates the instrumental/emotional support-VBS link, and role ambiguity negatively moderates the instrumental support-VBS link. Additionally, team heterogeneity positively moderates the instrumental support-VBS link while negatively moderates the emotional support-VBS link. The study considers the roles of social supports (job resources) in shaping team VBS behavior under different sales complexities (job demands), not only contributing to the VBS literature by extending the research context to B2B cross-functional sales teams, also providing a insights on how to implement VBS and enhance performance via social supports in various sales situational complexities.

Investigating innovation ecosystems during their early stages of development is critical when considering how these nascent activities shape future technological direction and markets. This paper prospectively investigates how actors in these ecosystems discursively construct future markets, particularly when the past cannot be considered indictive of the future, as is the case of disruptive technologies, such as autonomous vehicles. An interpretative research approach is followed with discourse analysis that focused on discursive activities undertaken by our participants. A framework of symbolic actions conducted by ecosystem actors contributes to our understanding of activities undertaken at the fuzzy front end of innovation ecosystem emergence. This framework focuses on activities conducted at micro, meso and macro levels as participants prospectively construct future markets. Our findings highlight that future possible value propositions are embedded within market visions as participants position themselves and outline their roles in such future markets.