Industrial Marketing Management最新文献

Motivational strategies are vital in boosting performance, yet their effectiveness at the firm level remains underexplored. This study proposes a supportive organizational culture as a firm's intrinsic motivational strategy and a rewards-based strategy as its extrinsic motivational strategy. Leveraging from a resource-based view and resource orchestration theory, intrinsic and extrinsic motivational strategies should be uniquely configured to optimize their impact on diverse value-creation tasks. Interview and survey data were collected from Chinese manufacturing firms. Three distinct interaction patterns—none, negative, and positive—were discovered, offering novel insights for industrial firms: First, to fortify a market information system, utilizing intrinsic or extrinsic strategies alone can be effective. Second, negative interaction implies a trade-off decision between intrinsic and extrinsic strategies and warns of resource redundancy for new product innovation development. Lastly, intrinsic strategies positively contribute to objective market performance only when synergizing with a high level of extrinsic strategies.

This study advances the ongoing scholarly research on brand hate discourse by investigating its consequences in the business-to-business (B2B) context – thereby attempting to initiate a novel trajectory in brand hate literature by including the B2B perspective. The paper demonstrates and validates a conceptual model that connects brand hate with complaining (an immediate behavior), boycott, and retaliation (next stage behaviors) adopted by business buyers with varying relationship lengths with the selling brand. Based on two empirical studies, a survey, and a scenario-based quasi-experiment, results demonstrate that aggressive behaviors of business customers are associated with buyers' emotional processes (hate). In particular, it confirms the direct effect of brand hate on complaining, boycott, and retaliation. Further, it demonstrates the mediation mechanism of complaining between hate-boycott and hate-retaliation relationships. Interestingly, these effects are more substantial for customers with longer relationship length. The findings enrich B2B literature on negative customer-brand relationships and provide managerial guidance for devising strategies to cope with brand hate and unfavorable consequential behaviors.

Inter-firm coopetition, the simultaneous presence of competition and cooperation between firms, has gained increasing attention in strategic management research. While scholars have focused on its effect on selected firm outcomes, the impact of coopetition on customer satisfaction remains underexplored. Our study addresses this gap and leverages recent advancements in coopetition research by examining how coopetition, and the intensities of competition and cooperation in alliances, affect customer satisfaction. Analyzing a unique dataset of 1893 alliances across 143 U.S. firms from 1994 to 2021, we uncover three key insights: First, the intensity of competition in alliances is negatively related to customer satisfaction. Second, the occurrence of coopetition is negatively related to customer satisfaction. Third, contrary to our hypothesis, the intensity of cooperation in alliances does not have a positive influence on customer satisfaction. Our findings substantially contribute to coopetition research by shedding light on the rarely studied ‘dark side’ of coopetition and emphasizing the importance of considering customer perspectives in coopetition research. Besides, we provide managerial implications and suggest future research avenues.

The literature on digital servitization calls for more research linking specific organizational choices related to the implementation of digital services to financial outcomes of the providing firm. This study evaluates how two fundamental such organizational choices – i.e., strategic emphasis on value creation activities over value appropriation activities, and outsourcing intensity – affect firm profitability, along with the moderating role of firm size. Analysis of longitudinal archival data, collected for a sample of 176 manufacturing firms engaged in digital servitization, reveals several noteworthy relationships. Greater relative emphasis on value creation activities negatively impacts firm profitability, but to an extent that decreases with firm size. In addition, while outsourcing intensity has a positive direct effect on firm profitability, the relationship is observed to change with the size of the firm; that is, greater outsourcing intensity may lead to lower profitability in the case of large firms. For managers of manufacturing firms, the study provides insights that may help tackle the implementation challenges of digital servitization, enhancing their abilities to determine appropriate resource allocation strategies and configurations of value chain activities to increase financial performance. The appropriate organizational choices vary with the size of the firm.

Corporations that present a distinctive and different brand identity are preferable for customers and the market, create value, and lead in pricing. It helps customers feel the corporation is trustworthy and reliable. Despite the remarkable advantages, the definition of brand identity for global B2B companies needs to be clearer and more complex than the definition of other close concepts. It deals with some problems and causes some challenges for managers. The present study aims to identify the main controversies and challenges in brand identity management for global B2B companies. Accordingly, a hybrid systematic literature review (SLR) and thematic analysis (TA) have been employed to extract the initial drawbacks. Afterwards, the relationships among the extracted themes are identified using an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) to recognise the network of the problems surrounding the brand identity of global B2B companies. Ultimately, the identified themes are also categorised via the MICMAC method (Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification). After reviewing 142 articles, 12, 11, and 9 challenges were extracted as the main themes for corporate, brand, and stakeholder levels. These themes were analysed and categorised into drivers, linkages, dependents, and autonomous challenges. Moreover, three subsystems were presented, covering the causal relationship among the challenges.

Market segmentation goes beyond merely dividing a market into smaller groups of customers with similar needs that can be served with different offerings. Segmentation builds on and holds implications for marketing strategy, the differentiation of marketing activities, and the allocation of resources. Consequently, segmentation is essential for firms to enhance their competitive edge in navigating a more complex marketing landscape. This paper discusses five important areas where further research is needed to advance the understanding of segmentation: Segmentation as a theory, segmentation in practice, segmentation as a process, the impact of increased digitalization, and the challenge of multilayered markets.

The emerging digital technologies have brought about new changes to the servitization of manufacturing enterprises and resource allocation efficiency. Besides that, in the Chinese manufacturing industry, the ratio of listed companies between state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises is approximately 4:1, which also influences the resource allocation efficiency. This study establishes a comprehensive set of indicators encompassing workforce composition, financial investments, servitization propensity, and performance outcomes to gauge the holistic level of servitization among publicly traded manufacturing companies. The objective is to investigate the impact of servitization on the efficiency of resource allocation among firms within the industry. During the initial phases of servitization, the introduction of services renders products less substitutable. Consequently, some firms experience an increase in pricing levels, while others witness a reduction. This divergence in pricing strategies results in decreased resource allocation efficiency among firms. As the servitization process progresses, companies with initially high pricing levels reach a saturation point in their servitization journey, while those with lower pricing levels intensify their servitization efforts. This shift leads to an enhancement in product substitution elasticity among firms, thereby fostering an improvement in resource allocation. Notably, firms with higher levels of servitization tend to incorporate digital technologies into their service processes. They leverage information collection and data matching to formulate personalized and differentiated service strategies, consequently elevating the distinctiveness of their products. However, this transformation may also precipitate a reduction in resource allocation efficiency within the industry. It is imperative to underscore that the impact of manufacturing servitization on resource allocation efficiency varies across different regions in China, different sectors characterized by varying factor intensities, and different ownership structures. This impact is particularly conspicuous among non-state-owned enterprises, which indirectly underscores the relatively subdued competitive intensity among state-owned enterprises and the inadequacies in market-driven dynamics.