Industrial Marketing Management最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.