Industrial Marketing Management最新文献

Annual sales revenue is one of the most critical indicators of franchise performance not only for the business stakeholders but also for prospective franchisees who are exploring their investment opportunities. Accordingly, Franchise Times ranks and reports the 200 top franchisors annually based on sales performance. Historically, some franchisors have successfully maintained their position among top-ranking firms for years in this credible ranking. Understanding factors associated with such achievement is pivotal for the success and improvement of franchise firms. Despite its importance, the impact of franchise contract provisions on maintaining their sales leadership remains unexplored. In this research, we examine various contract provisions, including cost structure, incentives, and governance, among top franchise firms over time to shed light on factors affecting their sales leadership and continued presence among top-ranking firms. Using the survival analysis, we empirically address this gap by analyzing an unbalanced panel dataset of 153 franchise firms from 2013 to 2020 (1172 firm-year observations). We find that franchisors with contract provisions specifying higher royalty rates, financing support for franchisees, multi-unit or master-franchise-only options, and a primary focus on franchising for expansion are more likely to maintain sales leadership within the industry.

This article investigates the role of corporate venturing (CV) advisory firms in fostering strategic agility in their clients, which are typically established, incumbent companies. While strategic agility, defined as the ability of a firm to adapt its strategic direction to create new value, is gaining prominence, the mechanisms for achieving agility through CV remain rather underexplored. Furthermore, traditional CV service providers have been categorized into “inside-out” and “outside-in” players, but a new category of service providers, i.e., the CV advisory firm, transcends these distinctions by offering integrated CV services. Hence, this paper focuses on the case study of Gellify, an international CV advisory firm supporting corporations in developing strategic agility. The results suggest the existence of four distinct CV services that nurture strategic agility, namely venture clienting, venture acquisition, venture building, and venture builder building. Each of these services influences the three key dimensions of strategic agility (i.e., resource fluidity, strategic sensitivity, and leadership unity) in distinct ways and provides different impacts on incumbent firms. This paper contributes to the understanding of how the CV services offered by advisory firms nurture strategic agility in established corporations, thus providing valuable insights into the evolving landscape of CV and strategic agility.

Data flows across organizational boundaries are vital for creating and capturing value from data-intensive digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence. To achieve this, organizations increasingly engage in digital innovation networks, i.e., constellations of relations among dispersed, loosely coupled actors, who seek to collaborate for combining heterogeneously distributed domain expertise to train and leverage emerging digital technologies that learn from data. Yet, data flows remain stalled within digital innovation networks, and organizations fail to achieve sought-after benefits from data-intensive digital technologies. To date, research has paid limited attention to what contributes to stalled data flows and what strategies are required to facilitate seamless data flows. Our in-depth qualitative study of a digital innovation network within the Swedish forestry identified four key mechanisms underlying stalled data flows and hampering firms in leveraging value from data-intensive digital technologies and revealed the key role of brokerage functions in digital innovation networks for establishing what we call related variety.

This paper aims at developing the theory of interfirm adaptation in business relationships. The paper adds to earlier research by developing a theoretical structure for the analysis of interfirm adaptation. While it is well established in literature that companies adapt their product and service offerings, as well as their processes of production and delivery to account for the evolving needs of customers or suppliers, our understanding of why firms can pursue adaptations in business relationships and how adaptations happen or fail to materialize remains an enduring puzzle. This paper contributes towards a theory of interfirm adaptation in business relationships by presenting a unifying conceptual framework that connects 1) the bases of interfirm adaptation, and 2) the processes of interfirm adaptation. This unifying conceptual framework gives researchers a coherent set of analytical tools to assume, champion, and experiment research on interfirm adaptation in business relationships.

The potential for predicting churn in B2B contexts remains untapped despite the growing availability of digital customer traces, particularly usage data. Nevertheless, this source provides valuable insights into customer behavior and product interaction, serving as a powerful tool for understanding customer needs and improving retention efforts. This paper aims to explore the value of usage data for B2B customer churn prediction using a real-world dataset with 3959 subscriptions from a European software provider. The contribution to literature is two-fold. First, we define a framework to structure usage data into cross-sectional features that could be included in predictive models. We study the impact of usage information on churn prediction performance along three primary components– timing, granularity, and expertise. The findings confirm the value of this data source and two of the three examined components, particularly in terms of AUC and TDL. Second, we provide insights into the carbon footprint of the entire modeling process required to integrate usage data into different machine-learning algorithms. Furthermore, to strengthen the robustness of our findings, we compare five common machine-learning algorithms in CCP. Consequently, this study uncovered unexplored aspects of usage data and practical implications for enhancing churn prediction in a B2B setting.

This instrumental case study's objective is to understand the target market strategies of technology oriented, service intensive, transnational entrepreneurs (TEs). Existing studies featuring the merits of ‘concentration versus spreading’ target market strategies provide mixed findings, typically involving firms with product oriented as opposed to service intensive business models. Furthermore, prior research focuses on export-oriented owner-managers as opposed to TEs who have capabilities associated with being socially embedded across different countries. Interview data features the practices of 15 TEs, whose businesses involved information and knowledge-based solutions. Specifically, first generation UK-based South Asian immigrant entrepreneurs who are socially embedded in both their country of origin and country of settlement. Unique insights contribute to a microfoundational cultural perspective of business-to-business (B2B) practices, regarding a new generation of TEs, being relatively highly educated, experienced, and technologically oriented. New evidence builds on dated prior studies often featuring lower skilled and less experienced immigrant entrepreneurs in low-tech, service-oriented sectors. The choice of TEs' target market strategy is not necessarily binary in nature, whereby the importance of decision-makers possessing the ability to pivot strategies is evidenced. To varying degrees, certain TEs employ an ambidextrous approach, concentrating on key markets and entering/exiting others perceived as peripheral.

Coopetition, characterized by the simultaneous pursuit of cooperation and competition, presents a paradoxical challenge for organizations and the individuals involved. This study explores managers' capacity to manage the inherent paradox of coopetition, focusing on the managerial framings and the various contextual factors shaping them. While the importance of coopetition-oriented mindsets, paradoxical frames, and cognitive and emotional capabilities is recognized for successful management of these challenges, more research is needed to understand how individual managers frame coopetition. The framing perspective is important, because it shows how managers make sense of and try to influence their own behavior as well as that of others. Utilizing a qualitative approach, we analyzed 26 interviews with top managers from 24 organizations within the same healthcare ecosystem. As a result, we develop a framework outlining three distinct paths to framing coopetition: conscious denial, acceptance, and unconscious denial, along with five specific framings. Our findings highlight the impact of these framings on managers' ability to manage coopetition effectively and the conditions shaping the different framings. Through these insights, this research advances our understanding of coopetition management and underscores the crucial role of context, enriching both theoretical discourse and practical application.

Prospecting involves significant stress for industrial salespeople. Some react by procrastinating or develop mental health issues whereas others dive headfirst into it. Employing genetic, survey, and experimental data, this study explores whether these different reactions relate to genetic predispositions of salespeople and how managers and salespeople can intervene. Drawing on differential susceptibility theory (DST) and stress research, we propose that carrying the Serotonin Transporter Gene S allele (SERT S) has the potential to affect a salesperson's propensity to prospect because it makes salespeople more sensitive towards negative information. We find empirical evidence that carrying SERT S has a positive relationship with prospecting for salespeople who tend to appraise stressors as eustress (salespeople high in sensation seeking), and a negative relationship for salespeople who tend to appraise stressors as distress (salespeople high in neuroticism). An experiment further supports these findings and explores how managers and salespeople can trigger coping to mitigate the negative effects of distress appraisals in prospecting. Thereby, the study contributes to research on salesperson well-being by taking a DST perspective on salesperson stress. Furthermore, the study provides actionable implications for business practice on employee well-being.

Business-to-business (B2B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) possess untapped potential in leveraging social media (SM) strategically to acquire external knowledge, a crucial catalyst for bolstering absorptive capacity and, consequently, improving new product development (NPD). Despite this potential, a research gap exists in the understanding of the intricate relationship between SM use, absorptive capacity, and NPD. We conceptualize SM use as a strategic capability and propose its impact on NPD both directly and indirectly through absorptive capacity processes. Surveying 146 managers in UK B2B SMEs, our findings reveal the nuanced and multifaceted connections between SM use, absorptive capacity processes, and NPD, broadly supporting our hypothesized relationships with interesting variations. This study provides valuable insights into the strategic use of SM for cultivating absorptive capacity, thereby enhancing NPD in B2B SMEs. The practical implications extend to businesses aiming to optimize SM use for knowledge acquisition and innovation.

How can studying paradoxes in business networks help understand the networks' adaptation and survival? IMP identifies three central paradoxes influencing business networks: i) Development of Relationships vs. Inability to Change, ii) Controlling vs. Effectiveness, and iii) Stability vs. Change. Studying them seems critical to knowing how interdependent participants in business networks adapt to one another. To do that, we use a co-evolutionary lens to review 41 articles dealing with business network paradoxes from an IMP perspective. Results of the Reflexive Thematic Analysis underline that salient tensions mainly originate from weak coordinating norms, resource misallocation, the relationship of newness and aging, and Machiavellian behaviour. As the main value of our work, we then advance that embracing a co-evolutionary perspective can help shed novel light on these paradoxes by contrasting the factors that make the tensions salient with those able to overcome them. Specifically, we identify moral behaviour, structuration of the network, network capability development, and co-adaptation as four main factors that mitigate the paradoxes and help networks' adaptation and survival. Accordingly, we advocate a co-evolutionary conceptual framework regarding paradoxes and outline five co-evolutionary claims as implications for research and practice.