Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of successfully coordinating infrastructural capabilities, such as technology, and structural capabilities, such as people, on the performance of service businesses. Effective coordination of these two types of capabilities is shown to impact the implementation of quality management practices and the design of marketing strategy, both of which when utilized properly, lead to enhanced organizational performance.

The authors surveyed retail banking firms for this study to analyze empirical data on infrastructural and structural capabilities. Results were corroborated on the basis of in-depth interviews with several banking managers to provide real world verification of the findings.

Results indicate that both infrastructural and structural capabilities positively impact the design of marketing strategy, while only structural capabilities impact the implementation of quality management practices. Both, successfully implemented quality management ideals and a well-designed marketing strategy, are shown to enhance overall organizational performance.

Research was conducted on a specific sector of the service industry, the banking sector. Also, the relatively small size of the study sample may have impacted the outcome of research applicability in some large businesses. Continuously emerging financial regulations could not be incorporated in the study. On the positive side, strong managerial feedback provides guidance toward adopting the study results, and lays the foundation for future research.

As today’s rapidly evolving society pushes people out of service encounters, replacing them with efficient and cost-saving technology, roles of both the people and the technology in an organization must be fully understood. This paper shows that, despite the exponential growth of technological innovation, both people and technology are critical to enhancing organizational performance through sound quality management practices and supportive marketing strategies.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this paper is to review international industrial purchasing and marketing literature with a focus on portfolio models, to develop portfolio models for buyers' and sellers' international strategies, and to combine the models so that both the buyer and seller perspectives are dealt with simultaneously.

Literature on international industrial purchasing and marketing is discussed. Dimensions that are important for the buyers' and sellers' strategies are identified. Portfolio models for buyers and sellers are developed and the two perspectives are matched together.

The paper contributes a specification of features that are important for industrial buyers' and sellers' international purchasing and marketing strategies. These dimensions are used to develop a model of supplier relationship management and a marketing management model for supplier strategies. The consequences for the firm's international activities are discussed. A model combining industrial buyers' and sellers' international supply and marketing management strategies is developed.

This paper provides a deeper understanding of international exchange processes by combining literature on international industrial purchasing and international marketing. Situations are identified where different areas of theory are applicable. The paper also contributes to the discussion on what should be the conceptual domain of international business. Here, it is argued that international exchange is the product of joint decisions made by two or more actors based in different countries. Earlier academic literature reveals a striking imbalance: while one side of the coin – the exporter side – has been extensively studied, the importer side has largely been neglected. In this paper, it is tried to present a balanced view of both sides.

This paper introduces portfolio management models that can be used for both industrial purchasing and marketing management. The paper stresses the importance of finding a fit between the marketing and purchasing strategies within a relationship. If both parties have positioned the relationship in a similar way, there are much greater possibilities for the relationship to create value for both parties.

The paper combines international industrial purchasing and international marketing perspectives as few studies have done before.

The contingency approach and its relevance to theory building and research in marketing is described. The approach is delineated and its theoretical foundations traced. Several established contingency theories within the management discipline are outlined and the research they have stimulated on related topics in marketing are highlighted. An assessment of the current state of the contingency approach in marketing literature is then provided.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of top management’s social capital – focusing on specific components of social capital – in shaping a company’s marketing capabilities. In addition, the study was designed to determine the extent to which cosmopolitanism as a top management’s characteristic serves as a moderator that allows top management’s social capital to influence corporate marketing capabilities.

This study’s sample comprised small- and medium-sized companies in Korea and China. After excluding insincere responses, 636 questionnaires (329 from Koreans, 307 from Chinese) were used for the analysis. A mediated hierarchical regression analysis was performed to verify the hypothesis.

This study proposed the hypothesis that top management’s social capital would have positive effects on corporate marketing capabilities: pricing strategies, product development, distribution strategies and marketing communications. While managerial tie utilization and solidarity were revealed to have positive effects on corporate marketing capabilities, trust did not show statistically significant effects.

This study is subject to several limitations. First, it has not fully addressed various foundational concepts or factors that comprise or facilitate the building of social capital. In addition to trust and the sharing of core values and knowledge among organizational members, there may be other factors involved, so systematic studies should be conducted using a model that can review the roles of various explanatory variables that constitute social capital.

This study’s empirical results contribute valuable data to the literature, as it was based on a survey conducted with actual Korean and Chinese top managers. In addition, the study’s findings are likely to suggest a valuable direction for evaluating corporate marketing strategies and business performance. The study identified powerful effects of top management’s social capital on corporate marketing strategies. Therefore, greater investments should be made to build the top management’s social capital, so that the corporate capacity for marketing strategies will be able to produce maximum effects.

The results of this study suggest the following additional points. A company with a high level of cosmopolitan orientation may have excellent strategies for competing on overseas markets. Companies targeting global markets should leverage accumulated top management’s social capital to discover overseas business opportunities and acquire knowledge of overseas markets. When the corporate executives of companies that attempt to make inroads into overseas markets have such a cosmopolitan orientation and actively seek and seize overseas market opportunities, they are more likely to avoid path dependency, following domestic business activities and become successful in those global markets.

The present study segmented social capital into sub-factors, thereby identifying their relationships with the behavioral outputs of corporate executives, such as business practice processes, marketing capabilities and business performance. Based on the findings of this study, top management’s social capital should enable companies to consolidate corporate business practice capabilities and, eventually, to be seen as closely associated with business performance and the essential qualities and characteristics of top managers.

Throws down a challenge to management educators and trainers, as well as to managers themselves, to reconsider how they relate the critical issues in marketing to the equally critical issues in business strategy and vice versa. Management education is accused of repeatedly failing to respond to changes in the business world, and of artificially separating marketing from strategy for reasons of administrative neatness, which have nothing to do with the real problems that managers have to solve. A structure is provided, which reflects practices in real organizations, as a way of clarifying this question. This structure has important implications for educators and practitioners, and self‐audit questions are provided for both types of reader.

Boxing Not so Clever In this first issue of what will be a regular review of the world's marketing literature, it is a challenge to an editor to extricate a theme from such an abundance of riches.

The purpose of this paper is to organize the semantics jungle of marketing strategy approaches, terms and concepts into a logically coherent framework using the history of marketing thought to inform current marketing research and practice.

The paper takes the form of an intensive literature review tracing the three streams of marketing strategy terms and concepts from their roots in the literatures of early marketing management, managerial economics and corporate management to the present.

Along with marketing ideas, strategy concepts from managerial economics and from corporate management were absorbed directly into the corpus of strategic marketing thought. These three streams of research have converged into the current state of marketing strategy – an eclectic mixture of both complementary and conflicting strategic approaches, terms and concepts. By systematically following the evolutionary development of major contributions to strategic marketing thought and by redefining terms and refining concepts the various approaches to strategy can be integrated into a comprehensive conceptual framework for organizing and choosing among individual marketing strategies.

The framework offers conceptual and practical value. It provides a researcher with a consistent set of terms and concepts to build upon. The framework also provides a strategic toolkit for the marketing manager, based upon organizational and environmental conditions, to choose from among the feasible alternatives the most effective marketing strategy to achieve management's goal(s).

The purpose of this paper is to present taxonomy of marketing strategy concepts and integrative frameworks that differentiate and integrate its formulation and implementation processes.

The paper is conceptual based on a review of academic literature on marketing strategy chronicled in major marketing journals January 1990‐April 2006. We present selected references classified by key marketing strategy topics for further pursuit by interested readers. Also, the paper reflects our experience and views based on practices chronicled in corporate case studies and trade journals.

The literature casts marketing strategy formulation and implementation in the context of strategic planning and marketing strategy process models. The focus of the strategic planning model is on achieving corporate financial objectives through the implementation of product, pricing, promotion, and place (distribution) programs. The focus of the marketing strategy process model is on the formulation of segmentation, targeting, differentiation, and positioning strategies to create, communicate, and deliver the value to the customer resulting in gaining customer satisfaction and loyalty; i.e. marketing objectives.

The propositions and frameworks constitute guidelines useful in the process of marketing strategy formulations and implementation by practitioners and establish bases for academic researchers to test concept validity, examine concept differences, and explore concept relationships.

This paper advances propositions that clearly differentiate, but interrelate, marketing strategy formulation and implementation processes and recast the strategic planning financial‐oriented model and the marketing strategy process models into a set of frameworks to demonstrate that: the road to healthy financial results must first be paved by sound marketing strategies; explicitly state and underscore the role of branding and organizational strategies in mediating formulated marketing strategy into actionable marketing programs; and broaden the concept of firm orientation to reflect its role in mediating corporate strategy into a set of functional strategies including marketing.

This study aims to draw on the strategy–structure–performance framework to investigate baseline supply chain (BSC) practices as a function of how firms structure logistics and marketing mix activities to achieve market share in the emerging market (EM) supply chain ecosystems.

The authors validate the study’s conceptual framework with survey data collected in two contrasting EM supply chain ecosystems. They include supply chains in EM economies with an advanced logistics/distribution infrastructure such as China and those in economies with poor logistics/distribution infrastructure such as Ghana. The authors use ordinary least squares regression and structural equation modeling analysis to examine the relative market share outcomes of different configurations of logistics-marketing practices (logistics-affordability marketing, logistics-accessibility marketing, logistics-acceptability marketing, logistics-and awareness and full integration into BSC).

Key findings confirm that the integration of logistics with marketing activities into BSC practice is more pervasive in EMs with high logistics performance index, such as China than in firms in EMs with low logistics performance index, such as Ghana. Moreover, the authors confirm that integrating logistics and marketing into BSC generates higher market share performance than logistics- or marketing-only practices in China and Ghana. These differences are driven more by the firm’s strategic orientation than the demands of competitive market conditions.

The study focuses on BSC integration activities in the logistics and marketing functions because researchers have not updated this issue for the past two decades.

The study results provide managers with much-needed empirical evidence of the strategic benefit of BSC integration under different supply chain ecosystems in the EMs.

Linking BSC activities in logistics management and marketing management mix activities within the 4As marketing mix framework provides evidence to support the argument that the 4As marketing mix is an appropriate planning framework for EMs’ unique ecosystems.