Search results

This study examines the potential of foreign business-to-business (B2B) firms to select high-status local partners in emerging markets to achieve positive relationship outcomes. Because a domestic firm’s high status may also promote opportunism, the study also examines if the foreign B2B firms may mitigate such behavior through either or both transaction-specific investments (TSIs) and socialization.

The research is conducted via a model that suggests a positive correlation between high local partner status and the focal relationship outcomes and the moderating effects of structural TSIs and social governance systems. The model was developed and empirically tested using data collected from 96 foreign firms operating in China.

Using multiple regressions, the findings suggest that foreign B2B firms are likely to achieve more beneficial relationship outcomes with high-status local partners. Standing alone, foreign B2B firms’ TSIs mitigate the positive relationship outcomes, whereas their socialization with the high-status partners enhances the beneficial outcomes. Most importantly, combining socialization with TSIs increases beneficial outcomes.

This study adds to B2B marketing, status theory and the application of transaction cost economics (TCE) and social exchange theory to foreign-local B2B exchange relationships in emerging markets. The findings confirm the attractiveness of high status in emerging markets by exploring how the selection, formation and chosen B2B governance processes may lead to competing outcomes of opportunism or success. Future research will benefit from simultaneously securing data from both sides of the dyad.

The paper suggests that foreign B2B firms consider high status as a key criterion in selecting local partners in emerging markets and the importance of managing high-status partners’ potential opportunism by effective governance mechanisms.

This study is one of the first to apply and explore the workings of status theory in the foreign-local B2B partner selection process and relationship outcomes in emerging markets and thereby contributes to B2B marketing, status theory and both TCE and social exchange theories in the focal foreign-local B2B context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the cognitive appraisals, coping choices and behavioral responses by business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals confronting the acutely stressful experience of losing a customer, and their pursuit of justice in the win-back process, influences reacquisition outcomes. The paper further examines the role of sales experience as a moderator between coping choices and successful win back.

In all, 98 critical incidents were reported by sales professionals from B2B firms across various industries. NVivo 9, content analysis and logistic regression were used to analyze the data.

The results show that problem-focused coping (PFC) and pro-active responses positively affect win-back outcome. By contrast, emotion-focused coping (EFC) and re-active responses have a negative association with customer reacquisition. The findings also show that sales experience moderates the relationship between levels of EFC and win-back outcomes. Specifically, for sales professionals with low levels of EFC, sales experience helps improve chances of winning back lost customers. But for sales professionals using higher levels of EFC, more sales experience decreases win-back probability. Additionally, the findings show that procedural, interactional and distributive justice all contribute to successful customer reacquisition.

The few published studies of how B2B sales professionals deal with customer defections reveal a mixture of bereavement and drivenness in striving for new accounts. The authors’ focus and findings on the use of PFC and EFC strategies, justice mechanisms and the uneven role of experience in responding to this stressful context suggests that there is much to be gained from additional research. Specifically, probes into how sales professionals may be inadvertently skewed to EFC behaviors by either overly simplistic training systems, learning- versus performance-based incentives or their experience with prior customer defections.

The findings highlight the importance of PFC strategies and the delivery of procedural, interactional and distributive justice strategies to productively adapt to customer defections, activate switch back behavior and win back lost customers. Sales force training systems need to address the increased churning in B2B markets and integrate win-back procedures in sales training programs so that sales professionals do not default to EFC and/or strive for new accounts when facing the stress of customer defection.

The findings contribute to customer defection management and sales literature by integrating coping and justice theories in exploring sales professionals’ cognitive appraisals and coping responses to the acute stress of losing a current customer.

The purpose of this study is to examine the concept of customer value and its role in building switching costs perceptions. The current research develops scales and empirically validates a typology of customer value for business services.

Through an extensive literature review, qualitative interviews, and an empirical investigation, the current study identifies three facets of customer value for business services (i.e. economic value, relational value, and core value) and investigates their relationships with buyers' perceptions of switching costs. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to evaluate a measurement model and structural relationships.

The findings show that economic value and the value obtained from relational and support aspects of a service exert strong positive impact on customers' perceptions of switching costs and thus serve as barriers to exit. Although core service does not seem to have positive impact on switching costs, core value maybe a “hygiene” factor that may promote customers' switching if not properly managed.

The results of this study are generated from a single industry; additional studies in other industries may strengthen the generalizability of the proposed constructs and framework.

Business suppliers need to build exit barriers through co‐creating relational value. Through communications, suppliers may be able to monitor customers' desired value as a proactive action to anticipate changes and to influence positive changes in customer value.

The current study sheds some light on how supplier firms can enhance switching costs, and consequently raise exit barriers by better managing various aspects of customer value perceptions.

Case research has typically been criticized as lacking objectivity and methodological rigor. It has, therefore, taken a back seat to more quantitative methods like survey and experimental methods when conducting business-to-business research. However, many of the issues of importance to business-to-business research take place in a rich and theoretically important context. When a phenomenon of interest takes place within a complex context, case research is often the most appropriate means to pursue investigation. Thus, in order to enhance the legitimacy of case research, a systematic case methodology is developed that addresses the traditional criticisms. Central to this method are three critical aspects. First, all research must begin with theory development. Second, the research design must be logical and systematic. Third, findings must be independently evaluated. By designing research projects around these aspects, case studies can provide marketers with one more tool to investigate business-to-business marketing, its processes, and the complex environment in which it operates. Specifically, case research is thought to be beneficial is studying network systems, international business-to-business marketing, and the industrial new product development processes.

This study aims to test a theoretical research model specifying how two emerging job stressors, i.e. centralized authority and reporting requirements, influence hotel managers’ well-being. A mediated model through reappraisal is hypothesized.

The model was tested on 600 Norwegian and Swedish hotel managers using a questionnaire survey (72 per cent response rate). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analyses, correlation and structural equation modeling, which included bootstrapping.

Job stressors were negatively related to well-being, whereas reappraisal had a positive influence on well-being. A positive relationship was found between reporting requirements and reappraisal, while the opposite appeared for centralized authority. A negative mediating role of reappraisal existed in the relationship between centralized authority and well-being, while there was a positive one in the relationship between reporting requirements and well-being.

The findings will have important implications for management practices, as they illuminate how job stressors reduce well-being on the one hand and how reappraisal positively influences well-being on the other. This knowledge indicates that reappraisal is important for well-being when faced with stressful environments. The findings illustrate the importance of controlling stress in the managerial environment, and for hotel managers to maintain the ability to reappraise.

The study advances the knowledge of the managerial role, as well as the importance of reappraisal and well-being. This is the first empirical study among hotel managers testing a research model that illustrates how job stressors and reappraisal influence well-being.

This article reviews the quantitative marketing literature on artificial intelligence (AI) through an economics lens. We apply the framework in Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence to systematically categorize 96 research papers on AI in marketing academia into five levels of impact, which are prediction, decision, tool, strategy, and society. For each paper, we further identify each individual component of a task, the research question, the AI model used, and the broad decision type. Overall, we find there are fewer marketing papers focusing on strategy and society, and accordingly, we discuss future research opportunities in those areas.

This study aims to investigate the impact of a salesperson’s babyface in his/her profile picture on the number of online reviews the salesperson receives. In addition to testing the direct relationship, this study explores the moderating roles of salesperson gender and consumer involvement.

Responding to the call for field-based consumer research, the authors test their theory using an experimental design and a field study. Study 1 employs an experimental design in high and low involvement service settings to test the effect of a babyface on consumers’ intention to write online reviews. Study 2 uses field data, utilising real estate salespeople’s online profile pictures to test the effect of salespeople’s babyface on the number of online reviews they receive. It does so by using an artificial intelligence facial recognition application interface.

A salesperson’s babyface results in fewer online reviews in situations in which consumers are highly involved in the purchase process. By contrast, a salesperson’s babyface engenders more online reviews when consumers purchase low involvement services. The adverse effect of a babyface on the number of online reviews, however, attenuates when a salesperson is female.

Limited information about salespeople, a skewed number of online reviews and blurry online profile pictures from a real-world data set constitute the study’s limitations.

When consumers are highly involved in the purchase process, salespeople should appear mature in their online profile photos to engender more online reviews. However, salespeople providing low involvement services should opt for online profile pictures reflecting babyish facial features to generate more online reviews.

Research has shown that salespeople’s physical appearance plays an important role in consumers’ perceptions of salespeople and their performance. Although abundant research and practice have shown the importance of online reviews, less is known about how online profile pictures affect online reviews. Thus, building on well-studied cases of an overgeneralization effect, this work examines the extent to which salespeople’s babyface features in their online profile picture affects the number of online reviews received in a real-world setting.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

The artificial intelligence (AI) based total productive maintenance (TPM) condition based maintenance (CBM) approach through Industry 4.0 transformation can well predict the breakdown in advance to eliminate breakdown.

Meeting the customer requirement as per the delivery schedule with the existing resources are always a big challenge in industries. Any catastrophic breakdown in the equipment leads to increase in production loss, damage to machines, repair cost, time and affects delivery. If these breakdowns are predicted in advance, the breakdown can be addressed before its occurrence and the demand supply chain can be met. TPM is one of the essential operational excellence tool used in industries to utilize the existing resources of a plant in a optimal way. The conventional time based maintenance (TBM) and CBM approach of TPM in Industry 3.0 is time consuming and not accurate enough to achieve zero down time.

The proposed AI and IIoT based TPM is achieved in a digitalized data oriented platform to monitor and control the health status of the machine which may reduce the catastrophic breakdown by 95% and also improves the quality rate and machine performance rate. Based on the identified key signature parameters related to major breakdown are measured using the sensors, digitalised by programmable logic controller (PLC) and monitored by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and predicted in server or cloud.

Long short term memory based deep learning network was developed as a regression forecasting model to predict the remaining useful life RUL of the part or assembly and based on the predictions, corrective action has been implemented before the occurrence of breakdown. The reliability and consistency of the proposed approach are validated and horizontally deployed in similar machines to achieve zero downtime.