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The level of trust in a service provider is an important decision factor when buying industrial services. Especially, the outcome uncertainties of services, its individuality, and asymmetric information between buyer and seller are some reasons that the evaluation of trust is a key component in service trading. Consequently, searching of potential new suppliers involves examining providers’ trustworthiness. This paper focuses on the study of online trust signals used by buyers, to assess provider’s trustworthiness in the context of industrial services. The main research objective is to propose the basis for a digital tool, which helps buyers to assess provider’s trustworthiness by providing a “standardized trustworthiness signal description” and “trust functionalities.” A particular approach is used, wherein different methods are mixed such as a case study, expert interviews, and a quantitative method following the guideline of the design science paradigm. The aim is to propose a useful tool for trustworthiness assessment to enhance e-markets for industrial services.

This chapter presents the e-marketing practices followed by the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India. It explored the owner-managers perceptions of MSMEs regarding their average expenditures, budget allocations, management, policy, sources of information, return on investment and their desire for formal training on e-marketing activities in future. Data were collected from 253 MSME owner-managers through an e-questionnaire. The researchers found that the majority of the MSME owner-managers allocate a monthly budget for e-marketing initiatives, and they have increased it over the past few years. However, the total expenditure on e-marketing activities is between 1% and 10% of their total marketing budget. These businesses are partly or fully outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO), display advertising and referral marketing, whereas other e-marketing activities are managed in-house. Generally, these MSMEs are not measuring the success of their digital marketing efforts. If they do it, they are not doing it in a professional manner. MSMEs were found to be slow in posting content and engaging their followers on social media. Surprisingly, two-third of the MSMEs that participated in this study did not show any desire to pursue courses in digital marketing. In conclusion, this study puts forward key implications to practitioners as well as to the government agencies that are involved in the promotion of information technology among MSMEs.

Customer experience (CE) has been of research interest especially with researchers in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) context. Extensive research has identified the potential of similar studies in Business-to Business (B2B) contexts, yet we have little understanding of what influences a customer's experience in a B2B environment.

This chapter aims to capture the adequacy of efforts to capture the intricacies of CE in a B2B context using input–output measures both in the traditional and modern-day environment. The chapter would provide marketing managers with a clear understanding of how CE is affected in the B2B context. Essentially, it describes the importance of creating a positive CE through the direct interaction of various stakeholders with the company and its brand. This chapter advances the current state of knowledge by analysing the impact of CE on all dimensions of customer journey, creating a differential advantage over time.

Companies are increasingly leveraging digital technologies toward innovation strategies that deliver novel features to customers sequentially through successive new product generations (i.e., successive innovation). Extant literature examining successive innovation is both limited and fragmented across marketing and management literatures. Our goal is to synthesize literature on concepts related to successive innovation (such as versioning and upgrades) to identify the core dimensions of successive innovation and provide a cohesive framework to guide future research in this domain.

Given the equivocality in understanding the conceptual domain of successive innovation, we review and synthesize literature across three disciplinary domains: marketing, management, and information and decision sciences. Based on the emerging patterns from the literature review, we develop a conceptual framework of successive innovation with the aim of moving the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity.

Based on the literature review and synthesis, we identify three core-dimensions that define successive innovation and compare these across digital and physical product realms: coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability.

Our proposed conceptual dimensions of successive innovation, and discussion of differences across physical and digital product domains, offer important directions for future research and a common vocabulary.

As physical and digital successive innovations can differ in coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability, firms need to consider relevant barriers to adoption of successive product generations and select appropriate strategies to promote and communicate successive innovation. Our proposed successive innovation conceptual dimensions help managers comprehend the complexity of arranging such innovation in business and consumer segments.

Our contribution to the emerging literature on successive innovation is threefold. First, by conducting a comprehensive literature review, we integrate insights from different fields of inquiry (i.e., marketing, management, and information and decision sciences). Second, based on the synthesis of the literature, we offer a conceptual framework of successive innovation, which aims to move the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we discuss a set of future research directions to guide academic research efforts.

It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently enjoying a period of fast and stable growth. This is manifested by the growing number of both Internet users and companies which – to an ever-increasing extent – use the Internet as a form of communication (both internal and external), promotion, sales etc. Expenditures on Internet advertising are growing continuously and now constitute more than 25% of all advertising expenditure. A natural consequence of this development is the need for the standardisation and organisation of the world of the Internet. These activities will result in a greater awareness of the benefits which this medium provides, increasing the possibilities of its use, and – most importantly – the opportunity to evaluate the return on investments made on the Internet. Nowadays, it is clear that many companies are striving to increase the quality of their activities on the Internet or to improve the effectiveness of such activities. As a consequence, the number of companies that look for indices which would enable the making of more precise and effective decisions in the scope of online operations is growing.

This chapter is dedicated to the phenomenon of the increasing role of the Internet in business, including the scale of its use by Polish and international companies. We present the most commonly used measures of marketing activities on the Internet and in social media. This group includes the indices which make it possible to determine whether a company actually needs a website. Other measures allow for the improvement in the effectiveness of the activity on the Internet, whereas others specify the costs of activities on the Internet and often serve as the basis for settlements between a company and advertising agencies or companies specialising in website design. It is worth emphasising that the Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned (PESO) model, worked out by Don Bartholomew,¹ is the basis for creation and description of indices concerning social media. This model has gained certain popularity in the social media industry. It does not, however, specify how individual indices should be named and calculated. It maps already existing indices and adapts them to specific levels of marketing communication measurement. All the measures indicated by the author of the model have been grouped into five major areas: exposure, engagement, brand awareness, action and recommendations. This model– similarly to all models of performance measurement – inspired by the sales funnel concept, adjusts certain standard indices and proposals of measurements for specific levels. Additionally, the measures are divided into four types, depending on who the owner of the content is: Paid (P) – refers to all forms of paid content; Owned (O) – all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand; Earned (E) – the contents about a given brand created spontaneously by Internet users; and Shared (S) – the contents shared by Internet users.

The number and breadth of research articles, diversity of topics, and improved quality in international marketing research have all grown rapidly over the past 30 years. Our sample of 26 research journals shows that the number of articles increased by almost 400% between 1970 and 2001, rising from fewer than 50 in 1970 to nearly 200 in 2001, and more than doubled between 1980 and 2001. More important, the quality improved even faster, while the range and diversity of topics expanded at least tenfold. Indiana University was a principal actor in this revolution.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Finding an efficient way for enhancing brand reputation by using social media among customers and business partners has long been the main purpose of every business. However, due to micro and macro changes in the business field, strategies to find a way to improve brand reputation with business partners and customers have altered from transaction marketing to newer approaches such as employing a social media platform. However, not all brands make use of social media to enhance their reputation. The present study uses Apple as an example of the one of the best known brands which does not benefit from social media platforms as to the degree expected.