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The purpose of this paper is to use the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model to evaluate the incremental performance of an eChannel addition.

Data were collected from 53 Taiwan financial services firms. In total, 33 of them introduced their online services, whereas the other 20 firms did not introduce their online services during the period under examination.

The research findings show that firm asset values increase following eChannel additions. Thus, eChannel additions enhance firm financial performance. A further analysis comparing the performance between firms with and without eChannel additions also shows that firms with eChannel additions have higher asset value growth rates, which further validates the capacity of eChannel additions to enhance financial performance.

Managers and shareholders in firms making eChannel additions are not required to be concerned regarding stock price volatility, and managers in firms without any eChannel investment could use eChannels to enhance their stock price and seize future opportunities. Using eChannel is a valid approach for firms to provide enhanced services to current customers, access new markets, and extend market coverage, thus enhancing overall financial performance. Investors could confide those firms implementing eChannel additions.

Studies investigating whether eChannel additions enhance firm financial performance are scant. No study has evaluated performance from a long-term perspective or from a volatility aspect (both are important considerations in eChannel performance evaluation). The research represents a pioneering work that empirically investigates these issues.

After a massive storm hit the northern Illinois service area of electric utility Commonwealth Edison on July 11, 2011, more than 900,000 customers were left without power during a hot, humid summer. ComEd crews and reinforcements from more than a dozen other states worked for days afterward to restore service. Meanwhile, the company's months-old social media strategy faced its first major test. The eChannels social media team, part of ComEd's customer operations division, worked around the clock to respond to posts from customers on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. At a time when the company faced public debate and criticism over its plan to raise electricity rates, in part to invest in smart-grid upgrades, engaging directly through social media was a way to strengthen relationships with customers and the general public, consistent with an important corporate goal: “Keep the lights on and information flowing.”

After discussing the case, students will:

• Develop an appreciation for the role social media can play in shaping a company's reputation

• Understand how companies can use social media to engage customers directly in order to protect their reputations

• Understand the role these interactions with customers can play during a crisis situation

• Recognize the added reputational risk when a company's core business is directly impacted by a natural disaster

Develop an appreciation for the role social media can play in shaping a company's reputation

Understand how companies can use social media to engage customers directly in order to protect their reputations

Understand the role these interactions with customers can play during a crisis situation

Recognize the added reputational risk when a company's core business is directly impacted by a natural disaster

The role of channels and their management in the eBusiness era is becoming increasingly important to customer relationship management. Traditional use of the application portfolio approach has been concerned with providing an appropriate basis for making investment decisions about IT applications for the firm. This paper argues that there is a gap between the established IS portfolio application theory and the requirements to support management investment decisions about eBusiness applications; Therefore, the paper proposes a channel benefits portfolio (CBP) approach to inform managers' channel investment decisions concerning business‐to‐customer channel interface. The suggested approach provides a conceptual framework and means to facilitate the alignment of the firm's portfolio with their customers' portfolio. The paper reports exploratory findings regarding customer channel preference and customer channel choice behaviour in the information search and purchasing stages during the customer decision‐making process on the basis of the CBP.

This study aims to provide insights into glocalisation of international channels of distribution. The study also seeks to identify the key principles and patterns of glocalisation in general.

The authors utilise the single case study approach to study glocalisation in international channels of distribution by conducting in‐depth interviews with the firm's senior executives.

Results reveal that the firm employs glocal channels of distribution strategies. The study specifically identifies two types of glocalisation: inter‐decision and intra‐decision, and it is found that the firm follows a combination of both. The findings also suggest that the decision on how to glocalise channel strategies is based upon the firm's global practices as well as several local conditions specific to individual markets.

The study concludes that there is no uniform formula to pursue glocalisation. Firms may choose to pursue inter‐decision or intra‐decision glocalisation, or a combination of both. However, the decision should be based on a careful assessment of the firm's global philosophy, the channel decision involved, and ground realities in each market.

The study shows how glocalisation can be applied to international channel strategies. The study fills the gap in prior literature by throwing light on the lesser understood “global dimension” of a glocal strategy. The study may be the first to identify different types of glocal strategies and thus offers relevant insights into the concept of glocalisation. The study also adds to the limited knowledge on practicable application of glocalisation among both academics and practitioners.

A key objective of the 5th Annual Pharmaceutical Congress “Marketing ROI for Pharma” conference was to illustrate how in the midst of a very turbulent environment, and with higher demand for pharmaceutical marketers to deliver bigger profits from increasingly smaller promotional budgets, there are a few critical decision areas that, if addressed appropriately, can help to deliver better return on investment (ROI). This commentary paper aims to provide a summary of what was discussed.

Given access to the conference presenters' original materials, the authors condensed the presentations into a summary article with reference to some recent academic work in the area.

The article summarises the presentations of a number of European pharmaceutical industry practitioners, healthcare professionals and government policy personnel in their assessments of the turbulent European pharmaceutical industry environment and the challenges associated with optimising ROI from promotional spending.

The entire paper summarises recent industry practice in Europe regarding how to optimise pharmaceutical ROI with respect to marketing activities and provides actual examples of how to do this.

Primarily targeting pharmaceutical industry practitioners, this paper provides a timely and thorough resource for those industry personnel charged with the mission of maximizing pharmaceutical marketing ROI.

This study aims to provide probable future developments in the form of holistic scenarios for business negotiations. In recent years, negotiation research did not put a lot of emphasis on external changes. Consequently, current challenges and trends are scarcely integrated, making it difficult to support negotiation practice perspectively.

This paper applies the structured, multi-method approach of scenario analysis. To examine the future space of negotiations, this combines qualitative and quantitative measures to base our analysis on negotiation experts’ assessments, estimations and visions of the negotiation future.

The results comprise an overview of five negotiation scenarios in the year 2030 and of their individual drivers. The five revealed scenarios are: digital intelligence, business as usual, powerful network – the route to collaboration, powerful network – the route to predominance and system crash.

The scenario analysis is a suitable approach that enables to relate various factors of the negotiation environment to negotiations themselves and allows an examination of future changes in buyer–seller negotiations and the creation of possible future scenarios. The identified scenarios provide an orientation for business decisions in the field of negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to document the development path of a specific concept during its first 20 years.

Evidence was extracted of the citation-counts of relevant articles, uses of the term in other articles that do not cite the original articles, and uses of terms with similar meanings. Examination of the data took into account insights from epidemiology, memetics and diffusion of innovations theory.

The concept has had insufficient impact to overcome the weaknesses in theory and practice that it was intended to address. It has lacked champions. It has proven to be sufficiently fit to survive, but not to flourish.

Google Scholar has a wide catchment area, and hence provides a basis for tracking the path of development of new ideas. However, the tools remain fairly blunt, and do not, for example, enable efficient extraction of patterns of citation over time, or the nature of the uses made of terms by the citing articles.

Neologisms take on a life of their own, losing the associations that they were intended to have with other ideas, and shedding their embedment in a body of theory. For a new term to successfully project a meme, its proponent must enthuse a critical mass of early adopters to apply it, and to generate a further round of adopters.

Concepts are seldom tracked over time. This paper shows that a new term and its associated body of theory require more than publications in top-level journals if they are to have significant impacts on academic research and industry practice.

Both online and brick and mortar retailers have invested heavily in developing omni-channel service offerings. Though seen as a competitive necessity, these omni-channel service offerings increase costs and complexities. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of strategies involving bundles of omni-channel services related to order fulfillment and returns management on retailer performance.

Archival data were obtained for 152 retailers and analyzed using ordinary least squares regression. Robustness tests using an alternative dependent variable and a model-based classification strategy corroborate our findings.

Retailers offering full sets of high integration omni-channel services (buy online pick up in store, ship from store and in-store returns) have better performance (e.g. sales, growth and competitive position) and web sales than retailers that offer only a partial mix of these high integration services. Retailers offering a partial bundle of high integration services, in turn, have better performance and web sales than retailers that offer none of these services.

The research extends work that has examined the performance effects of omni-channel services on individual retailers. Our results indicate retailers benefit the most when offering a full set of high integration omni-channel services, suggesting retailers who have only adopted a subset of these services could improve performance through broader adoption of services. The results further indicate partial adoption of high integration services is better than no adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to test the frequency of the use of e-tourism by consumers/internet users of various European Union member states and to identify the socio-economic variables that determine this frequency.

The secondary data regarding the use of e-tourism services in 28 European Union member states were used for analysis. Relationships between variables and the frequency of the use of e-tourism services by consumers in 28 countries in Europe were analyzed. For each of the 32 benchmarked countries, a representative sample of internet users was surveyed via local online panels. Also CATI approach was used in one country.

The authors of this study identify a statistically significant relationship between the frequency of the use of e-tourism by internet users and their country of origin. Statistically significant relationships between the frequency of using e-tourism and socio-economic variables, such as age, sex, education level, occupation, and professional position, are also identified.

The findings of this study can provide tour operators with useful suggestions on how to extend the utility of internet (e-commerce) in order to develop their business, get more customers and improve their profitability. Simultaneously, these results may contribute to enhancing competitiveness of the whole European Union and increasing its gross domestic product.

With the worldwide rapid growth of internet (and e-commerce) many benefits can be reach by tourism sector especially in the growing competition. The paper is unique because it shows data collected from almost 25,000 respondents and it presents a comparison of the use of e-tourism among citizens of 28 European Union member states.