Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study brand embedded licensing (technology licensing and brand licensing combined) and its theoretical difference from standard licensing (technology licensing only). The following research questions are asked: What makes embedded licensing theoretically different from standard licensing, and what determines a licensor's decision to select brand embedded licensing over standard licensing?

This paper compares brand embedded licensing to standard licensing and argues that brand embedded licensing is a quasi‐hierarchical organizational structure, while standard licensing is a market‐based structure. Brand embeddedness in licensing serves as a credible commitment from the licensor and induces the licensee to invest sufficiently in complementary assets. Drawing on the transaction cost perspective, the determinants of embedded licensing are examined.

Embedded licensing is determined by both the licensee's characteristics and the licensor's brand characteristics. The licensor is more likely to utilize embedded licensing or the licensee is more willing to demand embedded licensing when: the licensee's specific complementary investment is high; the licensee's complementary capacity is high; the market entry is at a late stage; the licensor uses separate branding; the extent of product differentiation is high; and the stage of brand globalization is advanced. A strong intellectual property rights regime and a fast pace of technology change enhance the effects of these six determining factors on the licensor's selection of embedded licensing.

This paper challenges the classical view that licensing is a market‐based relationship by revealing that embedded licensing is a quasi‐hierarchical organizational structure.

As specialisation takes root in human communities, the economics of scale and of diversity come into play. Scale leads to product markets, specialised firms, channels, and to industries. Diversity generates peasant markets, shopping malls, and business eco‐systems. These outcomes are all examples of marketing systems, and are typical of the patterns that emerge, grow, adapt and evolve in complex transaction flows. Marketing systems are multi‐level, path dependent, dynamic systems, embedded within a social matrix, and interacting with institutional and knowledge environments. The purpose of this paper is to outline a number of propositions that might serve as a basis for a theory of marketing systems.

The paper draws on historical research into the evolution of exchange and on examples of markets and exchange practices from marketing, anthropology, sociology, and economics. It utilises results from complex adaptive systems theory, from the networks and markets literatures, and from ecology, to formulate a series of propositions that identify properties believed to be common to all marketing systems.

Marketing systems are identified and categorized as emergent patterns in flows of transactions. In total, 12 foundational propositions are suggested. The propositions are complementary to those suggested by S‐D logic.

This paper offers a fresh approach to the study of marketing systems, developing relevant theory. Marketing systems link micro choices with macro outcomes, with implications ranging from disaster recovery to distributive justice and QOL outcomes.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the complexity of buyer-seller relationships in emerging markets and called for a better understanding of the cultural norms shaping such relationships. This paper aims to draw on social capital theory to explore the role of networks and relational norms, such as wasta, in Arab culture on consumer relational behaviors. The Arab market constitutes a significant economy and social networks and relational norms are of significant value in Arab culture.

A qualitative approach was used to address the research questions. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 male and female consumers across Lebanon over a four-month period.

Social networks are heavily used in relational behaviors to achieve four types of goals, namely, self-serving goals, unity goals and equality goals and relationship maintenance goals. In fulfilling these goals consumers create economies of favors that aim at the using and maintenance of communal bonds.

This study was conducted in one geographical context. While Lebanon shares many of its characteristics with other Arab countries, future research should aim at exploring the influence of social networks in other Arab and emerging market contexts.

Consumers have different motivations between formal and informal markets. The research suggests that small sellers in highly embedded markets need to use their social networks and to make their stories authentic and known within their communities to facilitate emotional connections with consumers.

Emerging markets offer opportunities to extend our understanding of marketing theory and practice. This research provides a richer understanding of Arab consumers and suggests that wasta relationships play a role in consumptive decisions and not just in business negotiations. Wasta, as a cultural form of cultural capital, is heavily used in consumption as a coping mechanism to overcome market inefficiencies.

Few studies have conceptualized how companies can build and nurture international dynamic marketing capabilities (IDMCs) by implementing growth hacking strategies. This paper conceptualizes growth hacking, a managerial-born process to embed a data-driven mind-set in marketing decision-making that combines big-data analysis and continuous learning, allowing companies to adapt their dynamic capabilities to the ever-shifting international competitive arenas.

Given the scarcity of studies on growth hacking, this paper conceptualizes this managerial-born concept through the double theoretical lenses of IDMCs and information technology (IT) literature.

The authors put forward research propositions concerning the four phases of growth hacking and the related capabilities and routines developed by companies to deal with international markets. Additional novel propositions are also developed based on the three critical dimensions of growth hacking: big data analytics, digital marketing and coding and automation.

Lack of prior conceptualization as well as the scant literature makes this study liable to some limitations. However, the propositions developed should encourage researchers to develop both empirical and theoretical studies on this managerial-born concept.

This study develops a detailed compendium for managers who want to implement growth hacking within their companies but have failed to identify the necessary capabilities and resources.

The study presents a theoretical approach and develops a set of propositions on a novel phenomenon, observed mainly in managerial practice. Hence, this study could stimulate researchers to deepen the phenomenon and empirically validate the propositions.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Embeddedness has gained prominence in entrepreneurship studies. However, the notion that the embeddedness metaphor relates to “market” structures prevails in studies in the area. Entrepreneurship scholars still know little about whether entrepreneurs are eventually embedded in other structures whose relationships go beyond the restricted dimension of the interested actor’s assumption. This study aims to propose investigating the social structures in which a specific type of entrepreneurship, the religious one, is embedded.

The research was qualitative, using interviews as an evidence collection instrument. A total of 17 entrepreneur-pastors responsible for business churches in Brazil and eight parishioners took part in the study.

Religious entrepreneurs are embedded in market structures, corroborating a perspective that associates embeddedness with the utilitarian notion. At the same time, entrepreneurs are embedded in two other social structures: reciprocity and redistribution.

This article emphasizes the relevance of going beyond the predominant perspective associated with the utilitarian and rationalized understanding of embeddedness in relationship networks.

This study makes essential contributions. Initially, it attests to the utilitarian perspective of Granovetter’s embeddedness while suggesting incorporating two other dimensions into the metaphor. By highlighting this, this article stresses the need to reinterpret the metaphor of embeddedness and how entrepreneurship scholars use it. Further, by emphasizing the need to consider embeddedness in networks beyond its still utilitarian perspective, this paper highlights unexplored opportunities for entrepreneurship scholars.

This paper aims to conceptualise and characterise brand systems and outline propositions and research avenues to advance the systems’ view of branding.

A conceptual synthesis approach is adopted to integrate the extant branding research perspectives. The conceptual framework is grounded in the theoretical foundation of marketing systems theory.

The conceptual framework delineates brand inputs, throughputs, outcomes and feedback effects within a brand system. It configures the complexity and dynamics of brand value formation among brand actors within the branding environment.

This paper contributes to systems thinking in branding and brand value co-creation research. It extends marketing systems theory into the branding context and provides research directions for exploring the structural and functional configurations, cause–consequence processes and outcome concerns of brand value formation.

This conceptual framework informs brand development, management and regulation at a macro level. Managers can apply the brand system concept to identify and manage conflicting expectations of brand actors and alleviate adverse brand outcomes such as negative brand externalities, enhancing overall brand system health and societal value.

This research expands the scope of brand actor agency and identifies the likelihood of disproportionate brand outcomes. It provides methodological guidelines for analysis and intervention in brand systems.

This study endeavors to decode the propensity for entrepreneurial action by addressing the perceptions of feasibility and desirability stemming from entrepreneurs' and non-entrepreneurs’ appraisal of holding marketing capabilities; complemented by the direct and indirect effects of market stakeholders' support, assessed as bridging or buffering the entrepreneurial action.

Three groups were formed from a random sample of 1,957 Canadian (from Quebec) respondents to an online questionnaire: non-entrepreneurs with low entrepreneurial intentions, non-entrepreneurs with high entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurs with high entrepreneurial intentions.

The analyses revealed salient effects of perceptions of feasibility and desirability, coupled with appraisals of possessing marketing capabilities, on entrepreneurial propensity; and their strengthened relations when obtaining stakeholders' support. Overall, the results suggest that perceived market feasibility and market desirability are prominent factors in differentiating between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial action, and the type and function of stakeholders' support are prominent in differentiating between intentions.

Practical implications include facilitating the transmission of marketing knowledge to novice entrepreneurs through higher education and the ecosystem.

The authors show that perceptions of feasibility and desirability are particularly dependent on the entrepreneur's perceived marketing capabilities and perceptions of entrepreneurial ecosystem supportiveness. This study thus captures a fuller range of the intentions–action relationship by gauging the unidimensional approach to entrepreneurial action through intertwining attributes at the individual and market levels. It takes a new look at feasibility and desirability through marketing capabilities; and offers a more robust classification of stakeholders' support—institution/people, bridging/buffering. Practical implications include facilitating the transmission of marketing knowledge to novice entrepreneurs through higher education and the ecosystem.

The authors assess the informativeness for stock markets of proven reserves of oil and gas, and embedded CO₂ in those reserves.

Based on a two-step regression approach, the authors attempt to test the relationship between proven reserves, CO₂ embedded in those reserves and the stock market value controlling for the selection bias (i.e. the decision of managers to disclose environmental information about embedded CO₂).

Results, based on a sample of the US and Canadian firms are the following. Proven reserves increase the firm’s value, while embedded CO₂ reduces the stock market value substantially. Furthermore, the decision of managers to disclose information about embedded CO₂ is positively related to analyst following, share price volatility, firm size, and institutional ownership.

The current study assesses the long-term incidence of embedded CO₂ (in oil and gas proven reserves) on firms’ stock market value, while most studies are focusing on yearly CO₂ emissions.