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The ethical consumption movement is increasingly being supported by mobile web applications that enable consumers to reward ethical companies (and punish unethical ones) with their purchasing decisions. By providing company ethics information to consumers at the point of purchase with the swipe of a barcode, these applications hold the promise of an additional market mechanism for motivating companies to serve the public good. However, the degree that this potential is realized will depend on how widely such applications are adopted and diffused. This paper aims to identify design factors for such applications that theory suggests will enhance their diffusion by increasing the likelihood that the user will adopt the information these applications deliver.

The multi‐level model incorporates dual‐process cognitive theory, social capital theory, and technical design features of the mobile technology‐enabled ethical consumption (MTEC) tool to understand factors that contribute to information adoption. In this way the paper takes a design science approach to the problem of enhancing human and societal benefit.

The findings have identified technical design features for MTEC tools that show promise for maximizing data transparency, source credibility, and information adoption. These features also have the potential to minimize consumers' cost/effort to contribute their purchase (and non‐purchase) decision information to the associated community, increasing the quantity and frequency of such contributions.

Market‐based mechanisms for upholding the public good hold much promise for ensuring the long‐term viability of society and the earth. Hence, the role that IT can play in establishing and supporting them demands rigorous theoretically driven models of design prior to empirical validation. Whereas design science research (DSR) is often focused on solving a business problem, this work helps to expand the domain of DSR to encompass the need to address problems of human benefit and civil society.

Using a document analysis methodology, the study analyzes official policy documents produced by the centralized Israeli Ministry of Education and by the State Comptroller responsible for reviewing the Israeli government's policies and operations. Coordination is assessed using three lenses: coordination among policy plans initiated by different governmental ministries; coordination among policy plans initiated by the Ministry of Education; and coordination within policy plans, referring to the congruence among various components comprising a particular policy.

Following previous studies testifying to the significance of coordination for organizational effectiveness and to the contribution of centralized structures for coordination, the current study attempts to assess whether centralized complex educational systems exhibit coordination among their articulated policy plans.

In spite of the highly centralized nature of Israeli governance, coordination among policy plans articulated by different governmental ministries is limited. This also applies to the coordination found among various educational policy plans or among various components comprising particular policy plans articulated by the Ministry of Education.

While centralized structures produce administrative bottlenecks creating ideal grounds for coordination, it appears that the assumed connection between centralization and coordination may not be applicable to educational systems and that coordination among and within policy plans in complex systems is not a zero-sum game. Implications are further discussed.

My goal is to describe my life in marketing over more than 36 years and to help readers better understand (from my personal perspective) the history of marketing. I also aim to lift the curtain on some aspects of service within the marketing community.

This paper is an autobiographical sketch. It describes some key moments in my career, as well as describing how my most cited articles came to be written. It emphasizes the contextual factors at work in different periods, so readers can better understand how and why my research evolved in certain ways. I aim to convey the nature and variety of career experiences that were (and are) open to marketing academics. I discuss my experiences at the Journal of Marketing and the Marketing Science Institute.

Marketing changed rapidly between 1974 and 2017. Although change can be uncomfortable, I urge marketers to seek exposure to new ideas and practices; they are essential to learning and growth. Unexpected opportunities will come along and an alert individual can learn much from them. My time in industry was a learning experience for me. There are many kinds of interesting and successful careers.

The marketing field advances, not by the work of a single individual, but from the accumulated work of the entire marketing community. Everyone has a role to play. I encourage each individual to look for ways to contribute. I offer thoughts on how to build a research career based on my own experience.

My thoughts may shed some light on the experiences of a woman academic and the globalization of marketing academia between 1974 and 2017.

My hope is that this paper contributes to a better understanding of the history of marketing, when it is considered together with other articles on this topic. It may also be useful to people who are embarking upon a career, as well as those seeking to understand the work of earlier marketing scholars.

Data collected from 202 large and 92 small consumer goods manufacturing firms were analysed to examine the perceptions and experiences of these companies with test marketing as part of their new product development strategy. Seventy six per cent of the large companies and twenty four per cent of the small firms in the study test marketed their new products before full‐scale introduction. Chi‐square analysis indicated a relationship between firm size, type of business/industry, the scope of marketing operations, and whether the firm conducted test marketing or not. Cost, time constraints, and the generic nature of the product were the most prominent reasons cited by all firms for not conducting test marketing. In addition, small firms cited their size as amajor reason they did not engage in test marketing.

After slicing and dicing their way to the '90s, American corporations are finding that job‐cutting is really a double‐edged sword.

The mass media are cultural pipelines through which flow hours of entertainment and information. They represent a part of our culture which critics decry and media specialists praise. They are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. Television (free, cable, or pay) is the subject of attention of three‐year‐olds and Ph.D. candidates alike. Newspapers are perused daily by all classes and conditions of people and their content, ownership patterns, and circulation statistics are studied in journalism classes, high schools, and by worried editors and publishers. Films entertained children in Nickelodeons, raised the spirits of millions during World War II, and now are the subject of so much analysis that words like ‘pan,’ ‘take,’ and ‘track’ have taken on new meaning in the vocabulary of most ordinary citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers associated with the adoption and use of mobile sales force automation (SFA) systems from a salesperson’s perspective.

A qualitative investigation of two business-to-business companies was conducted. Data collected from ten semi-structured interviews with directors or sales managers were analyzed to understand the main barriers to SFA system adoption.

The study confirms the existence of three barriers (customer knowledge, quality of information and the characteristics of mobile devices) to a mobile SFA system use and identifies two additional barriers: lack of time and optimization issues.

The explorative nature of the study and the qualitative method employed limit the generalizability of the results. The propositions could be further validated and tested with a wider population.

Organizations wishing to speed the adoption of a mobile SFA system should evaluate the importance and significance of the five identified barriers to adoption, and plan how to overcome them. It is important for the providers of the mobile SFA systems to focus on developing systems that can exploit the different characteristics of each channel and, in parallel, overcome the inherent limitations of any single channel. The content of an SFA system should be customizable for each type of mobile device.

Ever increasing mobility has led to a rise in the use of smartphones and tablet PCs (tablets) in business and the consequent growth in the use of SFA systems. Although SFA systems have been studied for roughly 30 years, little is known of the impact of newly developed mobile devices on sales management and sales personnel.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate marketing practices in professional service firms (PSFs). PSFs' marketing practices are not well understood, despite their increasing importance to economies worldwide and recognition of their unique characteristics and the marketing challenges they face. The study also examined whether PSF performance outcomes is better modeled through a competency approach suggested by the resource‐based view, or through the extent of use (practices) approach.

Empirical data were collected from professional service providers through an online survey of senior professional service providers across a range of services, including law, engineering, accounting and finance and management consultancy.

Results show interaction marketing was the most common PSF practice and the combination of extent of use and competency, rather than extent of use alone, is a better predictor of firm performance. The results also demonstrate the relevance of the plurality of practices.

The study shows that transaction marketing and database marketing are particularly necessary for financial and market performance, while both interaction marketing and database marketing particularly underpin customer performance. All practices need to be conducted extensively and well for optimum outcomes. The study is cross‐sectional in nature and does not enable a judgment about causal inferences; rather, relationships between constructs are presented.

Professional service providers should focus on competency of practice, as well as extent of practice. However, not all professional service providers do this. Importantly, having a customer service focus is not sufficient to achieve positive market and financial outcomes.

The results presented in the paper have important implications for researchers when modeling and measuring marketing practices and for professional service managers when undertaking marketing activities.

This paper aims to automate the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model as an enabler for process‐oriented supply chain business intelligence.

The hypothesis is the following: SCOR model automation is possible using data that is directly extracted from integrated enterprise systems. To test the hypothesis, an alignment product that allows the SCOR model to be automated with information that is directly extracted from the Oracle E‐Business Suite was developed.

In order to achieve the full benefits from the SCOR model, effective business process management and the SCOR key performance indicators (KPIs) must be implemented and used. Unless data collection to support KPI construction is automated, it is difficult to institutionalize the SCOR model as a measurement and benchmarking framework. We have demonstrated that automated support for KPIs is feasible and achievable.

The E‐Business Suite is a single enterprise solution, but we assert that the same procedures could be followed with other enterprise solutions or even applied in a legacy system environment.

The developed solution described in the paper can immediately be applied to the design, development, and deployment of corporate performance management systems.

This paper considers an instance of non‐verbal graphic communication from the legend of Theseus, in terms of information theory. The efficient cause of a failure in communication is regarded as a selection error and the formal cause as the absence of redundancy from the signals (a binary contrast between a black and a white sail) for transmission. Two considerations are then introduced. First, why should such a system of signalling have been succeeded by a graphic communication system, in alphabetic written language, so strongly marked by its redundancy? Second, why has information theory been so successful in describing systems for signal transmission but far less productive for modelling human‐to‐human communication, at the level of meaning or of the effects of messages on recipients? The legend is read historically, adopting specific insights, a method of interpretation, and a historical schema from Vico. The binary code used for the signal transmission is located as a rare but significant transitional form, mediating between heroic emblems and written language. For alphabetic written language, a link to the sounds of oral utterance replaces the connection to the mental states of the human information source and destination. It is also suggested that redundancy was deliberately introduced to counteract the effects of selection errors and noise. With regard to information theory, it is suggested that conformity with necessary conditions for signal transmission, which may include the introduction of redundancy, cannot be expected to yield insights into communication, at the level of meaning or the effects of messages.