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Technological advancements and deregulation in the transportation and communications industries have opened a host of new opportunities for nearly any business to improve its techniques for delivering products and services to customers. As a result, logistics, or the delivery of goods, is moving to the forefront as a way to reap dramatic profits.

Changes in market conditions and trends often point to the need for changes in the marketing approaches being used. Current market trends such as fierce competition and increasingly demanding customers bring into glaring focus the shortcomings of marketing approaches and vehicles developed in and for earlier times. Corporations are being forced to re‐examine and redefine their marketplace. The need for innovative ways of reaching the customers has never been greater. Such changes call for the development and use of newer sales and marketing tools. Call centers belong to a new breed of potent technology‐driven business tools that evolved in direct response to the changes in today’s business environment. Being rooted in a technological foundation, call centers have superior attributes. They offer more flexibility and simultaneously lower the costs of meeting customer needs. They bring businesses much closer to their customers by establishing a two‐way interactive link with the marketplace. Compared to traditional marketing approaches call centers are designed and developed for the contemporary business environment. They are an ideal tool for today’s rapidly changing global markets.

Despite the importance of developing sales personnel to become sales managers, virtually no attention has been given to this topic in the sales management literature. This paper presents a model that sales executives can use in developing potential sales managers. Valuable sales management skills are identified and methods for providing skill development are offered.

One of the most fundamental and dramatic changes since World War II in the conduct of strategic war has been the intense compression of time. Whereas in World War II it took the United States several years to train, transport, and launch major forces against an enemy, the present engagement time for a massive nuclear exchange of intercontinental missiles between the United States and the U.S.S.R. is fifteen minutes. Approximately half of that time would elapse before detection and communication reaches the national command center (the President), leaving seven or eight minutes for national decision and reaction. This highly centralized decision and reaction process has been among the major changes since World War II in our conduct of strategic warfare. It is based on the gathering together of information, on a real‐time basis, into a national command center where it can be evaluated and used by strategic decisionmakers.

The aftermath of the 1990 Middle East war and the region′s subsequent exposure to Western technologies and lifestyles has contributed to an accelerated opening up of Arabic culture to Western ideas. Often relegated to a secondary role in the Arab culture, changing market conditions have helped increase the importance of many marketing functions and, in particular, personal selling. Given the increased importance of personal selling in a high context culture, such as that of Saudi Arabia, the development of a qualified salesforce should significantly improve a firm′s competitive position. This exploratory study examined the extent to which sales training philosophies and practices differ between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Findings reveal the limited extent of Saudi sales training programmes and offer insight into the future development of marketing and sales training in this Arab culture as well as implications for both Arab and foreign businesses.

Online brand is becoming a popular and major gateway for consumers for booking various services specifically when they travel for several purposes. The present study aims to explore whether exposure to two separate yet similar modes of communication intervene consumer's brand trust and their subsequent loyalty intention toward the brand. The study further aims to investigate whether consumer's price consciousness has any influence on association between brand trust and brand loyalty in the process of decision -making.

The present study follows a different approach to data collection. The data have been retrieved from online brand (Oyo) page on Facebook through Google Form application. In all, 289 useable responses were retrieved from the travelers aged between 18 and 30. Structural equation modeling using SPSS 25.0 and Amos 26.0 has been applied to examine the effects of brand communication and online reviews on brand loyalty through brand trust.

Empirical evidence supports that even after having strong brand communication, online reviews play a crucial role in consumer's brand loyalty through brand trust. The study further reveals that price consciousness acts as a significant moderator in the relationship between consumer's brand trust and brand loyalty.

The current research contributes to the online brand and marketing knowledge by empirically showing the pertinence of consumer–brand relationship in an online brand context through a parsimonious model by examining how the two distinct mechanisms of communication influences consumer brand trust and loyalty intention.

The parsimonious framework of consumer–brand relationship adds to explicating the dual marketing challenges of communication and to draw a positive consumer response (i.e. consumer brand loyalty). The study attempts to examine the impact of two distinct yet identical modes of communication which facilitate shaping consumer brand trust that reinforce the strategic value of the circumstance and equips it with solid theoretical structure within an endeavor of the strategic significance of online brand managers.

Offers a parsimonious conceptual framework to provide a more systematic assessment of cross‐cultural business gift practices. Uses the high and low context classification of cultures to compare gift giving and to provide factors explaining possible differences. Then offers research propositions to guide future research and to assist international business managers when making gift‐giving decisions. Also provides a manager′s checklist to guide cross‐cultural gift‐giving decisions.

This study aims to address how and why do formal key account management (KAM) programmes hinder effective KAM management, and how can the problems of formalization in KAM be overcome. Recent empirical studies have reported an unexpected negative relationship between KAM formalization and performance.

An 18-month (340 days) ethnographic investigation was undertaken in the UK-based subsidiary of a major US sports goods manufacturer. This ethnographic evidence was triangulated with 113 in-depth interviews.

This study identifies how and why managerial reflexivity allows a more effectively combining of formal and post-bureaucratic KAM practices. While formal KAM programmes provide a means to initiate, implement and control KAM, they have an unintended consequence of increasing organizational bureaucracy, which may in the long-run hinder the KAM effectiveness. Heightened reflexivity, including “wayfinding”, is identified as a means to overcome many of these challenges, allowing for reflexively combining formal with post-bureaucratic KAM practices.

The thesis of this paper starts a new line of reflexive KAM research, which draws theoretical influences from the post-bureaucratic turn in management studies.

This study seeks to increase KAM implementation success rates and long-term effectiveness of KAM by conceptualizing the new possibilities offered by reflexive KAM. This study demonstrates how reflexive skills (conceptualized as “KAM wayfinding”) can be deployed during KAM implementation and for its continual improvement. Further, the study identifies how KAM programmes can be used to train organizational learning regarding KAM. Furthermore, this study identifies how and why post-bureaucratic KAM can offer additional benefits after an organization has learned key KAM capabilities.

A new line of enquiry is identified: the reflexive-turn in KAM. This theoretical position allows us to identify existing weakness in the extant KAM literature, and to show a practical means to improve the effectiveness of KAM. This concerns, in particular, the importance of managerial reflexivity and KAM wayfinding as a means to balance the strengths and weaknesses of formal and post-bureaucratic KAM.

Posits that, by specifically examining price‐value relationship, buyers can avoid many of the problems inherent in comparing products/suppliers in terms of net delivered price. Provides background on economic value pricing, along with a detailed discussion of the steps and considerations for buyer‐side application to supplier price analysis and its managerial implications.

The planning of distribution as both system ana process is examined in theory and in relation to corporate practice in Greece.