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The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential of an organisational orientation, namely the electronic marketing orientation (EMO) to address implementation issues in business-to-business (B2B) social media implementation. Previous research has demonstrated differences between B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing.

The paper draws on existing B2B marketing, social media and organisational orientation literature, both academic and practitioner. This facilitates the development of a conceptual model and research proposition as a basis of further research into addressing contemporary barriers to B2B social media implementation.

The paper contends that each of the four components of the EMO addresses different implementation issues faced in implementing social media and, more specifically, the unique issues faced by B2B marketers.

The paper is conceptual in nature; however, it provides directions for future empirical research.

The differences in promotional and sales channels and messages required in B2B context are addressed in the research propositions. The paper highlights implementation challenges and how a particular organisational orientation can facilitate the decision-making in dealing with them.

The paper provides a unique theoretical contribution by introducing the EMO conceptual model in a specific context of B2B social media marketing.

At present no frameworks exist for services marketers to incorporate social media (SM) within marketing communications planning. The majority of integrated marketing communications (IMC) frameworks were developed prior to the development of the widespread use of digital and SM for information seeking, sales and service. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this issue for services marketers specifically as they differ from FMCG, industrial and durable marketers in terms of marketing messages, branding, media and channels. Furthermore, as they are less reliant on outsourced sale channels they have more potential than other industries to integrate social and digital media to build awareness, brands and sales.

Depth interviews were conducted with eight senior services marketing executives to identify the impact of SM on marketing communications planning, implementation and measurement.

The findings revealed that the unique characteristics of SM (such as interactivity and individualisation, integration of communication and distribution channels, immediacy and information collection) impact traditional marketing communications frameworks. These impacts manifested in 12 modifications specific to services and SM to traditional generic IMC frameworks encompassed by the themes of reach, service channel, word-of-mouth advocacy, consumer generated messages, listening and behavioural measurement.

The rapidly evolving nature of SM means senior services marketers need to educate organisational stakeholders regarding implementation issues, which may be a barrier to effective integration of SM within marketing communications.

With digital marketing communications budgets reaching 30 per cent within some organisations, it is timely to put forward a marketing communication decision-making framework that first incorporates SM and second is suitable for services marketers.

The purpose of this study was to identify those factors that are supposed to be the most important in terms of small business success in tourism industry. The empirical data is collected within one region in Finland. The respondents were asked to evaluate the importance of the given factors for the firm's success and how highly the respondent evaluated the company's expertise in each factor in their operations. Questionnaires were sent by mail to a total of 214 tourism businesses. The final response rate was 43% (92 businesses). According to the analysis of the data, the respondents emphasise the importance of customer orientation, good skills in leadership, internal marketing and a good reputation of the firm and the product. The impact of external advice (incubators, consultants, research organisations) was evaluated as the least important factor of success. So, market orientation seems to play a key role in the performance of small and micro tourism firms. Customer orientation is also well mastered according to the businesses. The greatest development needs would be in the areas of price and accessibility, as well as in customer orientation. The results of this study indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in the views held by slowly or fast growing tourism businesses regarding the importance of the success factors. The same factors are considered important and less important in both slowly and fast growing businesses. Neither were there any statistically significant differences in these businesses as to the expertise in these success factors.

One of the factors that determines the success of marketing a product is a distribution strategy. Several factors affect distribution such as the number of products, the nature of the products, the size of the area, transportation facilities, communication facilities, company factors, cost factors, and market conditions. The authors realized the absence of research on distribution management on a product such as the 3-kg liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) aimed at reaching the poor in Indonesia. The use of LPG as fuel is considered relatively cleaner because pollution is less when compared to kerosene fuel. This research was conducted in Salatiga, a small town in the province of Central Java, Indonesia. This research applied descriptive statistics in the form of the distribution frequency and crosstabs, as well as multiple regression. This research revealed that the 3-kg LPG distribution is very intensive, spread in almost all places including shops or stalls in both urban and rural areas. The choice of using 3-kg LPG tubes is not only because the price is low and is subsidized by the government but also because of the custom that has been instilled by the government when encouraging people to convert kerosene to LPG.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a full‐scale testing of the role of marketing and its relevance in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The objective is to present the results of a rigorous assessment of a new model of marketing in SMEs.

A positivist approach relied on the use of the hypothetico‐deductive method to produce the theoretical model. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied to investigate the model. This paper reports on a large‐scale questionnaire survey, follow‐up interviews with SMEs owner‐managers and the use of published accounts to show how companies have performed during this study.

The role and relevance model of marketing in SMEs has been thoroughly investigated and tested. The model offers a straightforward way of diagnosing the situation within an SME. The simplicity of the model allows for a clearer understanding of what is often a complex and messy situation within these companies and their business environment. Some findings suggest a positive link between a company's financial performance and its approach to marketing within the model.

The paper concludes that the model goes a long way to explaining the behaviour of SMEs with regard to marketing. The model appears to be viable and could be used to analyse and diagnose the situation regarding marketing within SMEs.

The paper offers a unique theoretical and practical insight into the issue of marketing in SMEs.

Machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly important in enabling business-to-business (B2B) companies to offer personalized services to business customers. On the other hand, humans play a critical role in dealing with uncertain situations and the relationship-building aspects of a B2B business. Most existing studies advocating human-ML augmentation simply posit the concept without providing a detailed view of augmentation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how human involvement can practically augment ML capabilities to develop a personalized information system (PIS) for business customers.

The authors developed a research framework to create an integrated human-ML PIS for business customers. The PIS was then implemented in the energy sector. Next, the accuracy of the PIS was evaluated using customer feedback. To this end, precision, recall and F1 evaluation metrics were used.

The computed figures of precision, recall and F1 (respectively, 0.73, 0.72 and 0.72) were all above 0.5; thus, the accuracy of the model was confirmed. Finally, the study presents the research model that illustrates how human involvement can augment ML capabilities in different stages of creating the PIS including the business/market understanding, data understanding, data collection and preparation, model creation and deployment and model evaluation phases.

This paper offers novel insight into the less-known phenomenon of human-ML augmentation for marketing purposes. Furthermore, the study contributes to the B2B personalization literature by elaborating on how human experts can augment ML computing power to create a PIS for business customers.