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Shopper marketing describes the planning and execution of all marketing activities that influence a shopper along – and beyond – the path-to-purchase, from shopping trigger to purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation stages. Shopper marketing practices at manufacturers and retailers are growing at a tremendous pace and a rising portion of marketing budgets are now devoted to shopper marketing. The first phase of shopper marketing research and practice, Shopper Marketing 1.0, addressed interesting issues, primarily relating to in-store marketing. In the next phase, Shopper Marketing 2.0, will significantly extend to out-of-store marketing, including online and mobile marketing, resulting in an integrated practice. In this new environment, to formulate and execute effective shopper marketing strategies, managers need to better understand the complete picture of how online, offline, mobile and in-store marketing influence shoppers in the path-to-purchase-and-beyond cycle. In this chapter, we present the evolution of shopper marketing, summarize key learnings, outline important issues, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of Shopper Marketing 2.0.

A customer's journey of searching for a product or service, evaluating it, purchasing it, using it, recommending it, rebuying it or rejecting it is unique in itself. Organisations always have dreamt of getting inside the customers' minds and trying to understand what's happening inside at each of these steps. This chapter explains the customer journey concept and the analysis of the various components of the customer journey. We highlight that the firms need to understand the customer journeys and the multiple touchpoints they interact with to create a worthwhile customer experience. The chapter lists out the various touchpoints, including social/external touchpoints, customer-owned touchpoints, partner-owned touchpoints and brand-owned touchpoints. We discuss three frameworks that can be used by a firm to understand design a customer journey. These frameworks include AIDA (awareness, interest, desire and action), MAI (measure, analyse and improve) and journey maps. The chapter recommends the various steps which a firm can use to create a journey map. In the end, we create a linkage between the customer journey and business transformation. The chapter builds a case for the application of customer journey management by pointing out that it is a complex phenomenon, and the firms should use a structured approach to design and manage the customer journey.

After pioneering, but insular, work on the conceptualization and measurement of customer value in business markets undertaken in the 80s and 90s, interest in this topic is substantial since the beginning of this decade. Despite this recent interest, marketing scholars concur that value in business markets is still an under-researched subject. This contribution to the debate is threefold. The paper first proposes an own model of customer value conceptualization in business markets; based on several rounds of testing this theoretically grounded model in managerial practice indications exist to conclude that this model may offer benefits over current models.

Secondly, the paper provides a comprehensive survey of pricing approaches in industrial markets. The paper integrates this literature overview with own empirical findings. Concurrently the paper summarizes extant research on the link between pricing approach and profitability in industrial markets. The paper thirdly proposes a framework for value delivery and value-based pricing strategies in industrial markets. Proposing such a framework is both useful as well as necessary. Useful, since this framework guides new product development and pricing decisions and assists in the implementation of price-repositioning strategies for existing products; necessary, since the theoretical and practical adoption of value-based delivery and pricing strategies may have suffered from the lack of a unifying conceptual framework. Two case studies, one involving the pricing decision for a major product launch at a global chemical company, the other involving value delivery at an industrial equipment manufacturer, illustrate the practical applicability of the proposed framework.

We review the implications of the mobile technology for different stages of the consumer path to purchase including awareness, search, evaluation, store visit, and product choice. Real-time and location-specific access to information and products are identified as distinguishing characteristics of mobile devices. While the literature on digital marketing is well developed, knowledge of the effects on the consumer path to purchase in the presence of dynamic and location-specific information is still scarce. Path to purchase models need to recognize the central and powerful role of user-generated content. Better management of marketing resources would require models that connect investments in mobile marketing to sales, and also model the synergies among different digital and offline media. We conclude with a framework that connects mobile media impressions to product choice, in the presence of other marketing media, and consumer and firm feedback loops.

Purpose — The principal hypothesis of this program of research is that people's choices of which resources to own are a function of expected travel needs.

Methodology/approach — This chapter reports recent research using a stated-choice survey design that is innovative in two respects. First, respondents are asked to consider two types of choice having different time horizons but which are thought to be linked in a strategic-tactical structure. The two types of choices are (a) purchasing ‘mobility resources’, which include commitments such as car ownership and subscription to carsharing services and (b) choosing a mode of transport for a particular instance of travel. The second methodological innovation is that respondents indicate their choices in the context of giving advice to a demographically similar ‘avatar’.

The development of a technique for ‘empirically constrained’ efficient design is discussed, as is its application to this survey. This objective is to provide survey designs with a high degree of statistical efficiency whilst maintaining plausibility in the combination of attribute levels. Field data from an empirical application (n = 72) was collected and analysed.

Findings — The proposed method for efficient design proved successful. The main substantive findings from the empirical application are presented, along with detailed results relating to how different demographic classes of respondents engaged with the instrument. For instance, living with one's partner and living with no children at home were associated with high scores on a scale of similarity between the experimental choice context and one's real-world mobility choices.

Research limitations/implications — The proposed techniques appear promising, though the empirical results must be viewed as indicative only due to the size and coverage of the field data sample.

Companies spend millions on training their sales representatives. Thousands of textbooks have been published; thousands of training videos have been recorded. Hundreds of good pieces of advice and tips for sales representatives have been presented along with hundreds of sales methods and techniques. Probably the largest number of indicators and measures are applied in sales and distribution. On the one hand, this is a result of the fact that sales provide revenue and profit to a company; on the other hand, the concept of management by objectives turns out to be most effective in regional sales teams with reference to sales representatives and methods of performance evaluation. As a result, a whole array of indices has been created which enable the evaluation of sales representatives’ work and make it possible to manage goods distribution in a better way.

The indices presented in this chapter are rooted in the consumer market and are applied most often to this type of market (particularly in relation to fast-moving consumer goods at the level of retail trade). Nevertheless, many of them can be used on other markets (services, means of production) and at other trade levels (wholesale).

Although the values of many indices presented herein are usually calculated by market research agencies and delivered to companies in the form of synthetic results, we have placed the emphasis on the ability to determine them independently, both in descriptive and exemplifying terms. We consider it important to understand the genesis of indices and build the ability to interpret them on that basis. What is significant is that the indices can be interpreted differently; the same index may provide a different assessment of a product’s, brand or company’s position in the market depending on the parameters taken into account. Therefore, we strive to show a certain way of thinking rather than give ready-made recipes and cite ‘proven’ principles. Sales and distribution are dynamic phenomena, and limiting them within the framework of ‘one proper’ interpretation would be an intellectual abuse.

The purpose of this case study was to increase the knowledge base of how research librarians experience and cope with the turbulence of change within their library system. A library belonging to the Association of Research Libraries was selected for case study investigation. Seventeen librarians participated in on-site interviews, utilizing a protocol composed of a clustering technique and semi-structured interviewing. Instrumental case studies of each individual were then developed through a collective case method. The findings presented in this chapter include: the competing tensions between the physical and virtual environments, the speed of change, the search for professional meaning, and coping with the experiences of professional change. Analysis of the findings suggest: the emergence of a hypercritical state, the limiting nature of negative feedback, a complex systems framework for professional thinking, and coping in the hypercritical organization.