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The purpose of this paper is to articulate the impact of COVID-19 on marketing. It will shift from “physical first” to “digital first,” and from “selling to serving” the customers. This will impact all 4 Ps of marketing, as well as branding and innovation.

It is a conceptual paper based on literature review. The underlying construct used is transaction cost economics (TCE).

Using TCE, the paper finds that both consumers and marketers are very willing to shift to e-commerce and digital platforms which are both convenient, as well as cost-effective. Also, customer support organization will become a strategic advantage in interactive marketing.

This is an original paper written specifically for the special issue on the post-pandemic shock.

This paper aims to analyze the present status of customer support services (CSS) and advocate the re-positioning of support services from an administrative cost center to a strategic profit center. Authors demonstrate how customer support or after sales services can be a source of competitive advantage and revenue generation for firms.

The study adopts a conceptual approach grounded in theoretical foundations of service dominant logic, customer loyalty and customer centricity along with practical illustrations from the industry.

Following the tenets of theory, review of existing research and analysis of the industry practices, the authors propose a new framework to enable the repositioning of customer service function. The key propositions include establishing customer support as separate business unit and insights center, introducing a new role of a C-level chief customer support officer to lead the customer support unit, adopting a customer-centric culture and process, enabling frontline IT support and investing in frontline employee skills development.

Academics should examine the potential of customer support, where the strategic importance is low at present, leading to customer dissatisfaction. The new approach and positioning of customer support calls for a new direction for research in this area focusing on enablers, challenges and further implications. To succeed in this competitive era, firms should be conscious of the value of customer service and undertake concrete actions to generate value for all stakeholders.

Industry can use the new framework and re-position CSS of the organizations. The CSS unit can be different from other business units in the organizations. The CSS would evolve and emerge from the live customer insights. CSS unit can be managed by the C level chief CSS officer. Customer-centric culture would be developed and front line processes can be made customer-oriented by the officer. Thus, this paper and framework would provide new customer-centric directions to the organizations for effective functioning.

This is the original piece that has emerged from the experience and expertise of the authors.

Gillette’s historically successful “razor and blade” business model (RBM) has been a promising benchmark for multiple businesses across diverse industries worldwide in the past several decades. The extant literature deals with very few nuances of this business model notwithstanding the fact that there are several variants of this business model being put to practical use by firms in diverse industries in grossly metaphorically equivalent situations.

This study adopts the 2 × 2 truth table framework from the domains of mathematical logic and combinatorics in fleshing out all possible (four logical possibilities) variants of the razor and blade business model for further analysis. This application presents four mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive possibilities on any chosen dimension. Two major dimensions (viz., provision of subsidy and intra- or extra-firm involvement in the making of razors or blades or both) form part of the discussion in this paper. In addition, this study synthesizes and streamlines entrepreneurial wisdom from multiple intra-industry and inter-industry benchmarks in terms of real-time firms explicitly or implicitly adopting several variants of the RBM that suit their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of evolution in situations that are grossly reflective of the metaphorically equivalent scenario of razor and recurrent blades. Inductive method of research is carried out with real-time cases from diverse industries with a pivotally common pattern of razor and blade model in some form or the other.

Several new variants of the razor and blade model (much beyond what the extant literature explicitly projects) have been discovered from the multiple metaphorically equivalent cases of RBM across industries. All of these expand the portfolio of options that relevant entrepreneurial firms can explore and exploit the best possible option chosen from them, given their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of growth.

This study has enriched the literature by presenting and analyzing a more inclusive or perhaps comprehensive palette of explicit choices in the form of several variants of the RBM for the relevant entrepreneurial firms to choose from. Future research can undertake the task of comparing these variants of RBM with those of upcoming servitization business models such as guaranteed availability, subscription and performance-based contracting and exploring the prospects of diverse combinations.

Smart entrepreneurial firms identify and adopt inspiring benchmarks (like razor and blade model whenever appropriate) duly tweaked and blended into a gestalt benchmark for optimal profits and attractive market shares. They target diverse market segments for tied-goods with different variants or combinations of the relevant benchmarks in the form of variegated customer value propositions (CVPs) that have unique and enticing appeal to the respective market segments.

Value-sensitive customers on the rise globally choose the option that best suits them from among multiple alternatives offered by competing firms in the market. As long as the ratio of utility to price of such an offer is among the highest, even a no-frills CVP may be most appealing to one market segment while a plush CVP may be tempting to yet another market segment simultaneously. While professional business firms embrace resource leverage practices consciously, amateur customers do so subconsciously. Each party subliminally desires to have the maximum bang-to-buck ratio as the optimal return on investment, given their priorities ceteris paribus.

Prior studies on the RBM have explicitly captured only a few variants of the razor and blade model. This study is perhaps the first of its kind that ferrets out many other variants (more than ten) of the razor and blade model with due simplification and exemplification, justification and demystification.

This paper aims to determine the effects of a strategy of annual price increases for mature industrial, razors/blades products. Little prior research has looked at pricing strategy for mature industrial products and no prior research has looked at mature industrial products of capital goods (razors) and linked supplies (blades).

The authors surveyed a major industrial manufacturer's 3,000‐strong customer base to determine the price elasticity effects of annual price increases over a four‐year time span.

The authors found that though price elasticity appeared limited in the early years, it increased exponentially over the years.

The authors used a single company's 3,000 strong customer base for in‐depth analysis of concepts, with attendant limitations. Specifically, the population of respondents, though large, represents the customer base of a single company. The findings of this exploratory study must be replicated with more diverse populations before they can be generalized.

The study's practical implications lie in its contribution to understanding pricing strategy in mature industrial markets. Researchers and managers frequently treat these markets as extensions of their emerging or growing product life cycle stages. However, mature product markets exhibit different product‐market characteristics.

The article's originality and value stems from its addressing an increasingly important issue. The lack of research covering mature industrial products' pricing strategy, coupled with the increasing number of products that fall within this life cycle, make the product category increasingly central to many companies' profitability.

This study aims to fill a gap in the literature. The notion of giveaways/free has not been well addressed in management history literature and arguably is a valuable contribution in that it has a strategic dimension.

This paper is conceptual. It is a structured survey of ideas/opinions about the notion of “free” in commercial endeavor. The survey is organized largely from a historical perspective.

Several categories of “free” are delineated and placed into a historical and strategic context.

The work has strategic implications and lays out a new research agenda for management historians.

The aim of this article is to minimize the drag of an unmanned amphibious aerial vehicle (UAAV) and enhancing the endurance.

Various surface geometrical profiles such as rectangular, semicircular groove, razor blade and V-groove riblets are incorporated into the UAAV, and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis is performed for various angles of attack at diverse vehicle speed conditions to estimate the coefficient of drag considering k–e turbulence model. Comparative evaluation between riblet and blunt body shape methodology is performed. Wind tunnel experiments are conducted to validate the flow characteristics around the UAAV.

It is observed that V-groove riblet method produced minimal drag in comparison with other profiles. The pressure distributions around UAAV for various geometrical profiles suggested that V-groove profile has achieved minimal vortex region, flow separation and turbulent boundary layer near to the outer profile.

The CFD analysis of UAAV for various riblet configurations and validation with wind tunnel smoke test confirms that UAAV with V-groove riblet provides low drag.

Planning a strategy of innovation is the sine qua non of a corporation's success, according to Peter Drucker. Here, he describes three major successful strategies of innovation, and why they work.

In this chapter, we follow the growth of the pricing discipline, especially through the ideas of one of the earliest of pricing's pioneers: Dan Nimer. The Nimer influence on pricing has been foundational, sewing seeds for the growth and development of various pricing fields and subfields – pricing objectives and pricing strategy, value-based pricing, costing and pricing, financial analysis of pricing, and price sensitivity. The ideas we present in this chapter originated largely with Nimer, many in his own voice. We interweave them with the ideas of other contributors to the pricing discipline to show the development of the field. Dan taught many foundational pricing concepts; they are captured in seminars and articles kept through the years. Founding pioneer to pricing, Nimer's influence will remain long into the new century as pricing enters a new phase as a strategic capability of the firm.

The concept of modularity has gained considerable traction in technology studies as a way to conceive, describe, and innovate complex systems, such as product design or organizational structures. In the recent literature, technological modularity has often been intertwined with business model innovation, and scholarship has started investigating how modularity in technology affects changes in business models, both at the cognitive and activity system levels. Yet we still lack a theoretical definition of what modularity is in the business model domain. Business model innovation also encompasses different possibilities of modelling businesses, which are not clearly understood nor classified. We ask when, how, and if modularity theory can be extended to business models in order to enable effective and efficient modelling. We distinguish theoretically between modularity for technology and for business models, and investigate the key processes of modularization and manipulation. We introduce the basic operations of business modelling via modular operators adapted from the technological modularity domain, using iconic examples to develop an analogical reasoning between modularity in technology and in business models. Finally, we discuss opportunities for using modularity theory to foster the understanding of business models and modelling, and develop a challenging research agenda for future investigations.

People decide what is good or bad, or what they should or should not do, based on the values they cherish. Someone's values create the feeling that something is important for him or her, and then motivate him or her to take action. Therefore, personal values are important psychological aspects that serve as predictors of many types of human behaviour. The use of values to evaluate, to predict or to assess behavioural choices and their outcomes has received increasing attention in psychology in recent years. An important psychological insight is that similarities between personal values and values provided by the context (e.g., not only values cherished by the people who are close to us but also values embedded in the brands that are relevant for us or in the communication messages we are confronted with) have an impact on subjective well-being. This psychological insight makes values relevant for other domains as well. This chapter explores the use of values in communication, and introduces mechanisms through which values can be used to stimulate communication effectiveness.