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This research seeks to fill a gap in the service and retailing marketplace experience literature as well as retailing practice by extending Attribution and Expectancy Disconfirmation Theories to the large and growing market of consumers with vision disabilities. It reveals how accessibility-related service failures with a retailer's website can lead to anti-firm reactions from blind and low vision consumers, including social media sharing, negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) and avoidance of the retailer's other sales channels even if they are accessible.

Blind respondents were recruited from national blindness organizations to participate in this study using a within-subjects design to test reactions to accessibility-related propositions in two different scenarios involving varying degrees of effort.

In both high- and low-effort conditions, an accessibility-related service failure leads to the anti-firm consequences of NWOM, social media sharing and avoidance of the retailer's sales channels. Additionally, blind and low vision consumers who also feel inaccessible websites are discriminatory develop stronger anti-firm attitudes toward the offending retailers. Further, we aver that the retailer's entire website including all its features, not just the homepage, should be made accessible to the growing market of vision-impaired consumers and thereby obtain substantial competitive advantages.

This research pertains to the service failure and recovery nomological network. It extends the existing paradigm to include accessibility-related service failures experienced by consumers with disabilities into the specialized category of discrimination-based service failures in instances where service recovery is not easily achieved. Empirical investigations of these experiences have been rare, despite the frequency with which they occur.

States that little empirical work is available as a guide in the design and implementation of sales manager training programs. Examines the relationship between trainee satisfaction with sales manager training (a measure for training effectiveness) and the format, site, instructor, instructional method, and content of the program. Reports results of a survey of sales managers in field sales organizations. Indicates that training satisfaction is associated with all five issues. Offers direct implications for enhancing sales manager training programs.

The primary intent of this research was to determine whether the perceived importance of various rewards is influenced by the career stage of sales managers. This study found that sales managers in different career stages have distinct intrinsic and extrinsic reward preferences that may ultimately affect motivation and productivity. Although several statistically significant differences in intrinsic and extrinsic reward preferences were discerned, some reward perceptions were found to be uniform regardless of sales manager career stage. Sales management implications, limitations, and directions for future research are offered.

As firms seek to prosper in a fiercely competitive global economy, cooperative inter‐firm alliances among members of the value chain are increasingly being forged. In the area of marketing channels, strategic alliances among international channel partners have become the norm as well. Thus, identification of inter‐firm influence strategies – such as different leadership styles – used by the channel captain to motivate international channel partners becomes increasingly important. More specifically, in administering a firm’s marketing channels, participative, supportive, and directive leadership styles may be effective in eliciting channel partners to exert higher levels of motivation, which, in turn, may be associated with higher levels of performance. The linkages among leadership styles, motivation, and performance are empirically examined on data drawn from a sample of automobile distributors in the USA, Finland, and Poland. International channel management implications are discussed, limitations of the study are identified, and directions for future research are suggested.

Purpose – A major limitation in cross-cultural research continues to be attempts to compare construct measurements across cultures without adequate conceptual and empirical evidence of the equivalency of the measurement scores. Of significant concern in such studies is the presence of various types of response bias that may systematically differ from one culture to another, resulting in a potential violation of the assumption that measurement scores across cultures are equivalent. The focus of this study is to investigate the role of the response format type, extreme response style (ERS). Most studies have investigated response bias styles using Likert-type scales as response formats, yet it has long been argued that these particular formats tend to result in various types of response style bias, especially in cross-cultural research. Would other scaling devices, such as semantic differential (SD), lessen response style bias in pan-cultural studies? To answer this question, our study employs two types of response formats (i.e., Liker-type and SD) to empirically test for the presence of ERS within each response format style.

Methodology/approach – This chapter takes the form of empirical research using ERS indices to test for the degree of ERS between response formats using samples from a collectivistic culture (i.e., South Korea) and an individualistic culture (i.e., United States).

Findings – Results show that samples from both cultures exhibit greater levels of ERS when using Likert-type scales compared to SD scales. Additionally, this study finds that, when using Likert-type scales, ERS is greater for U.S. respondents than for South Korea respondents. Finally, results show that there is no statistically significant difference in ERS between the two cultural groups when using SD response formats.

Research implications – Findings show that the use of SD response formats eliminates systematic differences in ERS between a collectivist sample and an individualist sample. Therefore, the use of such response formats in future cross-cultural research can greatly diminish the problematic effects of culturally based ERS and lead to greater confidence in the equivalency of measurement scores across cultures.

Originality/value of paper – This study is the first to simultaneously assess culturally based ERS using two types of response formats to investigate the impact of response format on ERS. Furthermore, this study assesses the role of response format on ERS both within and between two distinctly different cultures.

American multinationals, when deciding pricing strategies for their culturally diverse foreign markets, usually have to debate whether to change or to keep the pricing strategy that they have been using at home. The recent move towards standardization in global markets has only raised the importance of this issue. This research addresses this issue by comparing the effectiveness of 9‐ending prices or just below prices in the USA and in a Central European country, Poland. A conceptual framework was developed to predict why there might be differences in preference for such 9‐ending prices in Poland and the USA. Results from the first study show that 9‐ending prices, which are popular in the US market, are not well received in the Polish market. The second study provided further insights by determining reasons for differences in perception and preference for such prices in the two countries.

Sales promotions are probably the least understood and least analyzed of all the promotional tools, yet they are among the most costly and most frequently used. Today’s top managers are relentlessly searching for new areas in which to cut costs and increase profits, so sales promotion are coming under greater scrutiny than ever. In order to justify and skillfully use expenditures on sales promotions for different objectives and target markets, marketing managers must understand some key concepts and thoroughly examine several critical variables across markets and among sales promotion tools themselves that impact directly on sales, profitability, and value added.

This paper explores the major factors influencing multinational companies’ (MNCs) propensity to change the level of resource commitments during financial crises in emerging markets. Favorable changes in the host government policies, market demand, firm strategy, and infrastructural conditions are hypothesized to influence the MNCs’ decision to increase resource commitments during a crisis. The hypotheses are tested with data collected in a survey of 82 MNCs during the recent Argentine financial crisis (late 2002). While all the above variables are considered by the respondents as generally important reasons for increasing resource commitments during a crisis, only favorable changes in government policies significantly influence MNCs’ decisions to change the level of resource commitments during the Argentine financial crisis. The research, managerial implications, and policy‐making implications are discussed.

This study empirically explores one of the important channel issues – the relationship between various channel support given to channel partners and the perceived (by managers) goal‐orientation of a firm. Results from an emerging market, India, indicate that perceived orientation towards both profitability and market share is not associated with any of the channel support considered. Growth orientation however is strongly associated with most of the channel support activities – both business (e.g., business advice, pricing and ordering assistance, and personnel training) as well as marketing (advertising support, sales promotional material, and inventory management assistance) oriented activities. In contrast, perceived sales volume orientation is only associated with advertising support and business advice, however, the relationship is negative. These findings have interesting implications for channel management and channel motivation.

This study examines how various characteristics of the discount retail environment and the overall attitude towards a discount retail store, considered to be an abstract and global image component, influence consumers’ satisfaction and how consumers’ satisfaction, in turn, affects store loyalty. The data, collected from a sample of 517 discount retail customers in Daegu, Korea, indicate that: (1) forming the overall attitude is more closely related to in‐store services: atmosphere, employee service, after sales service and merchandising, (2) store satisfaction is formed through perceived store atmosphere and value, (3) the overall attitude has strong influence on satisfaction and loyalty and its impact is much stronger on loyalty than on satisfaction, (4) store loyalty is directly affected by most significantly location, merchandising and after sale service in order, (5) satisfaction is not related to customers’ committed store revisiting behavior. The applications in management and implications for future research are discussed.