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Describes the winning formula at Neiman Marcus that has made it the No. 1 luxury retailer in the United States in terms of sales per square foot and profitability. Highlights Neiman Marcus' efforts to define who its customers are and are not and to achieve superior focus on its customers by aligning location, price, service, and merchandise to fulfill these customers' every need. Describes ways in which Neiman Marcus prevents typical silo behavior between merchandising and selling and how it ensures that the right merchandise gets to the right customer, despite the challenge of doing this in 36 micromarkets.

To show how a company integrates two strong high-performance functions—merchandising and sales—to get the right merchandise to each customer in more than 30 diverse selling locations while consistently providing exceptional customer service.

A literature review has revealed that a sales manager's transformational leadership has a positive impact on the job satisfaction of salespeople, while job satisfaction has significant influence on salespeople's work behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the transformational leadership of sales managers and the job satisfaction of salespeople.

The research was designed as a quantitative study, and the population was identified as salespeople in the consumer product industry in Taiwan, resulting in 123 individual surveys for analysis.

The findings supported the hypothesis that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between sales managers' transformational leadership and sales associates' job satisfaction. The result identified the predictors of sales managers' transformational leadership on the sales associates' job satisfaction through regression analysis.

The balanced scorecard (BSC) was originally intended to solve problems related to the historical nature of financial measures in accounting approaches. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to this literature by focusing on a major issue that has been less investigated, namely, the linking of the BSC perspective to the empirical investigation of leadership behaviors using statistical and technical tools and to predict employee satisfaction. The paper suggests applying Kaplan and Norton's BSC, which includes the perspectives of financial, customer, internal business, and innovation and learning measures to consider the effects of leadership behaviors on employee job satisfaction.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the body of literature concerning human factors in retail environments and their influence on consumers. Additionally, the authors identify the research gaps in the literature and suggest directions for future research.

This study uses qualitative approaches to provide a comprehensive review of human factors in retail environments.

The review is synthesised based on two main categories: the effects of other customers and the effects of sales associates. The influence of other customers, including the number of customers and social relations, is a significant source of human‐related environmental cues. In addition, existing studies support the importance of the number of sales associates, sales associates' physical attributes, and their behavioural characteristics observed in stores.

This study suggests that retailers need to effectively manage, control and manipulate human‐related environmental factors in order to generate a positive influence on consumers' perceptions towards stores and their behaviours.

This study provides a conceptual framework that integrates various human‐related factors in retail environments and their significant insights in the effective management of these factors identified for researchers and retailers.

Aims to improve understanding of an important and widely used management tool for motivating the salesforce – sales contests. Begins by introducing the question: what factors are associated with salespeople′s feelings towards a sales contest? Several potentially relevant characteristics that are expected to be associated with various feelings towards contests are discussed. To test the hypotheses, data were collected through verbal protocols and surveys from salespeople belonging to a division of a Fortune 100 firm. Results indicate that salespeople′s self‐esteem, commitment level, and career stage play a role in influencing feelings towards the sales contest.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of dynamic marketing capabilities (DMC), foreign ownership modes and sub-national locations on the performance of foreign-owned affiliates (FOAs) in developing economies.

Based on a sample of 254 FOAs in the Indian manufacturing sector (covering the period of 2000-2008 leading to 623 firm-year observations), the empirical paper adopts the panel data regression approach.

The study confirms the significant importance of DMC to assist FOAs to gain better sales performance in an emerging market such as India. The findings indicate that wholly owned foreign affiliates (WOFAs) have better sales performance than international joint ventures (IJVs), and majority-owned international joint ventures (MAIJVs) perform better than minority-owned international joint ventures in the Indian manufacturing sector. The results confirm that effective deployment of DMC leads to better sales performance in WOFAs and to some extent in MAIJVs. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that developing DMC in non-metropolitan areas is associated with higher sales growth than in metropolitan locations.

The study contributes to the literature by examining the impact of DMC on performance of FOA by considering the organised manufacturing sector in a large and fast growing developing economy. In addition, the results for the moderating effects provide novel evidence of the conditions under which DMC of FOA interact with different ownership modes and influence firm performance.

This study aims to explore the direct and indirect effects of sales opportunism and sales conflict as well as of non-economic and economic satisfaction in business-to-business (B2B) sales relationships. This understanding offers B2B buyers enhanced knowledge of sales business expectations towards sustainable business relationships in the future.

Through self-administered questionnaires, data were obtained from 237 sales or marketing managers/directors of small- and medium-sized companies across industries in Spain, who were randomly contacted via LinkedIn. The multivariate analysis of measurement and structural models was based on IBM SPSS Amos 27.

The study confirms that sales opportunism positively affects sales conflict. Moreover, sales opportunism is negatively associated with non-economic sales satisfaction, whereas non-economic sales satisfaction is positively associated with economic sales satisfaction. Consequently, if all associates are pleased with the relationship and the gains it can provide, a long-standing orientation can be achieved.

The study expands existing theory on seller–buyer relationships in a B2B context. It contextualises direct and indirect relationships between two antecedents (sales opportunism and sales conflict) and two postcedents (economic sales satisfaction and non-economic sales satisfaction) in sales business–buyer settings.

The study guides buyers in B2B relationships towards an improved understanding of how sales businesses perceive opportunism and conflict (as negative precursors) to impact non-economic satisfaction and how it can influence economic satisfaction.

Most studies explore B2B relationship building from the perspective of the buyer, thereby creating a shortfall in developing an understanding of all partner expectations in B2B relational intent. Moreover, the measurement of satisfaction as a multidimensional construct secured the integration of non-economic satisfaction and economic satisfaction within a single model allowing the constructs measured in this study to be holistically assessed.

Retailers are increasingly considering the introduction of service robots in their stores to support or even replace service staff. Service robots can execute service scripts during the service encounter that can influence customer interactions and the overall experience. While the role of service agents is well documented, more research is needed to understand customer responses to a technology-infused servicescape and to investigate the value of service robots as interaction partners. The purpose of this study is to examine the degree of customer immersion in human-human or human-robot interactions across different stages of the service experience and to understand how immersion affects store visit duration under each condition.

An experimental field study was developed to test the research hypotheses. The study was conducted in a retail store selling premium Italian leather goods with 50 respondents randomly allocated to one of two experimental conditions, interaction with a service robot or interaction with a human sales associate. Participants’ biometrics were collected to measure their immersion in the service encounter and to assess its impact on store visit duration.

The interaction with a service robot increases the level of customer immersion during the service encounter’s welcome and surprise moments. Immersion positively affects visit duration. However, participants exposed to a robot sales associate reported a shorter visit duration as compared to those who interacted with a human sales associate.

This study contributes to the emerging service and retail marketing literature on service robot applications applying a neuroscientific approach to the study of human–robot interactions across different moments of the service encounter. For managers, this study shows the conditions under which service robots can be successfully implemented in retail stores in accordance with the type of task performed and the degree of immersion generated in customers.

This paper aims to move beyond previous investigations juxtaposing the performance of global versus domestic brands, where domestic is referred to as “localness” in the literature, conceptualizing and developing two measures of “within-country brand or product localness.” In doing so, it uses objective localness measures, rather than consumer perceptions of brand localness, as have been primarily used previously. Then, by leveraging established theory on brand authenticity and corollary literatures on brand identity and country-of-origin effects, this research develops and empirically tests key hypotheses about how these within-country, more geographically local products or brands (referred to as simply “localness” hereafter, for brevity), influence sales outcomes through increasing perceptions of brand and product authenticity.

Two empirical studies using different archival data sets are conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 focuses on new product sales from 2002 to 2011 for 31 categories of consumer packaged goods US product launches initiated in 2002–2005, whereas Study 2 investigates online consumer review and retail sales data in the US craft beer industry from 2001 to 2011. Localness is operationalized as two different objective measures: in Study 1, local distribution is measured, and in Study 2, firm headquarters denotes the geographic bounds of localness. These two measures are motivated by prior consumer perceptual studies of Locavores (consumers who strongly prefer local products), which identify that local systems of production and/or distribution are the key signals of localness. Using two measures allows the localness construct to be tested for the potential firm-side boundaries of its scope and provides two empirical measures that future researchers can leverage.

Brand (or product) localness gives performance advantages over national brands in the form of increased sales across both studies. The second study, focused on craft beer, dives more deeply into the theoretical mechanism (localness operates through increased perceptions of brand authenticity) and shows that while brand authenticity directly translates into higher sales, as anticipated, localness fully mediates this relationship. When coupled with supporting marketing tactics (high price and/or product variety), the link between localness and brand authenticity grows stronger. Local brands with low prices and/or limited product variety are deemed inauthentic by consumers, so it is important for brand managers to use marketing tactics that reinforce brand authenticity to support localness as a strategy.

Future research could extend this inquiry in a number of ways. These include combining both empirical measures of localness into a single empirical inquiry, investigating additional product categories and further integrating aspects of strategy such as market positioning and innovation strategy. Newer data could also reveal how these phenomena are continuing to evolve.

Based on this study, managers can benefit by leveraging localness as a key brand or product attribute to achieve a sales advantage, but they must do so by using marketing tactics consistent with an authentic brand positioning. Efforts to expand a brand’s geographic reach over time should likely be conducted very locally at first, before extending to regional markets and then to a global footprint. It is also posited that retail store managers can benefit from allocating some shelf space to local brand and product offerings.

This paper conceptualizes and measures localness in new ways compared to the previous literatures. It develops objective measures of within-country localness instead of using consumer perceptions of localness and/or considering domestic brands as being “local” compared to global brands; builds key linkages between concepts of localness, authenticity and sales performance; and uncovers when and how within-country localness is a key brand or product attribute associated with increased sales success.

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.