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Clean cookstoves have emerged over the past half century as an important technological innovation to reduce indoor air pollution from cooking with traditional fuels. However, widespread adoption remains elusive, suggesting the need for other measures to accompany dissemination of clean cookstoves. Despite knowledge about health impacts of cookstove smoke and a body of evidence pointing to the efficacy of health education for supporting behaviour change, health messaging is relatively unexplored in the cookstove sector. This paper aims to present findings from action research in Cambodia that investigates how social innovation around positive and negative health messaging influences demand for clean biomass cookstoves.

An action research approach was taken, involving the design and implementation of a health marketing campaign alongside promotion of a clean burning biomass cookstove. Four communes were assigned as intervention communes and a fifth as the control group. Among the four intervention communes, two were provided with positive health messaging and the other two with negative health messaging. The methods included a baseline study of 381 households using structured surveys, roll-out of the health campaign, in-depth interviews with households and sales agents, ten focus group discussions with households and an endline structured survey of all 381 households.

Neither the type (positive/negative) nor the intensity of the health campaigns had a significant impact on stove sales. Sales results show no pattern in either variable, and sales in the control commune were not lower than in communes where health campaigns were used. However, health messaging did increase awareness about health impacts of cooking with traditional biomass burning stoves. For almost all communes, in particular those that received positive-tone messages, an increased awareness of the health impact of cooking with traditional biomass burning stoves was observed. Cookstove price and personal characteristics of individual sales agents were shown to be the strongest factors affecting sales.

The study relied on sales agents to deliver pre-assigned health messages. However, some sales agents did not follow instructions in delivering the messages, which made it difficult to compare the efficacy of the different campaign approaches. Due to a delay in the study, the campaign overlapped with the planting season when disposable incomes of famers is typically limited, reducing their ability to purchase a new cookstove. The 10-week duration of the campaign may not have been long enough to see an impact on sales, particularly for a product viewed as expensive for the average consumer.

The skill and motivation of individual sales agents can greatly affect cookstove marketing campaigns. The efficacy of individual sales agents appears to have been the strongest factor affecting sales, with the most successful sales agent using a combination of messages, including health information, to convince households to purchase the stoves. This warrants further study; designers of stove promotion campaigns might be able to learn from the behaviour and strategies of highly effective sales agents. Price continues to be an important factor influencing the adoption of clean cookstoves. In Cambodia, the main drivers of cookstove purchase (beside the sales agent) were availability of disposable income, time and fuel saved.

Health messaging was shown to have minimal effect on cookstove purchase. Indeed, it is clear that cookstove adoption is influenced by multiple factors linked in complex ways. This is a very important finding for public health workers, who need to think more broadly about how they achieve the public health goals associated with cleaner cooking through approaches that do not necessarily focus on individual health goals.

Although health messaging has shown promise as an approach for supporting behaviour change in other sectors, it has not been widely studies in the context of clean cookstove adoption. This paper contributes to filling this gap and suggests some lines of enquiry for future research. The study pioneered innovative methods such as action research, use of graphic images and using established local sales agents as means of communicating messages about the health risks of cooking smoke and the benefits of improved cookstoves.

The present study considers how clothing and shoe retailers in New Zealand, Portugal and Hungary manage promotion campaigns and looks at the objectives that are most important to these retailers as well as the marketing activities that are undertaken to reach these objectives. Change‐of‐season sales are found to be the most frequently used sales type by the retailers studied and these sales are linked with objectives of moving a volume of stock and activities such as co‐ordination of media across all forms. Secondary sales types include Christmas and general sales, and these are linked with other promotional objectives and activities such as increasing profit and dollar sales, and stock management.

The objectives of this study are threefold: to delineate the phenomenon of “You Share, We Donate” (YSWD) campaigns and what distinguishes them from sales-based cause-related marketing; to contrast the effectiveness of YSWD and sales-based cause-related marketing campaigns and provide an explanation for the differences in the effectiveness; to explore boundary conditions of the proposed differences.

Three experiments were conducted to empirically test the differential effect of campaign formats (i.e. YSWD vs sales-based cause-related marketing), the underlying mechanism and structural as well as contextual features moderating the differential effect.

The findings suggest that YSWD messages elicit consumers’ message-sharing intentions more than traditional cause-related marketing messages. The effect is explained by consumers’ sense of empowerment and can be enhanced through donation cap non-specification. The findings further indicate that YSWD campaigns are especially fruitful in low power distance cultures.

This study contributes toward corporate donation campaign literature by focusing on the usage of social media.

From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

This paper extends cause-related marketing literature by not only introducing the phenomenon of YSWD campaigns to the literature but also exploring strategies to enhance the effectiveness of such campaigns and shedding light on an outcome beyond the sales impact of cause-related marketing campaigns, i.e. an increase of visibility in social media. From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evolution of a company in Argentina with the support of the viable system model (VSM) and the Viplan method. This company had had a cybernetic intervention in the 1980s and in 2002 went out of business. The authors' purpose was revisiting the company with the lenses of current organizational cybernetics to find new insights from its history.

The history was constructed by one of the authors, who was a key player in the company. He also obtained the views of other people who had worked in the company. These data were assessed interactively by the two authors using the VSM and the Viplan method.

Though a functional application of the VSM may be helpful to highlight communication and information requirements, it yields limited insights about viability. It is the assessment of relationships within the organization and with environmental agents that offers more valuable results.

Often retrospective studies have limited value; it is easy to construct history to fit particular interests. However, the authors had very different backgrounds, one highly involved with the company's history, the other interested in clarifying the use of the VSM. The first wanted to provide an accurate history and the second insights to improve the application of the VSM.

The approach of the paper is focused on a particular and unique situation. Also the paper goes beyond the more traditional functional applications of the VSM. It is an application focused on people's relations and performance.

This research is based on the premise that current metrics for search engine advertising (SEA) are misleading and do not sufficiently allow managers to evaluate traffic and conversions simultaneously. This study aimed to conceptually develop and assess conversion potential (CvP) as a unifying construct for both measuring and evaluating the performance of SEA campaigns.

A data set of nearly seven million records covering almost three years of a multi-million-dollar keyword marketing campaign from a major US retailer was used to validate the construct of CvP.

Results empirically validate how CvP measures both campaign traffic and sales in SEA, using the optimization factor of ad rank, which is one of many possible factors.

Although the data set is large and covers a lengthy period of time, it is limited to one company in the retail sector.

The research instantiates CvP as a metric for overall SEA account performance while demonstrating that it is a practical tool for future campaign planning. The metric simultaneously incorporates a sales ratio and a traffic ratio.

This is the first study to formalize and provide a working definition of CvP in the academic literature. The contribution is a theoretical and practical managerial framework to mutually evaluate, measure and make decisions about SEA efforts.

Sponsorship activities have become a mainstream component of the marketing mix. As such, there are attempts to make these activities more effective by leveraging them using advertising, sales promotions, or in an increasing number of cases, through cause related marketing (CRM). This paper explores the relationship between sponsorship and CRM and identifies the potential opportunities that arise from leveraging sponsorships using CRM. The paper also examines the limitations of CRM as a leveraging strategy, puts forward a typology for categorising CRM and identifies some future research issues related to CRM‐leveraging of sponsorship.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how Agfa, a division of IG Farben and Germany's leading producer of photographic equipment, adapted its marketing strategy to the new political environment created by the Nazi regime. This was a time when many consumer goods manufacturers suffered from the state‐driven reallocation of resources favoring the armament industry. Agfa, however, expanded its production well into the war.

This case study is based on archival records of Agfa's sales department.

This paper shows that Hitler's armament drive left room for non‐essential consumer goods such as cameras, film, and photographic paper as they fitted the regime's consumption policy, as well as its import and foreign exchange policy. A pioneer in marketing, Agfa was able to secure its growth strategy and its room to maneuver by focusing its product and promotion program on the socioeconomic needs of the “Volksgemeinschaft” and the “Four Year Plan”.

This paper sheds new light on the often‐underestimated role of consumption during the “Third Reich.” Furthermore, it supports the evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – nature of the history of marketing practice in Germany, as Agfa's interwar marketing policy features many sophisticated modern elements prior to the “Marketing Revolution” of the 1960s.

The study investigates the factors that influence young consumers (Gen Zs and Ys) in emerging markets to engage fashion ads of non-luxury fashion retail small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) on social media. Through a desk assessment of practice and the phenomenon's available evidence in the extant literature, four main drivers were delineated, reviewed and subsequently tested to influence young consumers' behavioural engagements of emerging markets' fashion SMEs' social media contents.

A non-probability sample of 1,150 respondents (Gen Y and Z combined) in Ghana, an emerging market, formed the sample for the study. The respondents assessed four empirically identified antecedents (sales campaigns, relevant sales-related information, catchy and inspiring product/brand photo/video and consumer-generated contents) that are likely to influence their behavioural engagement on social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter). SmartPLS (version 3.3.3) was employed to perform partial least square structural equation modelling.

The results showed that to engage fashion-related ads, particularly from non-luxury fashion SMEs, young consumers consider sales campaigns, cues from consumer-generated contents, as well as quality and inspiring videos and photos. Less attention is given to relevant sales-related information.

The three significant drivers of engagement found in the current study provide managerial knowledge for non-luxury fashion SMEs in emerging markets. Videos and still pictures must be of high definition and quality. Short and long promotional campaigns may drive positive behavioural engagements. Interactivity between fashion SMEs and young consumers is encouraged as it precipitates the positive engagement behaviours enabled by social media. The study concludes with actionable recommendations for the non-luxury fashion SME sector in emerging economies.

The study is the first of its kind to ascertain what drives young consumers' engagement with non-luxury fashion SMEs on social media. It provides managerial insights and guidance to SMEs in emerging markets on effective social media fashion retailing targeted mainly at digital natives, the dominant generational cohorts on social media in most emerging economies.

The adoption of a model‐building approach to marketing is today inevitable, due to improvements in hardware and software and the increased professionalisation of marketing and its techniques. Aggregate response models are focused upon, particularly the issues of which responses are realistic and should be modelled, how the response can be expressed and how a choice can be made between options available. The traditional model‐building process is described, and the inclusion of correct variables found to be critical, the primary means of doing this being statistical analysis. Simple expressions perform as effectively as more complex ones, and should be used if able to give operationally meaningful results. Cross‐correlation analysis and biased estimation techniques provide good guides to usable variables and their effects.

The purpose of this paper is to show that some of the critical questions that top executives from electronics companies ask are not unique to their industry and, in fact, are the same ones that confront executives across a variety of industries and virtually all company sizes. Questions that address issues of product complexity and the breadth of product offerings, how to respond to competitive forces, and how to meet the challenges that come from shortened product lifecycles and shrinking the time it takes for products to ultimately reach the marketplace are all relevant across multiple industries. Still, the electronics industry is one that is experiencing an especially unprecedented degree of change spurred by the increasing complexity of end products, higher competitive intensity, and shorter time to commoditization.

The article provides the methodology and tool set needed to develop and assess a product portfolio map, determine changes needed to marketing and sales focus as well as future actions to take in order to sustain higher profitability and return on investments. It includes: definition of the key dimensions and characteristics of the six key zones for product, sales, and marketing; summary of product, marketing and sales focus by zone; key challenges and actions that an organization can undertake for each zone; and methodology to apply the framework and develop an actionable transformation roadmap. This answers key questions such as: Does the current coverage align with existing core competencies? Which zone has the most profitable products? If playing in every zone which business should be divested? If there is heavy emphasis on one zone what does it mean for M&A strategy? Where do the top 100 customers map in the framework? What looking at product and technology roadmap going forward, which zones do we start entering?

This article provides a framework that enables businesses to ascertain their current state and identify actions appropriate to achieve a desired future state. It provides insights that lead to an actionable transformation plan.

Most companies in the electronics industry are executing multiple strategies based on acquisitions, sales transformations, new product introductions, and cost cutting measures to deal with the situation. However, the success rate of these strategies leaves significant room for improvement at many companies. So what is the answer? As is often the case when many variables need to be considered simultaneously and the competitive environment is complex such as this, it is important to establish a structured way to approach the challenges at hand. In this case, the key elements to consider are the customer experience, the product portfolios, and sales and marketing competencies. Achieving the right level of interaction and focus among these elements is critical to achieving success. This article provides a new and insightful framework to enable a structured analysis of the multi‐variable system.