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Branded car dealerships with best revenue by serviced car also have the best after-sales customers’ satisfaction level. The purpose of this paper is to present the analysis of the after-sales quality management practices adopted by dealerships with the best performance in terms of customer’s satisfaction and revenue and how such practices contribute to these results.

A multiple case study was performed with nine leader branded car dealerships in an emerging country, considering the entrance car. The performance indicators to evaluate customers’ satisfaction, revenue and operational indicators related to product support, brand manifestation and relationship with customers were identified. Quality management practices that support the best results achievement were analyzed.

The three dealerships that represent Asiatic brands have best customers’ satisfaction and revenue performance. These dealerships typically have different processes comparing with dealerships that represent European and American brands concerning to: continuous improvement management; warranties and stock management; services scheduling; offer bonuses to customers; and customers service that emphasizes focus on technical and commercial expertise.

This research considered indicators performance and, based on that, analyzed the dealerships’ practices that support the best performance. Such aspect has room for academic literature since the quality management research related to car industry focuses mainly on manufacturer and generates managerial insights to the car industry and its dealerships.

Automobile salespersons have long been viewed by the general public as cunning and cold. They only fare better than murderers. The bad perception that the public has can be traced to the compensation system in the industry. This compensation system has also contributed to the high turnover rates of salespersons in dealerships. High turnover rates are costing the dealerships training cost and lost sales from returning customers. Dealerships have to start changing how they compensate their sales force. Replacing the at risk pay with salary and bonus will greatly change the salespeople’s selling attitude for the better. Salary based will also reduce the turnover rate especially during a lean period. It will also give a chance for a novice to enter the industry without them downgrading their lifestyle. Financial hardship during the learning period has been the main deterrent for newcomers to enter the industry. Other non‐cash incentives, such as free demonstrator, profit sharing and pension plans will help to retain the sales force. Another important factor is to hire the right salespeople from the beginning.

Describes the findings of a study into sales approaches taken by car dealerships during the slump of the Philippine economy. Covers 287 respondents across 29 dealerships of Japanese manufacturers. Provides rationale for some of the actions taken such as expansion and new models. Suggests that the study opens a new area of possibly more sophisticated research on the Filipino car‐buying pattern with the focus on the buyer, not techniques employed.

Research on weighting of measures often examines only one incentive at a time (usually bonus) and provide mixed findings regarding the relevance of non-financial performance (NFM) measures to evaluate and reward long-term time horizon employees. Using proprietary data from an auto dealership organization, we show that financial measures (FM) are weighted more for bonus than they are weighted for merit raise and promotion but NFM are weighted more than FM for merit raise and promotion. Thus, the temporal orientations of the measures and incentives seem to be aligned: the short-term (long-term) nature of FM (NFM) parallel’s the time horizon of the incentives. Next, our exploratory research questions find that for bonuses, both FM and NFM exert similar levels of significant and positive influence on junior and senior managers. But for promotions, the influence of FM is insignificant for both groups. In contrast, the influence of NFM on promotions is not only significant for both groups but is significantly greater for junior managers than it is for senior managers. That is, the evaluations of NFM for senior managers are less influential on their promotion than they are for junior managers suggesting that promotions for senior managers are often based on factors other than their formal performances.

Subscription offerings are being hailed as the next service growth engine for companies in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. The study analyzes how a manufacturing firm can develop and implement a scalable service-based subscription business model for B2C and B2B customers alongside its existing product-centric model.

A longitudinal case study is conducted, drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with company executives and dealers in key European markets.

The study outlines an iterative process model for subscription business model innovation. It reveals key events and decisions taken in developing, implementing, and scaling the new business model and how internal and external tensions involving intermediaries arose and were mitigated during the four stages of the process.

The findings highlight the dynamics of business model innovation processes and underscore the importance of organizational learning, collaborative relationships with channel partners, and strategic talent acquisition during business model innovation.

The findings suggest how product-centric firms can implement new service business models alongside existing product models and what this means for partner and customer journey management.

While servitization research predominantly concerns B2B manufacturers, B2C research focuses on digital subscription contexts. The study bridges this divide by investigating the move to subscriptions in both markets.

This paper aims at understanding how automotive firms integrate customer relationship management (CRM) tools and big data analytics (BDA) into their marketing strategies to enhance total quality management (TQM) after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

A qualitative methodology based on a multiple-case study was adopted, involving the collection of 18 interviews with eight leading automotive firms and other companies responsible for their marketing and CRM activities.

Results highlight that, through the adoption of CRM technology, automotive firms have developed best practices that positively impact business performance and TQM, thereby strengthening their digital culture. The challenges in the implementation of CRM and BDA are also discussed.

The study suffers from limitations related to the findings' generalizability due to the restricted number of firms operating in a single industry involved in the sample.

Findings suggest new relational approaches and opportunities for automotive companies deriving from the use of CRM and BDA under an overall customer-oriented approach.

This research analyzes how CRM and BDA improve the marketing and TQM processes in the automotive industry, which is undergoing deep transformation in the current context of digital transformation.

This study aims to observe and discuss an emerging disintermediation in transportation, finance and health care, and explain how these three key areas depend on intermediary institutions that are the fruit of modern corporate governance conditions that find their roots in classical sociological theory.

The authors review and incorporate a diversity of research literature to explain the likelihood for the development and continuation of disintermediation.

The authors map two sociological perspectives (Emile Durkheim’s theory of interdependence and Herbert Spencer’s theory of contracts) to two modern corporate governance theories (resource dependence theory and agency theory). The authors then discuss the challenging social situation resulting from modern corporate governance and show how these conditions create the potential for a continuum of disintermediation across the specific and crucial economic sectors of transportation, finance and health care.

The implications of this theoretical integration can help organizational leaders navigate complex social and strategic issues and prepare for the consequences that may result from the emerging disintermediation.

Under a discontinuous and nonlinear compensation scheme, which is prevalent among car dealerships, the amount of a salesperson’s expected daily commission depends primarily on his position in the pay schedule on the day he makes a sale. Salespeople thus vary their efforts and adopt a different pricing strategy week by week, or even day by day. The purpose of this paper is to examine the incentive effect of such a nonlinear scheme and provide the evidence that salespeople’s behavior is consistent with the theory.

The authors conduct regression analyses using the transaction data provided by two North American auto dealerships. The authors construct a daily measure of varying incentive intensity and evaluate its impact on the distribution of individual daily sales and the dealership’s gross profit rate.

The authors find that the daily measure of varying incentive intensity has a positive effect on the distribution of individual daily sales and a negative impact on the dealership’s gross profit rate. The results suggest that: salespeople adjust their effort levels in response to the intensity of incentives; and they game the system by lowering the prices when the marginal return to doing so is high.

The study shows that there is a high cost associated with the discontinuous nonlinear pay scheme, raising the question of why many auto dealerships use it.

This paper sheds light on the undesirable aspects of discontinuous and nonlinear incentive schemes, varied performance and gaming, by quantifying the effects of the worker’s behavior.

New car dealerships play an integral role in the initial and on‐going relationship between the purchaser and vehicle manufacturer. Evidence, mostly anecdotal, suggests that the buying and servicing experience of the paying public in regards to new car dealerships is far from ideal. With continuous improvement systems such as total quality management (TQM) firmly embedded into the manufacturing and supply side of the car industry, questions still exist surrounding the level of quality being adopted by automotive dealerships. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate if a quality culture is being developed within the dealership network in South Australia by testing a number of key principles of TQM such as: the support and commitment from top management, customer focus and satisfaction, process management, and employee involvement.

A questionnaire survey was designed and all 105 new car dealerships in the greater Adelaide region were targeted. The service manager from each dealership was advised of the pending posted questionnaire and an excellent response rate of 66 percent was achieved.

Results indicated a reasonably high level of commitment to quality within dealerships, including the important success factors of TQM. Questions still remain about quality endorsement, the type of quality systems being used and the depth of penetration of quality at the ground level.

The limiting features of this study surround the descriptive nature of the data analysis and the fact that the study was only conducted in one major city in Australia.

The findings of this paper can give some implications for senior managers to consider when developing firm's policies.

Empirical studies on quality in automotive dealerships are very scarce in the literature. Therefore, this paper provides an insight into the quality culture of new car dealerships and examines if key TQM principles such as top management support, customer focus, process management, and employee involvement are in fact practised.

To provide a social‐theoretic framework which explains how e‐commerce affects social conditions, such as availability of information and equality of access to information, influences actors' behavior, shapes e‐commerce business models, and in turn impacts industry structure.

Empirical investigation based on one‐hour interviews with owners/managers of nine vehicle dealerships and six vehicle buyers in a large US metropolitan region. The hermeneutic method of understanding was used, involving a circular process from research design and attentiveness to data, to data collection and interpretation. This circular process exemplified the dialectic relationship between the theoretical framework (derived from Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action) and empirical data, through which interpretation and theoretical explanations grounded in the data emerged.

Demonstrates that e‐commerce gives rise to increasing competition among the dealers, decreasing prices and migration of competition to price, decreasing profitability of the average dealer, and erosion of traditional sources of competitive advantage. Moreover, e‐commerce emancipates and empowers vehicle purchasers while reducing the power of automobile dealers.

The research findings focus on the effects of e‐commerce on the automobile distribution industry. However, one could argue that a number of the findings extend to other retailing‐based industries.

The paper illustrates a research methodology that may be useful to study other e‐commerce applications.

This paper illustrates the application of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action to studying the effect of e‐commerce.