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This study aims to delve into the influence of corporate social responsibility on the corporate brand performance of Indian business-to-business (B2B) companies.

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices have been measured through CSR disclosure index (CDI), generated by surveying annual reports/CSR reports/websites of 131 Indian B2B firms. The same was mapped to corporate brand performance of these firms, measured as customer-based corporate brand equity, which was measured through a questionnaire-survey of purchasing managers and users working in firms that are customers to the above-mentioned firms.

The result reveals the positive influence of CSR practices in shoring up corporate brand performance.

CDI has been developed based on CSR reporting across the stakeholder groups. However, the impact has been mapped onto one stakeholder category, the customer. The sample period was only one year, and the data is cross-sectional. Future studies may investigate the long-term effect of CSR using longitudinal data on larger data sets.

This study will encourage Indian B2B firms to practice CSR not only for conforming to the regulatory requirements but also as a strategic tool in strengthening the competitive advantage.

It is the first study of its kind to evaluate the imprint of corporate social responsibility, measured based on CSR reporting by firms, on corporate brand performance. It looks into the return earned by firms from the resources invested in CSR activities.

The purpose of this study is to understand customer experience (CX) in business-to-business (B2B) markets through the perspectives of buyer–seller dyads. This study aims to evaluate how customer journey, touchpoints and digital and social media (DSM) influence CX and offer avenues for sellers to align their efforts with buyers’ requirements to create and manage CX.

Integrating insights of practicing buyers and sellers in the pharmaceutical B2B industry, this study follows the phenomenological approach to understand their experience through their perspectives on the customer journey, touchpoints and DSM.

The findings of this study include convergence in the perspectives in journey stages, journey enablers, stakeholder involvement, touchpoint preference and DSM’s use. The study findings also include divergence in perspectives in the senior management engagement, journey enablers, selling center involvement, DSM purpose and usage of DSM platforms. These offer opportunities for sellers to align with buyer journey, touchpoints and DSM to create and manage CX.

Sellers in pharmaceutical B2B markets have been dependent on traditional knowledge to influence customer journey and touchpoints and the advent of DSM has enhanced the challenge. To avoid this confusion, sellers need to have clarity of customers’ expectations on the journey, touchpoints and DSM. This enables sellers to allocate their resources better to achieve the desired outcome in CX.

This first-of-its-kind study captured the convergence and divergence perspectives of pharmaceutical B2B buyer–seller dyads from the lens of the uncertainty reduction theory and social penetration theory. The study suggests opportunities for pharmaceutical sellers to create and manage CX.

Considerable amount of purchases in business-to-business (B2B) markets make through the tendering process. As technology keeps driving B2B procurement, both the supplier/contractor and buyer firms have settled down in their respective roles in the electronic-tendering environment. Researchers have ignored the supplier-side e-tender-driven marketing process that might lead to substantively successful financial performance. The purpose of this study is to improve the performance of an e-tender-driven marketing process of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) incorporating the stakeholder's inputs.

Discrete event simulation modelling (DESM) has been used as a methodology to model, analyse and improve the process with the involvement of stakeholders at every stage of the study. Different scenarios are analysed to identify the near-optimal scenario based on agreed-upon key performance indicators.

Scenario that incorporated man-power sharing and eliminating avoidable activities gives the near-optimal solution for implementation.

This study highlights that better insights can be gained by adopting the process-oriented view of the marketing–operations interface. Embracing a stakeholder-based consultative approach gives research a more practical outlook and reduces the gap between theory and practice. Suggestions for further research are provided.

B2B organizations, where lines between marketing and operations are blurred, can improve their marketing processes by implementing operations research tools.

This study provides an attempt to improve the performance of a supplier-side e-tender-driven marketing process of an OEM using the DESM methodology incorporating stakeholder's inputs.

The purpose of this paper is to study practices associated with corporate brand alignment enacted by marketing managers in an emerging business to business market.

The “Marketing-as-practice” perspective is used to examine brand alignment-related practices. A five months fieldwork was undertaken wherein primary data were collected using in-depth interviews of 30 managers representing steel, mining, energy, engineering consulting and Information Technology/Information Technology-Enabled Services' sectors along with observational data from event sites and industry meets. Secondary data stemmed from marketing plans and events' rosters. Data were analysed adopting the practice turn.

The constitution of three practices concerning brand alignment is unearthed: (1) practice of identifying key stakeholders, (2) practice of narrativization of brand promises and (3) practice of engaging key stakeholders.

This study highlights the dynamic nature of corporate brand alignment requiring a continuous gap analysis to verify coherency between internal and external brand elements. It also highlights the elicited relation between alignment, authenticity and advocacy. Suggestions for further research are provided.

This study elucidates managers' role as intrapreneurs in the process of alignment and provides a possible solution to the new marketing myopia which impairs stakeholder management.

This research identifies that brand alignment is not an abstract concept but a set of practices that help convert the symbolic capital held in brands into cultural and social capital.

This study aims to evaluate Netemeyer and colleagues' much cited financial well-being scale in Brazil and India and compare responses from different demographics. It also compares the results using two analysis techniques, item response theory (IRT) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

A total of 994 survey responses from Brazil and 1,081 from India were collected. IRT and CFA models were used to analyse the data.

The results demonstrate the two-dimensional structure of the financial well-being scale and show that different items are differentially useful in measuring the construct across different groups. These findings may support the scale's future refinement and use in applied studies that will target specific groups (e.g. males, females, younger respondents and older respondents).

This study serves as an example to others who can explore the advantages of IRT over classical test theory methods to assess the psychometric properties of scales aimed at measuring latent constructs of interest in the field of marketing.

The correct diagnosis of financial well-being is important to guide interventions by governments and non-governmental entities, as well as by financial institutions interested in better understanding individuals.

The authors show how the identification of the characteristics of scale items provided by the IRT technique allows for a better understanding of its properties and how it can be improved.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Customer experience is now a relevant and important element to B2B sales, with investments in this area demonstrating increasing competitive advantage.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) was mandated and institutionalised in India through the Companies Act (2013), a decade ago. It is critical to understand the priorities of the models used by the companies to effectuate their CSR policy. This paper aims to understand the skewing of interest towards Education and Health interventions. The paper then proposes a framework to cross-level and effectuate CSR programme implementation.

The qualitative study conducted in-depth interviews of the stakeholders from the CSR environment. The findings are used to derive a model to effectuate CSR in India.

The findings may be divided into two sub-themes – (a) observations from the field study and (b) integrated solution ecosystem (ISE) framework. The qualitative study and the insights form the first component. The proposed framework which can enhance the efficiency of CSR practices may be found in the second sub-theme.

Operationalisation of the proposed model, if adopted would require integrated efforts from multiple functional departments which could lead to an extended timeframe for implementation. This may eventually lead to a need to revise the model in the making. The research could also include perspectives from governmental stakeholders which is missing here.

The emerging model can present an opportunity for corporates and policymakers to revisit the CSR structure and frameworks. It can also be used to evaluate and audit the CSR practices of companies.

The ISE posits a bunch of actionable themes which can deliver an impactful transition from the existing approach to CSR to a more far reaching one. While the ground rules are revisited, the approach also allows a critical departure from a corporate-driven model of engagement with the community. The modifications or corrections in this model would also mean a more inclusive layering of developmental interventions. The diversity which could potentially be brought in to designing interventions can be another key impact.

This paper presents insights for some of the pivotal stakeholders of CSR in countries like India. It presents a possible model of effective and optimal utilisation of CSR spending.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between economic development and financial sector development for 28 countries at different stages of their development. The authors specifically focus on the nature of causality during economic boom and tranquil cycles.

The study uses quarterly time series panels of 17 developed and 11 emerging countries, during 1993Q1-2014Q4 with each having three sub-panels – full sample, a period of the economic uptrend (UP), and period of the economic downtrend. The authors use a univariate analysis for initial screening followed by panel unit root test, panel co-integration and causality test proposed by Toda–Yamamoto to examine the causal relationship.

The principal results suggest that for developed economies, there is a causal flow from financial sector to real sector in line with the “supply-leading” hypothesis, whereas for emerging economies, it is from real sector to financial sector, in line with the “demand-following” hypothesis. This overall relationship is strong for both emerging and developed economies during economic boom or UP cycles, but becomes weak during economic downturns or tranquil periods.

This study is different from previous studies on this issue and contributes to the existing literature in a number of ways. First, the focus of this paper revolves around identification of differential patterns in causal flows between real and financial sectors for different economies, across different economic cycles. Second, to present a robust representation of financial sector, the authors consider both banking sector and stock market parameters as the proxy for financial sector development. Third, the authors address the “stock-flow problem” in the measurement of financial variables a typical criticism of some of the previous studies. Finally, the authors use a rich sample size comprising of about 2,500 quarterly observations for each variable, with about 1,500 observations from developed and 1,000 from emerging economies.

Nonperforming assets in any banking system have stressed the economic health of nations. Resultantly, literature has given considerable impetus to predict failures and bankruptcy. Past studies have focused on the outcome of failures, while, there is a dearth of studies focusing on ongoing firms in bad shape. We plug this gap and attempt to identify underlying communication patterns for firms witnessing prolonged underperformance. Using text mining, we extract and analyze semantic, linguistic, emotional, and sentiment-based features in non-numeric communication channels of these poor-performing firms and their peers. These uncovered patterns highlight the use of vocabulary and tone of communication, in correspondence to their financial well-being. Furthermore, using such patterns, we deploy various Machine Learning algorithms to identify loser firm(s) way ahead in time. We observe promising accuracy over a time window of five years. Such early warning signals can be of critical importance to various stakeholders of a firm. Exploration of writing style-related features for any firm would help its investors, lending agencies to assess the likelihood of future underperformance. Firm management can use them to take suitable precautionary measures and preempt the future possibility of distress. While investors and lenders can be benefitted from this incremental information to identify the likelihood of future failures.

The enormous amount of waste generated and the scarcity of natural resources worldwide have encouraged societies and industries to adopt the Circular Supply Chain (CSC) concept. With a focus on zero-waste generation, Circular Economy (CE) mimics the ecosystem cycle as an alternative to the traditional linear economic model. This paper aims to investigate the evolution of research themes in this research area, hence, trace the trajectory of development in the field of CSC.

The authors conduct scientometric analysis using Pajek and VOSviewer software to identify key themes in the Circular Supply Chain Management (CSCM) field. The Citation Path Analysis (CPA), including Main Path and Local Path analysis, has been followed by a critical review of the papers. This paper includes highlighting the interrelationships between the information flows in the topic of study as well as an analysis of keywords co-occurrence.

The analysis of keywords co-occurrence revealed that the earlier years of research in CSC were more inclined toward value chain, stakeholders and green supply chains, whereas, in recent years, topics like logistics, Industry 4.0 and food supply chain have been more focused upon. Further, the Main Path Analysis (MPA) revealed an evolving trajectory that examines challenges and opportunities in CSC, the economic aspects of implementing CSC, the impact on the firm's revenue growth and collaboration between multiple echelons of a supply chain and Industry 4.0.

The adoption of scientometrics analysis unveils the hidden flow of information, various themes of research and their interconnections. The development of research trajectories and progressive attention paid to certain topics is also discovered. The research findings could be used by researchers for further theoretical and research development.

This paper traces the path of development in the field of CSC and its emerging trends and provides a thorough understanding of the same. It enables research scholars to conduct an in-depth study in the CSC domain, adding to the body of literature.