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This paper investigates the dynamic pricing strategy of a firm for the successive-generation products under the conditions of the limited trade-in duration and strategic customers. Further, it explores the effect of a limited trade-in duration on the choice of the myopic and strategic customers, besides the optimal dynamic pricing and trade-in strategy of the firm.

Based on the choice behavior of the myopic and strategic customers, the authors have developed a two-period game-theoretic analytical model to decide the optimal retail prices of the successive-generation products and the optimal trade-in rebate when the firm adopts a dynamic pricing strategy and then investigate three extensions of the basic model to discuss the change in the results owing to the relaxation of certain conditions.

The authors find from the results that, in terms of profit maximization, it is better to extend the limited trade-in duration, and hence, the firm should implement a dynamic pricing strategy. However, in the situation of using a static pricing strategy, the firm should extend the limited trade-in duration only if the incremental value of the new generation products is below a certain threshold. Moreover, the firm should use a dual rollover strategy instead of a single rollover one. If all customers in the market are myopic, then the firm should also extend the limited trade-in duration.

This study mainly discusses the impact of limited trade-in duration on the firm's dynamic pricing strategy when facing strategic customers, which provides several directions for future research. First, if the government offers subsidies to consumers, how will strategic consumers make purchase decisions? How would the enterprise make its pricing decision? Second, when asymmetric information exists between consumers and firms, how will it affect consumers' choice behavior and firms' pricing decisions? All these issues are worth exploring in the future.

These results offer certain managerial insights for the firm in the decision making on pricing within the trade-in program.

This is the first work to study the dynamic pricing strategy of the firm for the successive-generation products under the conditions of the limited trade-in duration and strategic customers. Further, this work discusses the changes in results owing to the relaxation of certain conditions.

The paper aims at generating a better understanding of the design elements and related management practices of strategic account management programs, in order to assist firms wishing to design such programs.

The research process is based on systematic combining of literature, empirical data from interviews with nine multi‐national firms, interaction with the firms during the research, and the knowledge resource base of the Strategic Account Management Association.

A strategic account management program (SAMP) is defined as a relational capability, involving task‐dedicated actors, who allocate resources of the firm and its strategically most important customers, through management practices that aim at inter‐ and intra‐organizational alignment, in order to improve account performance (and ultimately shareholder value creation). The research identified four inter‐organizational alignment design elements: account portfolio definition, account business planning, account‐specific value proposition, account management process; and four intra‐organizational design elements: organizational integration, support capabilities, account performance management, account team profile and skills. The management practices pertinent to each element are discussed.

Firms need to ensure that a SAMP is configured so that there is fit between the design elements discussed. Focus should be put on identifying framing elements that set the foundation for configuring effective programs, as they determine the prerequisites for other elements.

The paper contributes to the literature on strategic account management by summarizing extant research and developing an organizing framework, informed by an empirical study.

This study aims to examine how brands attempt to extend their customer set not through the typical route of adding brands, but through the strategic extension or enlargement of their target customer set. Building on theories from both reference group perceptions and brand identification, this research explores the impact of strategic customer extensions on current target market consumers.

Two scenario-based experiments explore strategic customer extensions for a packaged goods brand and a well-known retail brand. The analysis involves both analysis of variance and SEM methods.

Current target market consumers’ evaluations of strategic customer extensions are informed by reference group perceptions relating to the proposed customer extension. When current target market consumers perceive strategic customer extensions as potentially attracting a dissociative reference group, consumers have weaker evaluations and brand identification measures and, subsequently, weaker future intentions towards the brand.

The brand identification literature is augmented by incorporating theories from the reference group literature to demonstrate how to reference group perceptions drive a current target market consumers’ evaluations of strategic customer extensions to affect the strength of the identification that current target market consumers have with a brand. Brand identification is also demonstrated as mediator customer evaluations and subsequent intentions towards the brand.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of reference effect on newsvendor’s decision behavior in a market with strategic customers and work out the newsvendor’s optimal pricing policy and ordering quantity.

This study utilizes the prospect theory and strategic customer framework to analyze the decision-making behavior on the newsvendor’s optimal pricing policy and ordering quantity. The paper further presents an extension of newsvendor model and provides the model’s properties. The paper finally analyzes the results with various parameters on the model and reports on the insights generated by the model.

The paper indicates that the ordering quantity is not altered with the changing proportion of strategic customers and myopic customers, but the ordering quantity and the pricing strategy are influenced in terms of newsvendor’s reference effect, loss aversion, product cost, and salvage price.

The research findings have important implications for decision makers. Previous researches have studied the incomplete rationality newsvendor’s decision-making behavior mainly by analyzing the vendor’s risk preferences or loss aversion, but the effect of reference point also plays an important role in analyzing the decision-maker’s behavior. The paper provides the optimal pricing policy and ordering quantity with the reference effect considering the strategic customers behavior. This model is also a valid complementarity to behavioral operations management research area.

The paper examines the role of reference effect in newsvendor problem with the strategic customers and analyzes the impact of parameters such as loss aversion on the newsvendor’s decision behavior.

The strategy of carefully selecting the most important group of business customers for special treatment – for which several terms are in use – has come in for considerable recent attention from both academics and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to examine “strategic account management” at a large telecommunications operator in a developing country (“Arab Telco”).

The paper presents an in‐depth single‐company case study.

The approach to strategic account management employed by Arab Telco shows excellent fit with the recommendations of Western authorities about the implementation of such programs. In particular, there is evidence that the program is being implemented sincerely, with the allocation of additional resources to the strategic account function and the delivery of special treatment to strategic account customers. However, the strategic account program is still relatively immature and the term “key account management” is also in use at Arab Telco; this term refers to many customers who are not of particular strategic significance to the company.

Further research is needed into the impact of culture‐specific factors on the implementation of strategic account management. The transference of Western marketing models to emerging economies offers fruitful scope for additional research.

The paper examines the direct transfer of a well‐known Western management technique – i.e. strategic account management – to a major company in an emerging economy in the Arab world.

This paper aims to focus on changes in the way in which business‐to‐business companies are responding to customer and market pressures for higher service and relational investments, and the need for new capabilities in managing the business risk in the company's customer portfolio. The paper seeks to propose a model of the strategic sales organization as a basis for management review of how to realign sales, account management, and marketing processes around customers to achieve and sustain superior customer value.

The study traces the emergence of new pressures and mandates which are changing management thinking about the “front‐end” of organizations and edging companies towards a revolution in the role of sales, account management and marketing comparable to earlier reinventions in operations and supply chain strategy.

The outcome of the review is a model of the imperatives for the strategic sales organization.

The model produced in the review provides a tool or framework for executive consideration of the strategic sales issue, both in evaluating the strategic role and performance of the existing sales and account management structures and in designing new roles for delivering competitive strength in the future.

While the strategic role of the sales organization has been discussed in the literature, this paper provides a practical framework for executives to use in addressing the potential role of the strategic sales organization. The framework also highlights promising research directions for marketing and sales scholars.

Customer knowledge has not yet been recognized as a possible source of strategic competitive advantage in expansion of the knowledge-based view. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to gain initial insights into the strategic dimension of customers knowledge in order to enable companies to define, identify and motivate the right customers and work with them together on a strategically successful level.

The following single case study is based on semi-structured interviews with nine employees and strategic customers as well as a document analysis in an entrepreneurially oriented smaller firm equipped with limited resources.

The findings demonstrate that strategic customers take on a valuable position within the company. It appears that the strategic customer is more aware of his/her value than the company itself. A definition and first criteria of strategic customers could be determined and a systematic identification of strategic customers is possible with the help of this study.

The paper is an empirical contribution to the existing customer knowledge management literature and aids in gaining further insight into the definition, identification and motivation of strategic customers. A definition is derived based on a literature study and developed further through the results of the empirical analysis. An additional result of the empirical study showed that customer oriented knowledge management is a promising bridge between the knowledge- and market-based view.

The apparent lack of resources in entrepreneurially oriented smaller firms can be overcome through the addition of external knowledge resources, which the paper refers to as strategic customers.

Performance measurement and management (PMM) literature is highly abundant with numerous PMM frameworks encapsulating various aspects of enterprise performance that are largely driven by enterprise viewpoint. Considering dynamic nature of Indian telecom industry where customers hold high bargaining power in the industry, flexible strategy game-card has been adopted as a theoretical basis. The purpose of this study is to capture an “outside-in view” of enterprise performance by incorporating performance measurement from customers’ perspective and highlight dual perspectives of performance, i.e. enterprise and customers’.

Rigorous empirical data analysis tools have been used on the data collated through opinion survey to develop strategic performance management model for Indian telecom service providers where mediation effects of customers’-based strategic factors have also been captured.

The findings emphasize the fact that financial performance indicators are outcome variables that are driven by the external environment, internal organizational structure and business processes. An effective performance management system (PMS) should consist enabling performance indicators (customers’ perspective) in addition to leading and lagging performance indicators that are widely discussed in the literature.

The set of performance indicators identified is in the context of Indian telecom service operators, which should be used in another context with full caution. The generalization of the empirically validated strategic performance management model in other country context is limited. However, the process of development of PMS could be taken as an example to replicate in any other context.

Measuring an enterprise performance from customers’ perspective is the major contribution of this study. With the diverse set of performance indicators, effective PMS can be developed and deployed where tangible measures act as lagging indicators, namely, situational and operational, strategic measures act as leading indicators, and subscribers’ crucial assessment measures act as enabling indicators.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

This study aims to suggest a moderated mediation model addressing how internal integration interacts with information technology (IT) link with external customers to meet customer needs more efficiently and effectively.

This study tests the proposed hypotheses by using 268 data collected from manufacturing firms worldwide.

The results of this study reveal that internal integration plays a very important role in promoting customer satisfaction directly and indirectly by enhancing the ability to meet customers’ flexibility needs. In addition, the results show that IT link with customers strengthens this indirect influencing relationship.

By combining IT connectedness with external customers with internal capability, this study provides valuable insights into how manufacturing firms apply internal integration more effectively to enhance customer satisfaction.