Search results

The promotion mix is the combination of personal selling, advertising, and sales promotion used to achieve marketing objectives. The objective‐and‐task method is used in practice to develop a single promotion mix plan. This is practical but has drawbacks: (1) only one promotion strategy and mix is considered, and (2) decision making is taken out of the hands of senior marketing management. This paper sets forth a decision‐making process by which alternative promotion strategies and mixes are generated so that senior marketing management can choose the one that is most promising.

Too often companies using a manufacturing strategy of mass production have been hard hit by competition from inexpensively produced imports. But many companies that do remain competitive are developing a flexible specialization strategy. This strategy allows them to be more entrepreneurial in their manufacturing approach by both accommodating and creating rapid market changes.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which hubristic behaviour on the part of Thomas Farrow contributed to the downfall of Farrow's Bank in 1920.

The article traces the way in which Thomas Farrow's behaviour changed over the course of his managerial career using primary sources obtained from various British archives, including: court records, witness statements, auditors' reports, newspapers, journals, and personal letters. The article then evaluates Farrow's actions in relation to the criteria outlined in Petit and Bollaert's “Framework for diagnosing CEO hubris” so as to assess how far he can be said to have become afflicted by managerial hubris.

All the collected evidence points to the conclusion that Thomas Farrow had, by the time of the Bank's collapse in 1920, become afflicted by managerial hubris. This was reflected most clearly in the fact that he increasingly came to view himself as being somehow above and beyond the laws of the wider community. As a result, he felt little compunction about fraudulently writing-up the Bank's assets so as to cover the huge losses that his reckless investments had produced.

The Farrow's Bank episode confirms that the probability of management hubris materialising is enhanced when external control mechanisms are either lacking or inefficiently applied. On top of this, the amateurish organizational set-up of the Bank also suggests that the likelihood of hubris syndrome developing is enhanced when organizations themselves grant too much discretion to their leaders.

The paper breaks new ground by applying the latest management and psychology theories on the subject of leadership hubris to the field of financial management. Its value lies in the fact that it provides scholars and practitioners with an in-depth insight into how hubris syndrome can develop in organizational settings.

Customer experience is increasingly recognized as a source of competitive advantage. Customer experience refers to customers' responses and reactions to cues within touchpoints along customer journeys. Nowadays, customers often interact with online touchpoints – such as social media, websites, or e-commerce – in their customer journeys. Given that customer experience is multidimensional, this chapter addresses the following question: How can sensorial experiences be triggered in online touchpoints? Based on a review of the literature on customer experience and sensory marketing, four challenges in triggering sensorial experiences in online touchpoints are identified: (1) limited sensorial cues, (2) lack of thematic congruence between online and offline touchpoints, (3) sensory overload, and (4) lesser control over sensorial cues. Then, two routes through which organizations can trigger sensorial experiences in online touchpoints are proposed: (1) directly influencing sensations through sensory-enabling technologies, and (2) indirectly influencing sensorial perceptions through the use of sensory and nonsensory cues. The chapter closes with a presentation of a model that describes the process of triggering sensorial experiences in online touchpoints as well as a checklist of relevant questions for practitioners who wish to do so.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the practices, challenges and ethical issues underlying the fabric and dissemination of corporate sustainability ratings.

Based on 36 semi-structured interviews with sustainability rating practitioners, the study shows the trade-offs, ethical judgments and customizable aspects involved in rating practices, which cannot rely only on formal and predefined methods.

In contrast with the official optimistic rhetoric about the rationality and rigor of sustainability rating methods, agencies face serious challenges in the measurement and comparison of performance in this area, particularly in terms of the aggregation of scattered and fuzzy indicators, commercial pressures and the availability, materiality and reliability of the information collected. Despite these concerns, sustainability ratings do appear to be useful in improving corporate responsiveness and increasing investor awareness of the complex and difficult-to-measure aspects of nonfinancial reports.

Rating agencies should collaborate to set up common indicators that would be easier for firms to produce and should better separate their sustainability rating production activities from other services they offer to companies (e.g. consultancy).

This study contributes to the literature on the measurement and promotion of corporate sustainability by analyzing rating practices through the lens of moral fictionalism, which here refers to the human tendency to build ethical judgments on fictional but convenient and useful representations.

Three decades of academic and professional discourse on HR technologies (HRTs) have produced continued disagreement over construct definitions and research streams that are highly fragmented. These realities suggest that greater consistency in meanings is sorely needed if we are to integrate and upgrade knowledge in this area. This chapter draws on the findings of a systematic research review to properly define the content domains of human resource information systems (HRIS), virtual human resources (virtual HR), electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and business-to-employee (B2E) systems. An integrative synthesis was performed on 242 system-level writings that appeared in the literature from 1983 to 2017. The weight of the evidence strongly supports treating HRIS, virtual HR, e-HRM, and B2E systems as independent, complimentary constructs. While the first three comprise a firm’s HRT system, the fourth construct is more appropriately positioned in the business-collaborative system. The sample was further evaluated with an analytic framework to detect patterns of practice in research designs. This revealed that much more attention has been focused on system actions and outcomes than on attitudes and system characteristics. Different units of analysis were well represented aside from trans-organizational studies. Finally, a case is made for better contextualizing HRT research by recognizing differences in assimilation stage, functional penetration, and collective proficiency. These factors are rarely mentioned, let alone studied, raising additional concerns about measurement error. Detailed suggestions are offered on ways to incorporate them. Together, these materials should promote more sophisticated and generalizable assessments of technology, improving our ability to understand its impacts.

The aim of this chapter is to propose a critical analysis of socially responsible investing (SRI) through debate and reconstruction. Our goal is therefore to try to understand how the definition of ethics in finance has steered SRI towards a financial approach where ethics is guided by finance.

This chapter proposes a two-point approach consisting of a meta-debate and development perspectives. Each approach is divided into three debates (ideological and philosophical, scientific and practical), which are interconnected.

The chapter concludes that the debate on mainstream SRI is necessary but should be re-discussed, as it is preventing in its current form the concept from developing and being grounded in real ethical values, sacrificing the individual ethics that should be driving investing decisions.

The chapter proposes to rethink the paradigm around SRI through a conceptual framework that re-inserts finance within ethics, where non-financial performance and impact investment should be at the centre of the scientific debates, leading to an SRI based on exclusion, the consideration of controversies and social impact measurement.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).