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Innovation is attracting increasing attention from public authorities, enterprises, and academics. Although emerging evidence has indicated that marketing innovation should be regarded as critical as technological innovations for enhancing companies' competitiveness, few studies have considered this topic. This study aims to address this gap by examining the role of marketing innovation in the relationship between technological innovation and innovation success and failure. This study analyses the 2010–2012 Community Innovation Survey sample of German enterprises by using a double hurdle model and a probit model with sample selection. The results show that when enterprises undertake a technological innovation, introducing a marketing innovation is observed not to play a significant role regarding innovation success and failure. Notably, when the four types of marketing innovations are disentangled in the analysis, new findings emerge. Innovation in product packaging and design is positively related to innovation success. Innovation in product promotion is negatively related to innovation success and positively related to probability of innovation failure. Academics are called to study the role of marketing innovation, regarding innovation success and failure, by devoting their attention to the level of each marketing innovation. Enterprises should then carefully consider which marketing innovation should be introduced.

Store flyers are one of the most important media used to feature retail and manufacturer promotions. Yet the body of research on their effectiveness on customer behaviour demonstrates significant gaps. We addressed this by conducting a field experiment with over 9000 members of a retailer's loyalty programme to identify what drives customers to read flyers and understand how flyer distribution and readership impact upon customer purchase behaviour. The results show that flyer distribution and flyer readership do not seem to change purchase behaviour. However, they confirm that flyer proneness, loyalty to the retailer, subscription to its newsletter, and household size all positively contribute to the likelihood of flyer readership. Our findings thus call upon retailers to significantly revise their flyer distribution strategy and reconsider the role of store flyers within their communication and marketing strategies.

This study attempts to answer the question of whether European manufacturing firms that undertake offshoring, innovation or both benefit from higher productivity and profitability. From a methodological point of view, the driving forces that push firms to innovate and/or to offshore can be seen as self-selection mechanisms that make the estimation of their economic impact more difficult if the confounding factors affecting these mechanisms also affect the economic performance of the firms. To disentangle the effect of both offshoring and innovation on firms’ performances from the effect of firm characteristics, the propensity score matching methodology in a multi-overlapping treatment setting is used. The study targets European countries using the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-Unicredit dataset. Decisions to offshore and innovate do not seem to have a significant effect on productivity, whereas the decision to innovate only has a significant effect on firm profitability.