Search

Given the exponentially growing rate of technological innovations, changing landscape of market competition, and evolving sources of competitive advantages, the current commentary – on the foundations of resource-based research streams and resource-advantage (R-A) theory of competition – aims to facilitate the scholarly dialogue on pursuing competitive advantages in the interactive digital marketplace. We position our commentary within the broader body of research to refine the current understanding of the relationships among resources, capabilities, and performance in the interactive digital marketplace. This assessment uncovered five research directions that we posit will shape the future of resource-based research addressing competitive advantages in the interactive digital marketplace. We close with a corresponding research agenda to guide scholars across disciplines looking to extend our understanding of organisational competitive advantage for the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability has become a consideration for every firm operating in today's business landscape. Scholars are tasked with uncovering bridges and barriers to successfully implement sustainability strategies, and the academic community has largely responded. However, while sustainability research has proliferated across business disciplines, it is conspicuously missing from professional selling and sales management. This is partly due to conceptual ambiguity, but also because sustainability generally involves firm-level policies and programs, and therefore domains like consumer behavior, marketing strategy, and supply chain management have occupied the space. This is problematic because while executives develop sustainability strategies, the sales force is responsible for conveying those priorities to external stakeholders. Therefore, the goals of our manuscript are to: 1) organize and refine the definition of sustainability in a professional selling context, 2) review relevant literature that examines sustainability in that context, 3) explore emergent themes from this review that 4) reveal gaps in our understanding, and 5) present a research agenda for sales scholars to bridge these gaps and advance our understanding of the role of sustainability in sales and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media and firm applications are two mobile service marketing mechanisms that rely on push or pull promotions to be effective. Literature, however, has yet to uncover how the promotions may complement each other when purposefully implemented. Our study examines this possibility in the grocery industry over three months. First, we create and manage a supermarket's Instagram profile, posting to the account (push promotion). Next, we compare performance measures with a third-party mobile app (pull promotion), which provides aggregated customer views and access to the supermarket profile. A time-series analysis reveals a sequential chain from push promotion to pull promotion to performance, the temporal effect of a push to pull, and the mediating effect from push to pull to purchase with an elasticity of.23. Results are important to those balancing push and pull promotional efforts and those involved with digital marketing and promotion in retailing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Dual-Process Model, salespeople might utilize intuitive and/or deliberate judgments to make sales decisions. These two systems are distinct and used in isolation by the decision-maker. On the contrary, the Uni-Process Model suggests an alignment between the two styles of thinking based on common rules and principles, meaning they are integrated into one decision-making process. The processes happen simultaneously, not independently. We subscribe to this logic and test these two judgments according to salespeople's perception across three studies. First, we examine salespeople in the shoe industry, second salespeople working in the retail banking, and finally through a comprehensive meta-analysis. We investigate the effects of salespeople's intuition, deliberation, and 'intuition-deliberation alignment' on sales performance through the mediating mechanism of acquisition-retention ambidexterity, finding effects across each context. While this does provide evidence that the two judgments may work well separately, it strongly supports the use of the Uni-Process Model to explain and predict sales outcomes. Specifically, while both intuitive and deliberate judgment isolate increase sales performance through salespeople's ambidextrous behavior, the newly created intuitive-deliberative alignment construct suggests that sales performance is higher when salespeople's intuitive and deliberative judgements are both high rather than when both are low, and this effect goes through A-R ambidexterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As role plays become increasingly popular in the sales curriculum, the challenge for instructors is how to motivate students to watch--and, ultimately, learn from--them. This paper examines how both students and faculty can benefit from video capture technology. We find that students perform better in their second role play when they watch their first one via video link. Further, the longer students watch, the more they improve. For faculty, it provides a systematic way to monitor individual progress and tailor student feedback. This innovation has implications for student incentive structures, role-play assessments, and classroom technology adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]