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Myopic marketing spending—curtailing marketing and research and development expenses to boost earnings—damages firms' long-term value. Despite this, top management teams are often myopic, and by the time investors or boards detect such short-termism, it is too late to react or intervene. This research introduces a novel prediction method by analyzing the language top management teams use in earnings calls, specifically focusing on marketing and earnings emphasis, to predict future instances of myopic marketing spending. Through linguistic dependency parsing of almost 11 million sentences extracted from nearly 25,000 quarterly earnings call transcripts of 1,197 firms between 2008 and 2019, the authors demonstrate that the proposed approach can predict myopic marketing spending at a quarterly frequency for up to one year in advance. They find that an increase of one standard deviation in earnings emphasis is associated with a 23.68% increase in the likelihood of future myopic marketing spending. Investments based on the proposed approach produce 1.61% additional annual abnormal returns compared with models that exclusively use known predictors of myopic marketing spending, while offering earlier foresight and more frequent opportunities for intervention. This reduces information asymmetry for investors and boards of directors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sales management students carry certain misconceptions about sales jobs, which often create confusion in their minds about the nature of the sales job- should they be customer-oriented or sales-oriented? To excel in the initial years of their careers as effective salespersons, students might emphasize sales-orientation or target achievement over customer-orientation. This might force them to choose manipulative practices in their professional lives. The orientation also depends upon the gender and prior sales experience of the students. Thus, if the instructors could assess the students' orientation, i.e., sales-orientation or customer-orientation, which they would practice during the job in advance, they could mentor them with proper inputs. The present study is an attempt to predict such orientations of the students by using a modified version of the SOCO scale. The findings suggest that gender and prior sales experience play a significant role in predicting the students' orientation in some cases.

The extensive use of social media has resulted in higher customer engagement, and firms use these platforms to communicate with customers, share information about brands and improve brand popularity. Social media provides the same platform for customers to share their views about firms and brands. Online communities or groups on social media facilitate interactions and information sharing among members. When the group members start using these social media platforms to post negative views, it is termed trolling. Customer comments on social media are crucial in shaping a firm's reputation; therefore, when a brand falls short of customer expectations, they might feel cheated and betrayed and indulge in brand trolling activities termed Brand Trolling Engagement Behavior (BTEB). Customer comments on social media are crucial in shaping a firm's reputation and significantly impact the brand. Trolling is an emerging research topic, and empirical studies on brand trolling are relatively scarce. This paper attempts to develop and validate a scale to measure customers' BTEB and, subsequently, the impact of trolling on a brand. The data for the study was gathered from respondents in stages. Two factors, agitation and dissatisfaction, were obtained in the results, which explain the reasons why customers troll a brand on social media. Significant results were obtained where customers feel that brand trolling is a challenge for the firms and it affects the popularity and image of the brand. The research provides insights about the BTEB of customers on social media and would help the firms to manage customer-brand relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why some brands are able to ride the wave of macroeconomic expansions, whereas other brands are better able to successfully weather contractions. Using a utility-based framework, the authors develop hypotheses on how the impact of these shocks on brand equity is moderated by six strategic brand factors: price positioning, advertising spending, product line length, distribution breadth, brand architecture, and market position. The authors utilize monthly data on 325 national consumer packaged goods brands in 35 categories across 17 years from the United Kingdom to obtain quarterly sales-based brand equity estimates. The two preeminent brand factors are distribution and assortment. Distribution is by far the most important factor in contractions. It is also the most important factor in expansions. In short, in good times and bad times, extensively distributed brands win. A wide assortment is also a strong contributor to brand equity in expansions, while it does not destroy brand equity in contractions. The authors further find that advertising spending, premium price positioning, umbrella branding structure, and market leadership matter in expansions and/or contractions, and the magnitude of their effects on brand equity is relatively modest. The discussion concludes with managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the way customers shop, accompanied by an explosion of customer touchpoints and fast-changing competitive and technological dynamics, have led to an increased emphasis on agile marketing. The objective of this article is to conceptualize and investigate the emerging concept of marketing agility. The authors synthesize the literature from marketing and allied disciplines and insights from in-depth interviews with 22 senior managers. Marketing agility is defined as the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market. It is conceptualized as occurring across different organizational levels and shown to be distinct from related concepts in marketing and allied fields. The authors highlight the firm challenges in executing marketing agility, including ensuring brand consistency, scaling agility across the marketing ecosystem, managing data privacy concerns, pursuing marketing agility as a fad, and hiring marketing leaders. The authors identify the antecedents of marketing agility at the organizational, team, marketing leadership, and employee levels and provide a roadmap for future research. The authors caution that marketing agility may not be well-suited for all firms and all marketing activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essence of a brand is that it delivers on its promises. However, consumers' trust in brands (CTB) has declined around the world in recent decades. As a result, CTB has become a major concern for managers. The authors examine whether CTB is influenced by marketing-mix activities (i.e. advertising, new product introduction, distribution, price, and price promotion) implemented by brands. The authors propose and show that the sensitivity of CTB to marketing-mix activities is moderated by consumer, category, and country characteristics, using a multisource data set consisting of a survey of 15,073 respondents and scanner panel data on 589 brands in 46 CPG categories across 13 countries (including the four largest emerging markets), which collectively account for half of the world's population. The authors find strong positive effects for advertising and new product introduction intensity, weak positive effects for price and distribution intensity, and a minor negative effect for price promotion intensity on CTB. Furthermore, the authors find that the effect of marketing-mix activities on CTB is moderated by consumers' personality traits, consumers' reliance on brands in a category, and countries' secular-rational and self-expression cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differences in the behaviors of high (HIT) and low inventory turnover (LIT) retailers in responding to demand shocks. We identify quantity and price responsiveness as two [...]

In this article, we analyze how retailers change their inventory investment behavior in response to macroeconomic shocks. We examine if service level, as measured by the ratio of stockout to inventory holding costs, can explain the differences in observed behavior across retailers. We use data on macroeconomic indicators and quarterly filings of US public retailers from 1985 to 2009 to estimate a dynamic model of short- and long-term impact of macroeconomic shocks on inventory investment. Our results show that retailers with a high service level increase their inventory investment significantly more than those with a low service level during expansion shocks. Conversely, retailers with a low service level curtail their inventory investment significantly more than those with a high service level during periods of economic contractions. Thus, we show that the aggregate change in inventory investment documented in prior macroeconomics research is driven by different sets of retailers, as predicted by newsvendor logic. We draw implications of our findings to retailers as well as their suppliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]