Scholars have questioned the effectiveness of several customer relationship management strategies. The author investigates the differential effects of customer relationship perceptions and relationship marketing instruments on customer retention and customer share development over time. Customer relationship perceptions are considered evaluations of relationship strength and a supplier's offerings, and customer share development is the change in customer share between two periods. The results show that affective commitment and loyalty programs that provide economic incentives positively affect both customer retention and customer share development, whereas direct mailings influence customer share development. However, the effect of these variables is rather small. The results also indicate that firms can use the same strategies to affect both customer retention and customer share development.

Two aspects of international marketing strategy standardization are process and program standardization. A framework for determining marketing program standardization is introduced. Factors affecting program standardization are examined critically. In an attempt to establish a research agenda on the standardization issue, the author develops research propositions for each factor.

This study investigates the effects of direct marketing communications and mass marketing communications on the adoption timing of a new e-service among existing customers. The mass marketing communications pertain to both specific new service advertising and brand advertising from both the focal supplier and the competitors. Using a split-hazard approach, the authors determine the effects of the considered marketing communications on adoption timing, accounting for a significant part of the customer base that never adopts the new e-service. They analyze individual adoption behavior with a sample of 6000 customers of a Dutch telecommunications operator over 25 months. The empirical results show that service advertising shortens the time to adoption, even when it is initiated by competitors. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of the interaction effects between relationship characteristics and marketing efforts suggests that certain mass marketing efforts have a greater effect on loyal customers.

Although prior research has addressed the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on perceived customer responses, it is not clear whether CSR affects market value of the firm. This study develops and tests a conceptual framework, which predicts that (1) customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between CSR and firm market value (i.e., Tobin's q and stock return), (2) corporate abilities (innovativeness capability and product quality) moderate the financial returns to CSR, and (3) these moderated relationships are mediated by customer satisfaction. Based on a large-scale secondary data set, the results show support for this framework. Notably, the authors find that in firms with low innovativeness capability, CSR actually reduces customer satisfaction levels and, through the lowered satisfaction, harms market value. The uncovered mediated and asymmetrically moderated results offer important implications for marketing theory and practice.

In this article, the authors try to determine why and under what conditions consumers enter into strong, committed, and meaningful relationships with certain companies, becoming champions of these companies and their products. Drawing on theories of social identity and organizational identification, the authors propose that strong consumer–company relationships often result from consumers’ identification with those companies, which helps them satisfy one or more important self-definitional needs. The authors elaborate on the nature of consumer–company identification, including the company identity, and articulate a consumer-level conceptual framework that offers propositions regarding the key determinants and consequences of such identification in the marketplace.

Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.

In business markets, the long-term nature of relationships may prompt parties to conduct “business as usual,” but negative critical incidents (CIs) can cause a destabilization of these long-term relationships. The authors develop a comprehensive dynamic model of customer loyalty to account for the impact of negative CIs on both the nature and the magnitude of the relationships between satisfaction and customer share. The results indicate that CIs trigger a stronger updating of the customer relationship, which moves customers from a business-as-usual mind-set to a reconsideration of the relationship. Furthermore, nonlinearities in the relationships are much more pronounced in the presence of CIs. Depending on the relationship quality, CIs have different consequences for customer relationships, and if relationship quality is high, a negative CI can even have a positive impact on customer share.

The authors seek to extend theory and empirical findings on interfirm influence strategies by examining their use in channel relationships between suppliers and distributors of industrial products. Research hypotheses are developed, centering on the reciprocal use of noncoercive and coercive influence strategies by the supplier and the distributor in the channel dyad and on the interrelationships of these strategies with the interfirm power, latent conflict, manifest conflict, and conflict resolution constructs. Data from a national survey of industrial distributors are used in testing the research hypotheses, which are generally supported by the empirical results.

Marketing academicians and practitioners have been observing for more than three decades that business performance is affected by market orientation, yet to date there has been no valid measure of a market orientation and hence no systematic analysis of its effect on a business's performance. The authors report the development of a valid measure of market orientation and analyze its effect on a business's profitability. Using a sample of 140 business units consisting of commodity products businesses and noncommodity businesses, they find a substantial positive effect of a market orientation on the profitability of both types of businesses.