Knowledge that Transforms

Recent trends in industrial markets indicate that buyers and sellers are increasingly supplanting conventional “arm's length” arrangements with “alliances” involving closer ties. The authors develop a theoretical model of industrial buyer-supplier ties that presents joint action as a key aspect of closeness. Whereas conventional ties emphasize a clearly defined division of labor, these newer relationships are distinguished by more tightly integrated roles based on undertaking activities jointly. Drawing primarily on a normative theory of transaction costs, the authors identify the conditions under which these relationships are useful. The utility of the relationships derives from an ability to safeguard relationship-specific investments and to facilitate adaptation to uncertainty. Using data from a sample of industrial firms and their suppliers, the authors test these predictions. The results show good support for the model. Consequences for research and practice in marketing are drawn.

The authors report the results of a study on the use of information and decision making by practicing marketing managers. They examine the effect of managerial experience and decision programmability on managers’ information use and decisions. The results indicate that experience is an important determinant of managers’ behavior for relatively unprogrammed decisions. Moreover, the effects of experience are manifested in the evaluation and use of “soft” information, amount of information used, and the decisions themselves. The authors conclude that in studying the effects of experience on managerial decisions, one must examine the steps leading to a decision; they find that experience affects the prior step in which information is acquired. To the extent experience is a proxy for expertise, the article affords insights into the key ingredients in training and modeling expert managers.

Studies examining message framing effects on persuasion have produced mixed results. Some studies show positively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits gained by using a product, to be more persuasive than negatively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits lost by not using a product. Reverse outcomes have been obtained in other studies. The authors explore a theoretical explanation for such findings by investigating whether differences in the degree to which people engage in detailed message processing account for the mixed results. The findings support the view that positively framed messages may be more persuasive when there is little emphasis on detailed processing, but negatively framed messages may be more persuasive when detailed processing is emphasized.

Using the analytical logic underlying the classical adopter categorization approach proposed by Rogers, the authors suggest that adopter categories for a product innovation can also be developed by using other well-established diffusion models such as the Bass model. With data on 11 consumer durable products, they compare adopter categories generated by the classical approach and the Bass diffusion model, respectively. An application examining the diffusion of personal computers is documented to illustrate the usefulness of the adopter categorization based on the Bass diffusion model in studying differences among adopter categories.

A meta-analysis of 213 applications of diffusion models from 15 articles relates model parameters to the nature of the innovation, the country under study, model specification, and estimation procedure. The effect of use of the same data by several researchers is examined, as are weighting schemes for improving efficiency of the meta-analysis. A Bayesian scheme is used to combine results from the metaanalysis with new data for estimation of parameters in a new situation.

A 16-item scale is developed to measure the degree to which salespeople practice adaptive selling—the degree to which they alter their sales presentation across and during customer interactions in response to the perceived nature of the sales situation. This paper-and-pencil scale assesses self-reports of five facets of adaptive selling: (1) recognition that different sales approaches are needed for different customers, (2) confidence in ability to use a variety of approaches, (3) confidence in ability to alter approach during an interaction, (4) collection of information to facilitate adaptation, and (5) actual use of different approaches. The reliability of the scale is .85. Support for the nomological validity of the scale is found by failure to disconfirm relationships with an antecedent (intrinsic motivation), several general personality measures of interpersonal flexibility (self-monitoring, empathy, locus of control, and androgyny), and a consequence (self-reported performance).