Knowledge that Transforms

The authors employ a simulated market channel to investigate two properties of interdependence—magnitude and relative asymmetry. Increasing magnitudes of joint dependence are associated with more frequent use of noncoercive strategies, less frequent use of coercive strategies, lower residual conflict, and more favorable evaluations of partner performance. These results support the relational exchange paradigm. Findings for relative asymmetry were not anticipated but are informative. First, an increasing power advantage did not result in the predicted greater use of threats and punishments, although demands and normative statements were more prevalent. Second, one side of the dyad decreased its use of rewards and the other increased its use of rewards, promises, and information persuasion. As predicted, an increasing power advantage (lower relative dependence) is associated with less favorable performance evaluations of exchange partners and less residual conflict.

The authors suggest the use of D-efficient experimental designs for conjoint and discrete-choice studies, discussing orthogonal arrays, nonorthogonal designs, relative efficiency, and nonorthogonal design algorithms. They construct designs for a choice study with asymmetry and interactions and for a conjoint study with blocks and aggregate interactions.

Conventional product differentiation strategies prescribe distinguishing a product or brand from competitors’ on the basis of an attribute that is relevant, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. However, brands also successfully differentiate on an attribute that appears to create a meaningful product difference but on closer examination is irrelevant to creating that benefit—“meaningless” differentiation. The authors examine how meaningless differentiation can produce a meaningfully differentiated brand. They argue that buyers may infer that a distinguishing but irrelevant attribute is in fact relevant and valuable under certain conditions, creating a meaningfully differentiated brand. They outline the consumer inference process and develop a set of hypotheses about when it will produce meaningful brands from meaningless differentiation. Experimental tests in three product categories support their analysis. They explore the implications of the results for product differentiation strategies, consumer preference formation, and the nature of competition.

Data based on qualitative judgments are prevalent in both academic research in marketing and applied marketing research. Reliability measurement of qualitative data is important to determine the stability and quality of the data obtained. The authors assume a decision theoretic loss function, formally model the loss to the researcher of using wrong judgments, and show how this produces a new, proportional reduction in loss (PRL) reliability measure that generalizes many existing quantitative and qualitative measures. Because the PRL measure is often cumbersome to compute directly, they provide reference tables that enable the researcher to apply their approach easily. They then use this new approach to explore several important practical issues in conducting marketing research with qualitative judgments. In particular, they address the issues of (1) how reliable qualitative data should be (extending directly from Nunnally's rule of thumb for Cronbach's alpha in quantitative measurement), (2) how many judges are necessary given a known proportion of agreement between judges, and (3) given a fixed number of judges, what proportion of agreement must be obtained to ensure adequate reliability.

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are defined as discretionary, extra-role behaviors on the part of a salesperson that have been shown to influence managers’ evaluations of performance. It has been suggested that one reason managers value OCBs is that they believe OCBs contribute to organizational success. The authors’ purpose is to investigate the impact of OCBs on objective unit performance and compare this effect with the impact that OCBs have on managerial evaluations. First, the impact of OCBs on overall performance evaluations is examined. Second, the aggregate effects of unit-level OCBs on agency performance are examined using objective performance data for 116 agencies in a major insurance company. The results show that OCBs make an important contribution to overall agency performance; however, some citizenship behaviors appear to help and others hinder agency performance. Finally, a comparison of the results of the two studies suggests that managers tend to overvalue some citizenship behaviors and undervalue others.

Marketing boundary spanners—especially customer service representatives—are notably susceptible to burnout. The authors define the burnout construct and develop hypotheses to examine if burnout acts as a partial mediator between role stressors and key behavioral and psychological job outcomes. Responses from 377 customer service representatives reveal that burnout levels are high relative to other burnout-prone occupations (e.g., police, nursing) and that burnout has consistent, significant, and dysfunctional effects on their behavioral and psychological outcomes. Moreover, burnout mediates the negative effects of role stressors on job outcomes, whereas the positive effects of role stressors are unmediated.

The authors show how ethnography can provide multiple strategically important perspectives on behaviors of interest to marketing researchers. They first discuss the goals and four essential characteristics of ethnographic interpretation. Then they review the particular contributions to interpretation of several kinds of ethnographic observation and interview data. Next they discuss how interpretations are built from ethnographic data. They show how multilayered interpretations of market phenomena emerge through systematic analysis of complementary and discrepant data. Finally, the authors articulate three representational strategies that are used to link multilayered interpretations to marketing strategy formulation. They suggest that ethnographic methods are appropriate for apprehending a wide variety of consumption and use situations with implications for market segmentation and targeting; product and service positioning; and product, service, and brand management.