Knowledge that Transforms

Personal relationships between salespeople and customers are essential for the success of business-to-business relationships, and research has shown that a change of the salesperson can severely harm financial performance. However, such interpersonal relationship disruptions may also have positive effects by encouraging vitalizing reexplorations of the relationship. Using multilevel loyalty theory and relationship life cycle theory, the authors offer a comprehensive conceptualization of potentially countervailing consequences of relationship disruptions. In particular, disruptions may have different effects on resale revenue (from previously sold products) versus new sale revenue (from newly sold products), contingent on both the history and expected future development of the relationship. Therefore, this study examines moderators on the firm-level relationship prior to disruption and salesperson relationship management afterward. Longitudinal data from 2,040 customers of an international business-to-business firm reveal that a disruption can increase overall performance by more than 29%, depending on the firm-level relationship before disruption and the new salesperson’s relationship management. Managers can use these findings proactively to evaluate and manage the risks and opportunities involved in relationship disruptions.

Despite the growing popularity of cocreation approaches to innovation, the bottom-line results of these efforts continue to frustrate many firms. Marketing communications are one important tool in stimulating consumer adoption, yet marketers to date have not taken advantage of a unique phenomenon associated with many cocreated innovations: the presence of a genesis story in the words of the creator, which can be combined in different ways with traditional marketing messaging. Using mixed methods, the authors demonstrate a crossover effect in which a “mismatch” of the fundamental motivations behind authentic creation narratives and traditional persuasive messages enhances adoption of the cocreated innovation. This effect is mediated by potential adopters’ self-referencing of their own stories about similar experiences or consumption episodes. Furthermore, the effect of a motivation mismatch strategy is attenuated for expert consumers. Finally, this motivation mismatch strategy triggers “takeoff” of cocreated innovations. This research offers substantial implications for research on cocreated innovation, narrative persuasion, and firm-generated and user-generated communication. It provides managers specific guidance on enhancing the success of cocreation programs through an integrated communications strategy.

Facing competitive and commoditization threats, many companies shift to solution offerings, albeit with mixed results. With a qualitative analysis of dyadic data (suppliers and customers), this article investigates an important, often overlooked reason for such mixed outcomes: the complex, dynamic role of governance matching. This study identifies a series of tensions arising from solution-specific exchange conditions and the matched governance mechanisms actors use to address them: temporary asset colocation, network closure, knowledge-based boundary objects, rights allocation agreements, and liaison champions. It also reveals the dynamic nature of governance matching. Solutions evolve in three phases—experimentation, integration, and evolution—in which single mechanisms have different functions (safeguarding and/or coordination), provide contingent and transient benefits, and can be used in combination to address complex tensions. This study also identifies two decision points, mutual commitment and balanced power, that separate the three phases; their outcomes help explain why certain solution efforts do not take off, others stall, and still others revert to mere spot exchanges. Beyond contributing to solutions literature, these findings provide actionable insights to marketing managers.

Brand sponsorship connects brands with large, passionate audiences. The sponsorship literature emphasizes the importance of brand sponsor–team congruence; however, prior research has largely focused on the relevance of the brand to the sport or geographic area. This article offers the first real-world empirical investigation of the effects of visual congruence through color matching on sponsorship performance. A wide-scale study of 703 Major League Baseball fans’ evaluations of their team’s sponsors, merged with real stadium signage data, offers evidence of the benefits of visual congruence. Two experiments in the contexts of product packaging and online advertising provide converging evidence of the positive effects of created visual congruence on attitudes toward the sponsorship, brand attitudes, and intentions. Brands without an inherent match to a team can enjoy enhanced sponsorship benefits with little additional costs simply by adopting the team’s colors in visual displays. However, the viewer’s motivation (fan status), opportunity (fan exposure), and ability (lack of color blindness) to process visual congruence moderates its effectiveness. By using the proposed framework, managers can maximize the value of their sponsorship rights.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of evaluating TV ad spots by their immediate effects on important online activities. The authors merged minute-by-minute brand search and price search data with spot-level TV advertisement data for the three leading pickup truck brands in the United States over an 11-month period. They presented a generalizable modeling framework and used it to estimate the size and variation of immediate online responses to TV ads. The average elasticity of brand search to a brand’s own national ads is .09, and the average elasticity of price search to a brand’s own national ads is .03. Given ad audience size, immediate search responses vary with ad creative characteristics, audience category interest, slot of the break, program genre, and time factors. Overall, the results show that ordinary TV ads lead to a variety of immediate online responses and that advertisers can use these signals to enrich their media planning and campaign evaluations.

Companies often feature positive consumer reviews on their websites and in their promotional materials in an attempt to increase sales. However, little is known about which particular positive reviews companies should leverage to optimize sales. Across four lab studies involving both hypothetical and real choices as well as field data from a retailer’s website (Sephora), the authors find that consumers are more likely to purchase a product if it is recommended by a reviewer who has (vs. has not) made a prior purchase mistake. The authors define a purchase mistake as a self-identified suboptimal decision whereby people purchase a product that subsequently fails to meet a threshold level of expected performance. This persuasive advantage emerges because consumers perceive reviewers who admit a purchase mistake as having more expertise than even reviewers whose purchase experience has not been marred by mistakes. As a result, in marketers’ attempts to increase the persuasive influence of reviews featured in their promotional materials, they may inadvertently decrease it by omitting the very information that would lead consumers to be more likely to purchase recommended products.

In business-to-government and business-to-business transactions, suppliers often have limited access to buyers during the buying process. The authors term these buyers “barricaded buyers.” Despite the prevalence of barricaded buyers in practice, research has remained largely silent on the topic. Therefore, the authors combine insights from eight organizational purchasing case studies and individual interviews with signaling theory to advance a conceptual framework that highlights ways a supplier can increase its competitiveness (and, correspondingly, its selection likelihood) when selling to barricaded buyers. The framework reflects three distinct ways in which signaling occurs or influences the barricaded buying process: the seller signals to buyers (e.g., through novel solutions, explicit responding), the seller signals to competing sellers (e.g., through peacocking), and the buyer signals to sellers whose meaning is jammed (e.g., through supplier-specific capabilities and language). The framework invokes barricade restrictiveness as an important contingency variable that lends nuance to when the signaling activities are most likely to affect suppliers’ competitiveness.

Shareholder complaints put pressure on publicly listed firms, yet firms rarely directly address the actual issues raised in these complaints. The authors examine whether firms respond in an alternative way by altering advertising investments in an effort to ward off the financial damage associated with shareholder complaints. By analyzing a unique data set of shareholder complaints submitted to S&P 1500 firms between 2001 and 2016, supplemented with qualitative interviews of executives of publicly listed firms, the authors document that firms increase advertising investments following shareholder complaints and that such an advertising investment response mitigates a postcomplaint decline in firm value. Furthermore, results suggest that firms are more likely to increase advertising investments when shareholder complaints are submitted by institutional investors, pertain to nonfinancial concerns, and relate to topics that receive high media attention. The findings provide new insights on how firms address stock market adversities with advertising investments and inform managers about the effectiveness of such a response.

While prior research has found that consumer-influenced production improves purchase intentions, the author proposes that it can counterintuitively backfire. This work demonstrates that when consumers have some control over production (e.g., ordering products on demand, customization, preordering), they have lower purchase intentions for products made with unethical processes (e.g., pollution, underpaid labor) than if they had no role in production (i.e., buying what is already in inventory). This effect reverses, however, with positive ethical production (e.g., recycled materials). Because consumers have direct responsibility for whether a product is made, feelings of anticipated guilt or gratification result depending on the ethicality of the production process. This work also proposes a novel threefold conceptualization of responsibility that can be used as managerial levers: direct responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, and broad responsibility. Field studies using Facebook’s advertising platform demonstrate positioning strategies for fair-trade brands and advocacy groups.

Firms sometimes engage in myopic management (e.g., cutting marketing spending, providing lenient credit to customers to improve short-term results). Although marketing is at the center of such myopic management, there are few insights on whether a marketing department could prevent it. To address this gap, the authors examine the role of powerful marketing departments in preventing myopic marketing spending and revenue management. They hypothesize that there are internal and external enablers of marketing department power (i.e., a chief executive officer with marketing experience, the firm’s power over its customers, analyst coverage, and institutional stock ownership) that help a powerful marketing department prevent myopic management. They test the hypotheses using a panel of 781 publicly listed U.S. firms between 2000 and 2015. As hypothesized, when the firm has (1) a chief executive officer with a marketing background and (2) power over its customers, increasing marketing department power decreases the likelihood of both myopic marketing spending and myopic revenue management; increasing marketing department power and analyst coverage decreases the likelihood of myopic marketing spending. The findings highlight powerful marketing leadership as a hitherto overlooked way to prevent myopic management and improve firm performance.