SECURING BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS: THE IMPACT OF SWITCHING COSTS

Markus Blut,Heiner Evanschitzky,Christof Backhaus,John Rudd,Michael Marck 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.7

Although the relationship marketing literature acknowledges the importance of switching costs for increasing customer retention in general, little is known about its relevance in industrial markets. In particular, it is unclear whether switching costs and its dimensions impact relevant behavioral outcomes of buyer-seller relationships in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Against this background, our research intends to make two main contributions: Since we assume differential effects for different types of switching costs, our research first explores the dimensions of switching costs for the B2B domain. Second, it tests the relative impact of the dimensions of switching costs on business customers’ actual purchase behavior. Results suggest that switching costs in B2B settings are a multi-faceted construct, including (i) procedural, (ii) financial, and (iii) relational switching costs. Moreover, we find relational switching costs to be most important for securing B2B buyer-seller relationships since they impact a customer’s (a) share-of-wallet, (b) cross buying behavior, and (c) actual switching behavior. While procedural switching costs only influence share-of-wallet, financial switching costs solely impact customer’s cross-buying behavior across a firm’s product and services categories. These findings contribute to a better understanding about how to secure B2B buyer-seller relationships.

HOW TO DESIGN SERVICE INNOVATION PROCESSES:DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARTICIPATION QUALITY SCALE

Nils O. Ommen,Markus Blut,Christof Backhaus,David M. Woisetschläger 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.4

Research on new product development has emphasized the importance of integrating customers, employees, and suppliers in an organization’s innovation processes. While several studies evaluate respective participatory processes, there is, surprisingly, no consensus on which dimension participation quality consists of, and how to measure them consistently. The present study contributes to the literature by identifying the dimensions of participation quality and by constructing a participation quality scale that includes six dimensions, namely (1) project-related resources, (2) early involvement, (3) degree of influence, (4) transparency of processes, (5) incentive mechanisms, and (6) voluntariness of participation. Furthermore, a 24-item measure of participation quality is developed using a mixed-method design. Results of our study show that the developed measure impacts important innovation-related outcomes such as innovation performance, acceptance of the innovation, and intention to participate in future innovation projects. Given that the six identified dimensions of participation quality differentially affect these outcomes, the scale provides the opportunity to better design participatory innovation projects, and thus helps managers to integrate stakeholders more successfully in these projects.

FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES AS IDEA COLLECTORS: AN EXAMINATION OF INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL AND FIRM-LEVEL ANTECEDENTS

David M. Woisetschläger,Debra Hanning,Christof Backhaus 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.4

The importance of frontline employees (FLEs) for the success of organizations is recognized by researches and practitioners alike. However, their importance for the innovativeness of companies resulting from their boundary spanning role is often underestimated and has received little attention in prior research. The present paper identifies individual and firm-level factors that explain variations in idea collecting behaviors of FLEs. To test the hypotheses, data was collected from 31 different managers from the automotive, construction, IT, machinery, and chemicals sectors. In addition, a total of corresponding 237 FLEs were surveyed and matched to the firm-level data. Results of our study show that FLEs’ idea gathering is positively influenced by job satisfaction, desire for upward mobility, and lack of resources. Role ambiguity between FLEs and the employer decreases FLEs intention to gather ideas. Dissemination behavior is enforced by inter-sender role conflicts and reduced by role conflicts resulting from a lack of resources. Both dimensions of idea generation depend on the presence of a strong internal network. On a firm-level, learning orientation and providing feedback to FLEs are found to strengthen the interrelationship between idea gathering and dissemination. Based on these findings, implications for management and research are derived.

The Impact of Country-of-Origin and Joy on Product Evaluation

Nils O. Ommen,Tobias Heußler,Christof Backhaus,Manuel Michaelis,Dieter Ahlert 한국마케팅과학회 2010 Journal of Global Fashion Marketing Vol.1 No.2

Consumer’s differentiated perception and appraisal of a product’s country-of-origin (COO) exerts large influence on perception of the COO-image (COI) and on the perceived product quality. At peripheral information processing COO-Image (COI) provides a basis to ease requirements for information processing in form of heuristics. Most of internationalization literature examines the COO effect with respect to high-involvement products and in context of cognitive processing. However studies from Maheswaran and Chen (2006) point out, that besides cognitive influences, also specific emotions impact on COO-effects. Whereas the influence of negative emotions like anger, sadness or frustration on processing and judgments could be exposed, the issue of positive emotions’ impact still stays open. Since the question should be answered, if emotions impact on COO-Effects, it is emphasized to focus on COO as an affective heuristic operating as a “halo” effect on attitudes towards a product. Because both marketing and evolutionary theories of emotion act on the assumption of satisfaction of human needs, latter is specified, describing emotions as complex chains of events with stabilizing feedback loops. Particularly, in the context of impulsive purchasing emotion plays a vital role. Impulsive buyers are more emotionalized, experiencing more enthusiasm, joy, and glee than nonbuyers. Thus “joy” leads to impulsive decision making behavior. Drawing on the extant literature, we develop our conceptual framework to analyze whether, and if so, how positive emotions (such as joy) affect the impact of COO on product evaluation. Based on an experimental study including 130 respondents, we test three hypotheses: whether the COO has an impact on product evaluation (H1), whether the positive emotion of joy has a stronger positive influence on product evaluation than neutral emotional states (H2), and whether the positive emotion of joy reduces the positive relationship of COO on product evaluation (H3). In the experimental design, it is hypothesized that the latent variable Emotion impacts on the latent variable COI and in addition that these latent variables, both influence beliefs towards the product in terms of a halo effect. Latent variables in each case get measured with manifested variables in form of validated scales. Cause-and-effect relations are revealed in an experiment concerning a factorial test arrangement with a 2x2 factor design, consisting of two COOs (China vs. Germany) and two emotional states (joy vs. neutral state). Complex pictures from International Affective Picture System state standardized stimuli obtaining specific emotions. The apparel industry serves as the product category used in the experiment because impulsive buying behavior is quite common in this product category. Moreover, we chose women as respondents because they rather purchase for emotional and relationship-oriented reasons. Products get labeled with woven tags and tags at clothes hangers manipulating COO. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) can be counted among the most important analysis methods in marketing research and is used for analysis, with emotional state and COO being the independent variables and product evaluation as the dependent variable. Prior to probing hypothesized assumptions a manipulation check concerning induced emotions was successful. Participants primed with the joyful IAPS checked a significantly higher percentage of positive adjectives than respondents primed with the neutral IAPS (joyful=.76, neutral =.61; F=7.59, p<.001). Also the used scale of Product Evaluation could be validated by confirmatory factor analysis. The main effect of emotion is highly significant for product evaluation. Following Cohen (1988), the strength of the effects is large (η2 = 10.8 %). Product evaluation is influenced by a highly significant interaction effect (Emotion * COO, EtaSquare: 6.2 %).

MOBILE COMMERCE – THE MODERATING ROLES OF PERCEIVED RISK AND APPLICATION CONTEXT

Marco Hubert,Markus Blut,Christian Brock,Christof Backhaus,Tim Eberhardt 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2016 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2016 No.7

Worldwide, more than 1/3 of all e-commerce transactions in business-to-consumer industries are nowadays executed via mobile devices (Criteo, 2015). Despite its increasing importance, it can be noted that mobile commerce does not seem to “take-off” equally across diverse goods and services contexts. We observe, for instance, that mobile commerce is quite common in service industries for purchasing tickets (e.g., for flights, public transportation, and sport events), while it is less common for services such as financial products. Balasubramanian et al. (2002) addressed this issue and proposed that contexts of m-commerce differ from each other with regard to several characteristics. For example, they propose that location sensitivity (among other characteristics) differs for various m-commerce applications, and that this characteristic may impact acceptance of m-commerce across industries. It may be that acceptance of m-commerce is higher in some industries since use of location sensitive data is appreciated by customers, while it is not valued in other purchasing contexts. Against this background, we propose that examining (1) risk perception related to mobile commerce and (2) different types of mobile commerce applications are essential for gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of differing relevance of m-commerce across industries. In particular, our study acknowledges the differential roles of the financial, performance, and security facets of risk. In addition, we assume that the role of value and risk dimensions differs subject to three mobile commerce application characteristics which are location sensitivity, time criticality, and extent of control. Based on a dataset of 800 respondents, results of our models demonstrate that especially security risk can act as a critical inhibitor of acceptance. The extent to which performance risk and financial risk impact perceived usefulness was found to be moderated by the three contextual characteristics. From a managerial perspective, results show which factors should deliberately be considered in the development of m-commerce applications, and in which different application contexts they matter.

FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES AS IDEA COLLECTORS: AN EXAMINATION OF INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL AND FIRM-LEVEL ANTECEDENTS

David M. Woisetschl?ger,Debra Hanning,Christof Backhaus 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.7

The importance of frontline employees (FLEs) for the success of organizations is recognized by researches and practitioners alike. However, their importance for the innovativeness of companies resulting from their boundary spanning role is often underestimated and has received little attention in prior research. The present paper identifies individual and firm-level factors that explain variations in idea collecting behaviors of FLEs. To test the hypotheses, data was collected from 31 different managers from the automotive, construction, IT, machinery, and chemicals sectors. In addition, a total of corresponding 237 FLEs were surveyed and matched to the firm-level data. Results of our study show that FLEs’ idea gathering is positively influenced by job satisfaction, desire for upward mobility, and lack of resources. Role ambiguity between FLEs and the employer decreases FLEs intention to gather ideas. Dissemination behavior is enforced by inter-sender role conflicts and reduced by role conflicts resulting from a lack of resources. Both dimensions of idea generation depend on the presence of a strong internal network. On a firm-level, learning orientation and providing feedback to FLEs are found to strengthen the interrelationship between idea gathering and dissemination. Based on these findings, implications for management and research are derived.

HOW TO DESIGN SERVICE INNOVATION PROCESSES:DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARTICIPATION QUALITY SCALE

Nils O. Ommen,Markus Blut,Christof Backhaus,David M. Woisetschl?ger 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.7

Research on new product development has emphasized the importance of integrating customers, employees, and suppliers in an organization’s innovation processes. While several studies evaluate respective participatory processes, there is, surprisingly, no consensus on which dimension participation quality consists of, and how to measure them consistently. The present study contributes to the literature by identifying the dimensions of participation quality and by constructing a participation quality scale that includes six dimensions, namely (1) project-related resources, (2) early involvement, (3) degree of influence, (4) transparency of processes, (5) incentive mechanisms, and (6) voluntariness of participation. Furthermore, a 24-item measure of participation quality is developed using a mixed-method design. Results of our study show that the developed measure impacts important innovation-related outcomes such as innovation performance, acceptance of the innovation, and intention to participate in future innovation projects. Given that the six identified dimensions of participation quality differentially affect these outcomes, the scale provides the opportunity to better design participatory innovation projects, and thus helps managers to integrate stakeholders more successfully in these projects.