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From the seclusion of monastic life to the noise of Silicon Valley, the ancient practice of mindfulness has ‘come out of the cloister.’ As an antidote to mindless cognition and behavior, the practice of mindfulness—with its principle of grounding attention in the present moment—has been shown to have powerful and positive effects at both the individual and the collective level and in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, schooling, prison programs, law and negotiation, business, and even the army. This installment of Marketing & Technology introduces mindfulness to managers and explores its potential for enhancing the service encounter. We begin by reviewing the two main conceptualizations of mindfulness: the cognitive and the contemplative. We then explore the service encounter from the perspective of emotional labor and show how mindfulness can change surface acting into deep acting, thereby significantly improving the service encounter for both the consumer and provider. We also explore the other benefits of mindfulness and their application to the service encounter: adaptability, flexibility, and creativity. We conclude by sharing resources for managers interested in implementing mindfulness training.

Motivated by the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we explore how talented managers view CSR investments. Based on nearly 20,000 observations across 17 years, our evidence reveals a nonmonotonic effect of managerial talent on CSR. Exploiting a novel measure of managerial ability, we find that talented managers view CSR investments favorably. However, only those with especially strong talent are in favor of CSR investments. For executives ranked above the 75th percentile in terms of managerial talent, an increase in managerial ability leads to more CSR investments, suggesting that these strongly talented managers perceive CSR as enhancing firm performance. In contrast, for those with weaker talent, CSR investments are negatively associated with managerial ability, implying that these weakly talented managers view CSR as a wasteful deployment of resources. Further evidence shows that our conclusion is unlikely confounded by endogeneity.

Motivated by recent productivity-based theories of diversification, we argue that only conglomerates with an optimal degree of diversification can utilize their comparative advantages across various industries and achieve economies of scope by eliminating redundancies. Evidence from both corporate bond and equity markets suggests that optimally diversified conglomerates consist of either (1) approximately five equally weighted divisions, or (2) one large core business segment that roughly accounts for 75 % sales. Moreover, the relative size of divisions has a critical impact on how diversification affects credit spreads and excess values. Nonparity among divisions correlates with greater costs that increase with the number of divisions.

Request PDF | Induction of Construal-Level Mindset via Experience of Surprise: An Abstract: Proceedings of the 2018 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference | An experience of surprise is often an outcome of disconfirmation of expectations and can be associated with positive or negative affect depending... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

In this research, we find that incentive valence and construal-level mindsets can interact to influence behavioral persistence on challenging tasks. An abstract mindset improves persistence in response to positively framed incentives whereas a concrete mindset improves persistence in response to negatively framed incentives. This interaction effect can be observed even when the cues inducing construal-level mindsets are not related to the incentives or the incentivized tasks. Participants in our studies were either positively or negatively incentivized to solve a set of difficult anagrams, and were primed with an abstract or a concrete mindset using spatial (Study 1) and social (Study 2) cues. The participants persisted longer in response to the positively framed incentive when primed with spatially or socially remote cues. In contrast, for the negatively framed incentive, participants persisted longer when primed with spatially or socially proximal cues. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Today's practicing marketers and scholars are confronted with a wide array of conflicting and imprecise information about best practices by which to search, gather, consolidate and interpret market information. Consequently, the need has never been greater to optimize market sensing to generate managerial actions that efficiently and effectively utilize knowledge of emerging consumer needs and competitive threats. This book addresses these urgent concerns. In essence, Market Sensing Today will cover, in ground-breaking ways, the following marketing managerial areas: * marketing opportunities associated with conventional and progressive bases of segmentation. * trends in market segment size and growth affecting long-range planning. * strategic direction for reaching future goals. * managerial understanding of assumptions competitors make about themselves. * the direction of current market strategies. * adding to the knowledge of a firm's core competencies. * how new market knowledge is best integrated into a firm's market intelligence system. * best ways to ensure the quality of information underlying decisions. * how benchmarking improves with market sensing. * best approaches for translating business issues into projects. * ways that key information may be disseminated within firms. * how proposed strategic changes are promoted by market sensing. * roles customer satisfaction insights play in policy. This book will address these key issues and more, to advance theory, research and practice based on latest developments in this vital field. It will show how to re-formulate traditional models that no longer work.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the unintended negative effect of incentivizing shoppers to make unplanned purchases through incentive reminders during shopping trips. Design/methodology/approach Two experimental studies with between-subject designs were conducted to examine the effect of incentive reminders and related factors on abandonment intention. Findings When the search for unplanned purchases needed to reach promotional threshold fails, shoppers’ propensity to abandon a transaction increases if they are reminded of an incentive during their shopping trip. When the size of the planned purchases is relatively larger than the incentivized unplanned purchases, abandonment propensity is higher in response to reward type incentives, whereas when the size of the planned purchases is relatively smaller than the incentivized unplanned purchases, abandonment propensity is higher in response to avoidance type incentives. Research limitations/implications This research intersects and integrates several research domains, specifically transaction abandonment, promotional reactance, unplanned purchases and promotion framing. Practical implications Findings from this research help managers understand the possible negative consequences of incentive reminders and offer suggestions for decreasing shopper propensities to abandon transactions in response to incentive reminders aimed at increasing transaction sizes. Originality/value This is the first study to highlight (i) the possible effect of incentive reminders on transaction abandonment; (ii) the influence of the size of unplanned purchases and incentive types on abandonment; and (iii) the underlying roles of perceived value of planned purchases and fairness perceptions in abandonment.

This handy guide to excellent business communications is perfect for both college students and business professionals. Whether preparing for a career, launching a career, or advancing in a career, the savvy professional understands that every organization expects employees to be exceptional business communicators. Today's Business Communication: A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional leads readers through the most frequently encountered business communication situations. Two business partners who are also business school professors share their combined 30 years of marketing and communication experience with readers in this accessible, entertaining, and informative guide. The authors enhance the readers' experience through anecdotes from business professionals from different industries.

In consultant-client relationships, relationship longevity can create significant cost advantages and operational efficiencies for both client and consultant. At the same time, each party may also be motivated to look for new perspectives and opportunities by switching to new relationships. However, the benefits of replacing one consulting relationship with another are mitigated by switching costs: the costs associated with the act of changing the relationship itself. This chapter explores the concept of switching costs by examining various types of costs, the ways these costs have been conceptualized in the literature, and how these costs may impact the nature and continuity of consultant-client relationships. The chapter will end with a series of hypotheses and suggestions for a research agenda to further develop our understanding of this important phenomenon. Copyright © 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

The purpose of the study was to examine how international tourists' shopping satisfaction related to their overall satisfaction as tourists and the tourists' expenditure differences by gender. A survey was conducted among U.S. citizens of who were traveling to South Korea (n = 422). The survey took place at transport hubs of the major international airports and seaports in South Korea prior to tourists' departure. The findings of this research concluded that tourist shopping satisfaction was significantly correlated with overall tourist satisfaction. In addition, different shopping patterns were reported among men and women tourists. The results of this study confirm that a positive retail shopping experience is an important aspect of overall international tourism.

This book explores new and leading edge marketing research approaches as successfully practiced by visionaries of academia and the research industry. Ideal as either a supplementary text for students or as a guidebook for practitioners, this book showcases the excitement of a field where discoveries abound and researchers are valued for solving weighty problems and minimizing risks. The authors offer rich new tools to measure and analyze consumer attitudes, combined with existing databases, online bulletin boards, social media, neuroscience, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, behavioral economics, and more. The reader will profit from the numerous contemporary case studies that demonstrate the key role of marketing research in corporate decision-making.

Cosmopolitans are individuals with a distinctive kind of extended national and international orientation, a global vision, and sense of belonging to the world. These people are sophisticated and importantly engaged in the cultures outside of local geographical boundaries. But what do we know about them as consumers—their origins, values, media usage, and buyer behavior? This unique book details much about this group, and fills a knowledge gap that has long been overlooked largely because other related marketing areas have overshadowed and overlooked the notion of cosmopolitan consumers. Until this book, in fact, there has been no single authoritative source that directly and comprehensively covers the field of consumer cosmopolitanism. This book also includes original essays by an all-star cast of contributors, giving you an introduction to a powerful new approach to marketing, eclectically packed with novel ideas and insights that noticeably advance the marketing field and bring it more fully into the age of globalization.

The concept and framework of market sensing was introduced by George Day more than 20 years ago into the strategic marketing literature and especially the philosophy of the market-driven organization. Market sensing can be considered an expression of a company's capabilities to scan the external environment. It does this by using real time data and intelligence to understand business or uncertain changes, to meet the current and future needs of the market, increase customer value, and outperform competitors. Market sensing enables managers to resist complacency, as well as to exploit opportunities and to design appropriate competitive strategies in order to remain successful in today's uncertain, rapidly changing, and hypercompetitive market. The present volume, Market Sensing Today, is essential reading in the marketing discipline, given the rapidly escalating innovative developments in market sensing techniques. This book of essays by acknowledged experts in the field fills an important knowledge gap and provides a realistic basis for strategy. It is replete with real-life examples of market sensing that illustrate actionable ideas for immediate impact that will improve organizational learning and accelerate growth. This book of contemporary tested and comprehensive concepts and methods grounded in diverse and rich experience is intended to stimulate creativity and insightful approaches for educators offering courses in strategy as well as for practitioners involved in crucial strategic decision making.

The authors conduct a meta-analysis to examine dependence and interdependence in marketing relationships. Analyses reveal that dependence affects performance primarily through relationship quality and cooperation, while interdependence has substantial direct effects as well as effects mediated through relationship-specific investments and cooperation. Regarding relationship context, effects of dependence are stronger in channel relationships than end-user relationships and for services than goods; interdependence does not display the same pattern. Regarding methodological context, dependence measures that emphasize relationship value versus switching costs have different moderating effects; greater general dependence content is associated with weaker effect sizes for dependence but conversely greater effect sizes for interdependence. These results suggest that new insights can be gained by distinguishing relationship value and switching cost components of dependence and by investigating the possibility that the conceptual domain of interdependence differs from that of dependence. Future research that strives for greater precision in the measurement of dependence and interdependence constructs and that simultaneously examines dependence and interdependence is recommended.

Identity is recognized as a powerful antecedent of behavior. Social identity denotes the incorporation of culture into a person’s self-concept. A strong correspondence exists between identity with a given social unit and commitment to group values/norms, and thus, how much influence the social unit exerts on the person’s attitudes and behaviors. As a psychological construct, social identity research requires probing how individuals subjectively interpret their own affiliation with one or several collectivities. Cultures are increasingly emancipated from geography in the global era. Because contemporary consumers are continuously exposed to a variety of cultural influences, they may develop polycentric identities. As companies and markets integrate, a key international market segmentation topic relates to consumers’ mindsets about home and extraneous countries/cultures, and subsequently, the products connected with these entities. To date, no research has simultaneously examined the interrelationships of consumer ethnocentrism (bias towards products from one’s national culture), consumer xenocentrism (i.e., preference or orientation towards products from a culture other than one’s own), and cosmopolitanism (i.e., a yearning for and adeptness at mastering cultural diversity) in a single study. Employing an online survey, and drawing from a representative sample (n = 269) of American consumers drawn from all 50 states (plus D.C.), this research also examines the correspondence of these identity-relevant constructs within a nomological net of pertinent concepts (all of which are established in the marketing literature): materialism, consciousness-of-kind, external orientation (cultural open-mindedness and consumption of foreign media), global consumption orientation, and natural environment concern. The survey contained a total of 60 scales corresponding to the 8 constructs, along with a series of key demographic measures. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were applied to the construct measures. Various analytical techniques were employed (tests for convergent/discriminant validity, bivariate correlations, t-tests, MANOVA, two-step clustering, as well as path analyses using structural equation modelling) to test the 19 proposed theoretical hypotheses. Most hypotheses were supported, in terms of statistical significance and magnitude, as well as directional valence. Associative network memory theory and signaling theory implicate how consumers decide from a constellation of local, foreign, and global product options. Upon activation of a brand node by way of retrieval cues (product categories, brand names, and so forth), linkages such product attributes and semantic associations (e.g., ingroups/outgroups and corresponding levels of felt identification) become salient. Firms can manipulate signals, including associations towards or away from countries/cultures, to position products and persuade consumers. Vertical segmentation, the conventional approach to adapting marketing strategies, entails developing marketing mixes for each country, from the near limitless combination of demographic, economic and psychographic variables. Due to the globalization of media and the widespread movement of products and peoples across borders a growing number of researchers instead advocate horizontal segmentation, whereby similar groups of consumers are targeted with an essentially uniform marketing strategy, irrespective of where they might live. Individuals’ inward and outward dispositions—towards their own and different countries, cultures, and products—are sound candidate constructs for designing horizontal strategies.

Purpose - A first objective is to add insight into how constructs of ethnocentrism, xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism relate to each other. Knowledge of how these constructs overlap or work together in affecting consumer preferences will offer global marketers insights for designing appropriate marketing strategies. The second objective is to extend this knowledge by examining the correspondence of these three constructs to a nomological network of dispositional concepts pertinent for product positioning and market segmentation. The third objective is to empirically examine the extent to which the measures, construct structure and associative relationships are robust in different national research settings. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - Surveying British and American consumers, this study examines and analyzes the correspondence of these identity-relevant constructs within a nomological net of pertinent concepts: consciousness-of-kind, global consumption orientation, materialism and natural environment concern. Findings - The hypothesized negative links between CET-XEN and CET-COS, and the predicted positive connection between XEN-COS were all confirmed on the latent factor results for the combined data set. The negative correlation between CET-XEN was of a considerably lower magnitude than that for CET-COS. Originality/value - To date, no research has used an identity theory framework and simultaneously examined in a cross-cultural context the interrelationships of consumer ethnocentrism consumer xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism - and their differentiating linkages to a multiplicity of consumer dispositions.