Interdependences in business markets: Implications for management practice and research

Interdependences are a feature of business markets that are difficult to overlook. They have always been vital components of business markets, but now appear to be growing; or it may simply be that we are now more attentive to the phenomenon. Companies are increasingly dependent on suppliers, customers, and other business partners with whom they work. Examples are all around in large and small businesses. Companies hailed as champions in their sectors, such as Apple, Cisco, and Dell would be different without Foxconn, EMC, or Federal Express as their supplier-partners

“Reality is in the air”: concept of perceived augmentation and exploration of its impact on consumer experience

Augmented reality (AR) technology is becoming increasingly used in marketing as a tool for enhancing consumer experience. Developed and defined in the fields of computer science and human-computer interaction, AR technology simulates an overlay of virtual annotations in the physical environment and interacts with it in real- time (Azuma et al., 2001). Some popular examples of AR include virtual mirrors (Ray Ban, ModiFace) and smartphone applications that simulate products such as furniture (IKEA). Despite its increasing deployment in marketing, related academic research about the significance of AR for consumer experience and its impact on consumer behavior has been scarce. This thesis approaches this gap in the literature by studying media characteristics of AR and examining their impact on consumer affective, cognitive and behavioral responses, following the approach of Theory of Interactive Media Effects by Sundar et al. (2015). Throughout a series of four articles, it aims to define salient media characteristics of AR technology and evaluate how they alter consumer experience. The 1st article examines to which extent AR shares media characteristics of other interactive technologies and how these characteristics – namely interactivity, modality, hypertextuality, connectivity, location-specificity, mobility, virtuality – influence consumer responses. Based on a literature review, a research agenda is proposed that identifies the knowledge gaps related to the impact of AR on various types of consumer responses. For example, it suggests that future research should investigate: how lower levels of hypertextuality in an AR app influence consumer satisfaction and exploratory behavior; how can AR represent a social experience, given that little connectivity is present in the current AR apps; what combinations of modality in terms of text, visuals and audio are most effective for AR; to which extent consumers perceive AR apps to be interactive and how that impacts their experience. Finally, the research agenda also underlines the importance of investigating the AR media characteristic augmentation (Preece et al., 2015), absent in previous interactive technologies. The 2nd article focuses on two salient media characteristics of AR apps – interactivity and augmentation. It shows that the presence of AR does not translate into an app being perceived as more interactive in comparison to a non-AR app in terms of control and responsiveness. On the other hand, the study offers first evidence that perceived augmentation is significantly higher for AR apps than for non-AR apps and that it represents a suitable psychological correlate (Sundar et al., 2015) for measuring the perception of AR characteristics that set it apart from other technologies. Two experimental studies demonstrate that perceived augmentation impacts the level of immersion into flow, which then mediates the impact of perceived augmentation on consumer attitude towards the app and behavioral intentions to use it again and talk about it. Based on the previous study, the 3rd article further develops the measurement items of perceived augmentation and investigates its impact on consumer experience. An in-the-wild study (Rogers, 2012) was conducted in a retail store, where we observed consumers’ interaction with an AR make-up try-on application. The findings show that such an application creates a playful experience and that shoppers would use such tool to narrow their consideration set or, in some cases, to even choose products to purchase. Furthermore, the survey study confirms that perceived augmentation significantly relates with playfulness, perceived convenience and behavioral intentions. Finally, a more complete scale for perceived augmentation is developed and validated in the 4th article. Items are refined through several qualitative studies, based on which we propose that perceived augmentation is comprised of two dimensions – virtual enhancement and virtual- physical congruency. An online study with 213 participants confirms this dimensionality and, furthermore, shows that virtual-physical congruency elicits significant impact on enjoyment and perceived informedness, which further impacts future use and purchase intention, while virtual enhancement does not yield a similar impact. The contribution of this thesis lies in defining perceived augmentation as the psychological correlate of AR’s unique media characteristic, augmentation, and in proposing and validating its measurement items. Furthermore, a series of three larger studies, all situated in different contexts (in a lab, in a retail store, online), explain how perceived augmentation yields a significant impact on consumer affective responses and behavioral intentions, and in some cases also on cognitive responses such as perceived convenience and informedness. It also highlights the importance of AR app integration in a specific context, which can prevent it from being perceived as gimmicky. The results of this work have implications for both practitioners and academics and offer numerous directions for future research

Interaction and actors‘ identities in business relationships

The existence of continuous buyer-seller relationships in business-to- business markets has been evidenced in numerous empirical studies and more recently acknowledged in marketing in general. Research shows that the critical process in the development of business relationships is interaction (Håkansson et al., 2009). This study deals with the interactive behaviours of actors and focuses on how actors interpret each other’s identities. We review three fields of research that offer impulses for re-examining the role of actors from interaction perspective: relationship studies in business marketing - Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) in particular; the social interactionism in sociology (e.g. Goffman, 1959); and the sense-making stream in social psychology (e.g. Weick, 1995). We start examining how existence of relationships impacts the concept of markets and leads to the concept of business networks; proceed reviewing the literature on analysis of relationships and behaviour of actors in interaction, and finally formulate two propositions that drive the empirical study and regard relational specificity and emergent nature of actor identities in interaction. Data has been collected on 32 customer relationships of an industrial company through 128 interviews before and after a meeting with customer and supplier representatives regarding perceptions of the counterpart’s performance quality and organization personality. Our findings support for two broad hypotheses: 1) identity attributed to the counterpart changes from interaction to interaction and is continuously emergent; 2) identity of a business is relationship specific and, as a consequence, every business tends to have multiple identities. We conclude discussing the consequences of our findings for conceptualizing actors from interaction perspective and the implications for further research and practice

New business formation in business networks

This study deals with entrepreneurial activities for which there has been growing interest in academic research in recent years. Research has shown that the risk of failure among new ventures can be estimated at more than 50% in the first year, rising to 85% over three years. Such a rate of failure suggests that new business development is problematic. Against this background, the overall aim of this study has been to examine the difficulties encountered in developing a new business venture and to contribute to a better understanding of the causes of the frequent failures. The central assumption in our research has been that the key factors in explaining the success or failure of a new venture are the characteristics of the market context in which the new venture must be embedded through newly developed business relationships, primarily with customers and suppliers. Taking a contextualized view of entrepreneurship prevailing in recent research, we examine and interpret the difficulties a new business encounters when developing the initial business relationships and argue that to better understand why a business succeeds or fails it is vital to focus on the process of embedding the new business in the pre-existing context through relationship formation. In the first part of the thesis we review four theoretical approaches that offer different conceptualizations of the market, and highlight different features of the business landscape in which new businesses emerge: the neoclassical economic, the Austrian school of economics, the socioeconomic perspective, and the marketing perspective. The marketing perspective, which acknowledges the existence and centrality of customer-supplier relationships in markets, has been influential in formulating the concept of markets as networks, which has significant implications for the new business development process. Empirically, this study is based on three case studies of newly established businesses about to develop initial business relationships. To investigate the topic, we followed an inductive approach involving longitudinal qualitative research methods and multiple sources of evidence, including in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, and secondary data sources. The findings support the argument that unpredictability in new business formation is related to difficulties in connecting with the pre-existing business network context in the dimensions of the resource constellations, activity patterns, and webs of actors while developing new business relationships. Based on the literature review and our empirical study, we reached four main conclusions about the roots of the difficulties encountered in developing a new business. The first conclusion is that in starting a new business, entrepreneurs adopt an introspective view, attending to issues internal to the venture, rather than considering the external business relations and the dynamics that tend to endanger the venture’s successful development. The second conclusion is that new businesses struggle more to generate revenues from potential customers than they do in canvassing funds from investors and other funding bodies, which reinforces the tendency to look inward. The third conclusion is that in the initial stages of the new business, insufficient attention is paid to the critical organizing dimension. In particular, the internal organization needs to be developed, and the external organizing of the context as the new relationships are developed needs to be considered. Finally, the fourth conclusion is that in order to succeed, the new venture company has to generate positive economic outcomes for the partners (positively affecting their assets) and simultaneously ensure that the business is economically sustainable by generating sufficient revenues to cover operating costs. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for practice and further research