Product Elimination Excellence : systematische Portfolio-Bereinigung im B2B-Bereich

In vielen Unternehmen haben das Ausmaß und somit auch die Komplexität der Produktsortimente in den letzten Jahren stark zugenommen. Die hohe Anzahl unterschiedlicher Produkte führt nicht nur zu hohen Komplexitätskosten. Es stellen sich auch viele der eingeführten Produkte im Nachhinein als unprofitabel heraus. Produkt-Eliminationen stellen daher eine sinnvolle Möglichkeit dar, zum einen die Komplexität und die damit verbundenen Kosten zu senken und zum anderen unprofitable Produkte aus dem Sortiment zu entfernen. Zudem bieten Produkt-Eliminationen die Möglichkeit, frei gesetzte Ressourcen effektiver zu allokieren. In vielen Unternehmen herrscht jedoch eine große Unsicherheit, wie Entscheidungen über Eliminationen getroffen werden sollen. Zudem gibt es in vielen Unternehmen oft interne Widerstände gegen Produkt-Eliminationen. Gleichzeitig fürchten viele Manager negative Reaktionen betroffener Kunden. Vor diesem Hintergrund zeigt der Product-Elimination-Excellence-Ansatz verschiedene Optionen auf, wie die Entscheidungsfindung und die Umsetzung von Produkt-Eliminationen effektiv gestaltet werden können. Im Rahmen der Umsetzung wird dabei vor allem auf die Umsetzung innerhalb des Unternehmens (interne Umsetzung) und die Umsetzung gegenüber betroffenen Kunden (externe Umsetzung) eingegangen. Auf Basis einer umfangreichen empirischen Studie beinhaltet der Product-Elimination-Excellence-Ansatz einen ausführlichen State of Practice zu Produkt-Eliminationen, der eliminierenden Unternehmen als umfassender Benchmark dienen kann. Zudem wird eine Vielzahl verschiedener Aktivitäten für die Gestaltung von Eliminationen aufgezeigt und hinsichtlich ihres Erfolgsbeitrags analysiert

GIVE IT AWAY AND GET IT BACK? ON THE ROLE AND NATURE OF GIVEAWAY CAMPAIGNS BY SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS

Our study explores how social media influencers should design the set-up of giveaways in firm-sponsored posts to maximize their followers’ engagement, thereby enhancing the outreach of the post. Specifically, we investige how the value of the giveaway prize (= followers’ benefits) and the degree of effort to participate in the giveaway (= followers’ costs) drive followers’ liking and commenting of the post. We further explore how these empirical relationships vary with the origin of the influencer and the media richness of the post. Basing our conceptual model on social exchange theory and an indepth literature review, we use the public Instagram Graph API and systematic coding analyses to derive a unique dataset. We identified and manually coded 1049 giveaways posted by 115 social media influencers collected between August 2020 and August 2021. To analyze our data, we will apply a negative binomial regression and provide thorough reasoning for our approach

Driving Engagement with Virtual Influencer Content – Integrating Computer Vision, Text Analysis and Manual Coding

Virtual influencers have started to amass significant followings on online social networks and to collaborate with popular brands. However, the content characteristics driving the engagement with virtual influencer posts are still unexplored. This study addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing a unique dataset comprising over 25,000 posts from 171 influencers gathered using Google Cloud Vision and Instagram Graph API data. We conduct hierarchical negative binomial regression models for both likes and comments and find that posts displaying emotions such as anger and joy result in substantial increases in engagement metrics. Additionally, interactive posts using hashtags or tags also generate more engagement. Moreover, we present our remaining work which includes incorporating text characteristics (e.g., sentiment and emotional congruence) and manually coded content types (informative, entertaining, remunerative, and relational formats) into the model as well as post-hoc analyses and robustness checks to further disentangle the effects identified

DECONSTRUCTING E-COMMERCE PRESENCES - A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA

This literature review systematically analyses recent studies on the effective design of e-commerce presences in order to provide a state-of-the-art overview on this important topic. To do so, our review focuses on the level of webshop elements (i.e., the building blocks to design webshops), which we cluster in eight categories (e.g., color usage, music usage, rich media usage), derived from previous website quality frameworks (e.g., SITEQUAL, WebQual) and prior reviews. The basis of our comprehensive literature review are 91 articles grouped into the webshop element categories and additionally analyzed along three key study criteria, namely the applied research methods, theories, and key dependent variables. Based on the findings from this bibliographic analysis, we formulate an agenda for future research avenues to guide researchers in further exploring the field of e-commerce presences and to support practitioners in their decision-making on the implementation of webshop elements

The role of marketing in new ventures: How marketing activities should be organized in firms’ infancy

Although marketing activities are vital for new ventures (NVs) to ensure growth and survival, previous research is silent on how to organize them in firms’ infancy. The entrepreneurship literature focuses on which marketing activities to perform in NVs but not on how to organize these activities, whereas the marketing literature concentrates on how to organize marketing activities in established firms but not in NVs, which face specific opportunities and challenges in their early stage of development. This article aims to tackle this research gap by examining marketing’s role within NVs’ organization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with managers, we identify two key organizational dimensions: marketing’s dispersion (related to the proliferation and, thus, wide anchoring of marketing responsibilities) and marketing’s structuration (related to the manifestation and, thus, deep anchoring of marketing responsibilities). Through a field survey and archival data, we show that marketing’s dispersion enhances NV profitability, while marketing’s structuration decreases it, and that with increasing marketing influence (i.e., power of marketing actors) in NVs and NV maturity (i.e., age and size), this diametrical pattern of effects becomes less pronounced. Overall, the findings provide novel theoretical and practical insights into the organizational design of marketing in firms’ infancy.© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Organizational Multichannel Differentiation: An Analysis of Its Impact on Channel Relationships and Company Sales Success

This article examines whether and how a company's division of segment- and task-related responsibilities among multiple sales channels affects the relationships in the multichannel (MC) system and, ultimately, the company's sales success. Building on open systems theory, the authors develop an overarching framework of organizational MC differentiation that distinguishes between two generic approaches: segment differentiation and task differentiation. They predict that these two approaches affect key relationship and performance outcomes of an MC system, but do so differently and contingent on key characteristics of the company's customers. Drawing on a multi-informant survey in a business-to-business context as well as on objective performance data, the authors find that segment differentiation tends to mitigate horizontal conflict and inhibit cooperation, while task differentiation reduces primarily vertical conflict and promotes cooperation. Moreover, depending on customer characteristics, segment differentiation may damage channel relationships overall and, in turn, limit company sales success, whereas task differentiation unambiguously promotes channel relationships and thus drives company sales success. These findings offer novel insights into the relationship and performance impact of MC systems’ organizational structure and provide useful guidance on how managers should allocate segment- and task-related responsibilities among multiple sales channels

A Customer Perspective on Product Eliminations: How the Removal of Products Affects Customers and Business Relationships

Regardless of the apparent need for product eliminations, many managers hesitate to act as they fear deleterious effects on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Other managers do carry out product eliminations, but often fail to consider the consequences for customers and business relationships. Given the relevance and problems of product eliminations, research on this topic in general and on the consequences for customers and business relationships in particular is surprisingly scarce. Therefore, this empirical study explores how and to what extent the elimination of a product negatively affects customers and business relationships. Results indicate that eliminating a product may result in severe economic and psychological costs to customers, thereby seriously decreasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This paper also shows that these costs are not exogenous in nature. Instead, depending on the characteristics of the eliminated product these costs are found to be more or less strongly driven by a company’s behavior when implementing the elimination at the customer interface

Gestaltung und Auswirkungen von Produkteliminationen im Business-to-Business-Umfeld

Produkteliminationen können einen zentralen Beitrag für ein effektives Management des Produktsortiments und damit für den Unternehmenserfolg leisten. In vielen Unternehmen bereitet jedoch insbesondere die Umsetzung von Produkteliminationen Schwierigkeiten. Jana-Kristin Prigge untersucht die Gestaltung und Auswirkungen von Produkteliminationen in einem Business-to-Business-Umfeld. Ihre Untersuchungen stützen sich auf eine umfangreiche, branchenübergreifende Befragung von eliminierenden Anbietern und betroffenen Kunden. Dabei befasst sich die Autorin mit der Nutzung von Potentialen und der Reduzierung von Risiken im Rahmen der Umsetzung von Produkteliminationen sowie mit den Auswirkungen auf betroffene Kunden und Geschäftsbeziehungen. Aus den hieraus gewonnenen Erkenntnissen und einer umfangreichen Bestandsaufnahme der Eliminations-Aktivitäten deutscher Unternehmen leitet sie zahlreiche Empfehlungen für die Unternehmenspraxis ab

Kundenpriorisierung zur Wahrung profitabler Geschäftsbeziehungen

Customer prioritization is a common marketing activity in business practice. It aims at an increase in average customer profitability and return on sales by treating important customers more intensively. After a short introduction highlighting the importance of customer prioritzation, the present article provides an overview of key aspects of customer prioritization. First, companies need to select a prioritization criterion, determine the method to identify important customers, and decide on how to treat these customers in a particular way. Second, companies face challenges and need to address key requirements for implementing customer prioritization within a company. Finally, the article emphasizes positive and negative consequences of customer prioritization