Eco-friendly product development strategy: antecedents, outcomes, and contingent effects

Integrating sustainability aspects into product development has long been recognized as a strategic priority for practitioners. Yet the literature reports mixed results on the product development effectiveness outcomes of sustainable product development strategies, while scant research has investigated how companies integrate environmental aspects into product development. This study develops a model that integrates effectiveness-enhancing outcomes and organizational inputs of eco-friendly product development strategies. Using questionnaire responses from firms from multiple industries, supplemented with lagged primary product development performance data, we find that top management commitment and corporate environmental support policies can facilitate eco-friendly product development strategies, while environmental performance incentives do not. In turn, the adoption of such strategies has a positive effect on firms’ product development effectiveness. This effect weakens when business conditions are highly complex but tends to become stronger with increasing levels of munificence in the business environment. These findings have important implications for practitioners and researchers that are discussed

A Good Signal: How Firms Can Utilize Country of Origin as a Strategic Analytical Tool

Abundant consumer data has made decision making more complicated rather than simple for marketers. The abundance of consumer data raises an important question about which variables in the data contain reliable information for retailers to predict future consumer purchase value (CPV) to guide strategic decisions. The authors address this question by exploring the variables “distinctive choice of brand country of origin” (DBCOO) and “country of origin diversity” (COO diversity) as analytical tools to extract insights from consumer purchase data. Building on signaling theory, the authors theorize and empirically test that DBCOO and COO diversity in a consumer’s purchase history can signal, and therefore help predict CPV. Moreover, we explore high-involvement product categories and purchase frequency as boundary conditions to develop a comprehensive framework of COO signals as strategic analytical tools. We find that DBCOO in a consumer’s purchase history indeed increases CPV and that this relationship is enhanced for high-involvement product categories but moderated curvilinearly by purchase frequency. Moreover, we find that the COO diversity – CPV link is positive but depicts a negative interaction with both moderators. This allows retailers to successfully distinguish high- from low-CPV consumers and thus enables them to manage marketing mix and resources more effectively

INTEGRAÇÃO DE AÇÕES NA GESTÃO SUSTENTÁVEL

A sociedade, afetada pelas desigualdades, pela pobreza e pela fome, dentre outras mazelas, forma um quadro que não pode mais ser desconsiderado pelas organizações. As ações por proteção ambiental e justiça social podem se articular na medida em que esses contextos se completam e têm em comum um objetivo final. As empresas evitam investir em tratamento e em incineração de resíduos, uma vez que podem descartá-los em áreas desvalorizadas, abandonadas pelos investimentos públicos em infraestrutura urbana, e habitadas por populações pobres e menos organizadas. O artigo propõe uma estrutura de referência cujos elementos buscam identificar o compromisso empresarial com a questão socioambiental, aqui denominada Gestão Sustentável Integrada (GSI). Esta se compõe de três planos interdependentes: responsabilidade social corporativa, gestão ambiental e marketing ambiental, todas apoiadas na educação socioambiental. A identificação das ações representativas em cada face ocorreu com abordagem exploratória com consulta a dados secundários, extraídos principalmente das publicações do Instituto Ethos, e das normas brasileiras (NBR) ISO 14.001 e ISO 14.004. Consulta envolvendo 15 especialistas em meio ambiente originou a classificação ordinal das ações relevantes para cada face da GSI, tendo-se concluído que: 1) as ações de responsabilidade social estão vinculadas primordialmente à transparência na gestão; 2) na gestão ambiental, significa racionalizar produtos, processos e serviços da empresa; 3) o marketing ambiental deve se concentrar na seleção de fornecedores, concepção de projetos e de inovações que mitiguem o impacto ambiental

Supply chain strategies in the UK fashion industry - the rhetoric of partnership and realities of power

This paper focuses on the fashion industry, one characterised by issues such as dramatic shifts in the scale and power of major retail buyers in the market, the advent of retailer own brands, and the nature of sourcing and supply chain decisions, issues that are increasingly global in nature. The aim of this research is to explore the nature of relationships between UK high street multiple fashion retailers and their contracted suppliers, many of whom are entrepreneurial firms by most definitions of the term. Four core themes emerge from the literature and provide a framework for the research, namely, power, process, partnership, and people. The research approach was qualitative, and conducted over a period of twelve months. The paper ends with an agenda for future research