The article is devoted to the problem of improving interaction in B2B markets. By analyzing the literature on the issues under study, the authors have identified a trend in the customer management ...development in B2B markets towards a unique experience creation along the entire path of interaction between an account and a company. This is a business marketing strategy aimed at understanding, engaging and providing customized services and content to target accounts. The strategy involves using marketing techniques to engage the entire organization by targeting multiple stakeholders within a single potential account. The use of CJM as a methodology currently used in B2C markets has been justified and recommendations for its application in B2B made. CJM allows companies to align their business processes and resources with the needs of accounts, ensuring smooth teamwork. Engagement tools used in account engagement management have been systematized, helping to effectively shape the account experience; engagement performance metrics have been identified. The engagement tools implementation provides the cross-functional integration needed to engage with larger accounts, aligning marketing with sales and service. The article focuses on personalizing engagement with decision makers. The research analysis also revealed the features and trends of content customization within the ABM programs.
Purpose
Brand authenticity has emerged as a strategic imperative for many firms. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of consumer perceptions of brand marketing ...communications on brand authenticity of fast-moving consumer goods.
Design/methodology/approach
Direct and indirect pathways from brand marketing communications to brand authenticity were conceptualized. Data were collected from US energy drink consumers and analysed using structural equation modelling. Multiple marketing mix variables and context-relevant covariates have been controlled for.
Findings
Direct and indirect pathways to building brand authenticity have been observed. The total effect of brand marketing communications on brand authenticity is strong, thereby highlighting the predictor’s overall effectiveness in shaping the ultimate outcome.
Research limitations/implications
The focus on consumer-perceived authenticity as opposed to objective authenticity complements the prior literature. An integrative perspective on brand marketing communications is offered, specifying it as an antecedent of perceived brand authenticity.
Practical implications
An important implication is that investments into brand marketing communications will likely influence perceived brand authenticity. Such investments may also have favourable implications for the clarity of brand positioning. Overall, brand marketing communications are effective tools for building consumer-perceived brand authenticity.
Originality/value
A need to outline managerially controllable drivers of authenticity was addressed. How consumer perceptions of brand marketing communications influence brand authenticity via direct and indirect mechanisms was demonstrated. The existence of authenticity in fast-moving consumer goods was also demonstrated.
The emergence of Internet-based social media has made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about products and the companies that provide them. ...Thus, the impact of consumer-to-consumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace. This article argues that social media is a hybrid element of the promotion mix because in a traditional sense it enables companies to talk to their customers, while in a nontraditional sense it enables customers to talk directly to one another. The content, timing, and frequency of the social media-based conversations occurring between consumers are outside managers’ direct control. This stands in contrast to the traditional integrated marketing communications paradigm whereby a high degree of control is present. Therefore, managers must learn to shape consumer discussions in a manner that is consistent with the organization's mission and performance goals. Methods by which this can be accomplished are delineated herein. They include providing consumers with networking platforms, and using blogs, social media tools, and promotional tools to engage customers.
Purpose
In this invited paper, the authors aim to offer an integrated marketing communications (IMC) framework for understanding how disparate customer touchpoints impact consumer engagement and ...profitability in an omni-channel environment. For each aspect of the framework, the authors recommend areas for further research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review literature linking personal and electronic channels of communication in an omni-channel context to consumer engagement, with an emphasis on channel and message unity.
Findings
Five major research areas were identified: research that better links omni-channel and IMC theory and practice; conceptual and empirical research that helps operationalize the consumer-brand engagement construct, including its antecedents and consequences; Build understanding of off- and on-line consumer-brand touchpoints and how they may enhance engagement and profitability; how omni-channel IMC best monetizes buyer–seller relationships; and omni-channel IMC in other consumer decision contexts.
Practical implications
The emergence of omni-channel marketing is breaking down the silos across available consumer-brand touchpoints. The intersection of effective omni-channel marketing and IMC strategic and tactical initiatives offers marketers an opportunity to engage their customers and to form profitable relationships.
Originality/value
The authors proposed an omni-channel IMC Framework and a research agenda for advancing the field. As this is a new area of inquiry, the authors argue for the development of other comprehensive frameworks, both for general omni-channel IMC conceptualizations.
Visual marketing communications consist of two components: (1) semantic content (e.g., headings, images, copy) that communicates a brand's positioning, benefits, and personality and (2) visual design ...(e.g., font selection, image size, the organization of the content) that encourages inferences about brand claims. The authors investigate how visual design can be used to encourage inferences that support brand claims and improve brand performance. They find that brands with a utilitarian positioning perform better when the visual design of their marketing communications encourages structured perceptions, whereas brands with a hedonic positioning perform better when the visual design of their marketing communications encourages unstructured perceptions. In both cases, (un)structured perceptions encourage inferences that reinforce brand claims and, consequently, improve brand performance. This research offers actionable insights into how marketing communication specialists can coordinate logo design, product design, package design, visual merchandising, and retail environments to reinforce brand claims.
In this digital era, marketing theory and practice are being transformed by increasing complexity due to information availability, higher reach and interactions, and faster speeds of transactions. ...These have led to the adoption of intelligent agent technologies (IATs) by many companies. As IATs are relatively new and technologically complex, several definitions are evolving, and the theory in this area is not yet fully developed. There is a need to provide structure and guidance to marketers to further this emerging stream of research. As a first step, this paper proposes a marketing-centric definition and a systematic taxonomy and framework. The authors, using a grounded theory approach, conduct an extensive literature review and a qualitative study in which interviews with managers from 50 companies in 22 industries reveal the importance of understanding IAT applications and adopting them. Further, the authors propose an integrated conceptual framework with several propositions regarding IAT adoption. This research identifies the gaps in the literature and the need for adoption of IATs in the future of marketing given changing consumer behavior and product and industry characteristics.
As social media gains more importance, managers are challenged to quantify its return on sales. The academic understanding in the effectiveness of social media is limited, and in fact the synergistic ...effects between social media and traditional marketing efforts have rarely been investigated. Despite the dynamics in marketing effectiveness on sales, the time-varying effectiveness of social media has never been studied either. In this study, we capture the time-varying effects of social media and the time-varying synergistic effects of social media and traditional marketing with a time-varying effect model (TVEM) approach. The empirical analyses of a large U.S. ice-cream brand sales reveal that a) the effectiveness of social media and traditional marketing vary over time, b) the synergistic effects vary over time for social media with product sampling and with in-store promotions, c) the proposed TVEM approach has a higher predictive accuracy than the benchmark models, and d) the proposed TVEM approach saves marketing costs by $0.4 million per year, compared to the time-invariant benchmark model. Overall, this study enables managers to not only better understand the synergistic effects of social media marketing and traditional marketing, but also the time-varying effectiveness of their marketing efforts with TVEM approach for better resource allocation.
Email marketing is an important staple of marketing communications. Emails from companies to customers may be promotional in nature, to drive short-term purchasing, or relational in nature, for ...customer relationship management (CRM) and brand-building objectives. Emails are also issued when customers have opted in to receive alerts and notifications. The authors posit that these different types of emails (promotional, CRM, alerts) reflect both overt and more subtle attempts at persuasion and are associated with different levels of persuasion knowledge. Insights from the persuasion knowledge model (
Friestad and Wright 1994) and advertising wear-out are offered as explanations to understand consumer response to different types of emails. The authors test a model comparing the relative effectiveness of these types of emails on the email opening rate, the spending amount, and the shopping cart abandonment rate. They show that emails associated with relatively lower levels of persuasion knowledge are the most effective at increasing the opening rate and spending amount but are counterproductive for reducing shopping cart abandonment. In contrast, emails that likely trigger higher levels of persuasion knowledge are better for reducing cart abandonment. Alert notifications are mostly ineffective at driving our focal outcomes. The authors show that email effectiveness varies over time and is different for each type of email. They assert that combinations of specific email types, if strategically managed, can be used to enhance the spending of customers who opt in to receive specific alert messages.
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