Marketers desire exclusive brand repurchase. This can occur when customers develop deep emotional “bonds” with brands, as elaborated in the emotional attachment to brands construct. To create ...emotionally attached repurchase, marketers must understand controllable antecedents of the phenomenon. However, a comprehensive study of antecedents is missing from the literature. We use qualitative methods to derive five primary antecedents of emotional attachment to brands. Our summary model allows for simultaneous operation of multiple antecedents, as we consistently observed in our data. We offer applied suggestions for leveraging antecedents to evoke exclusive repurchase based on emotional attachment to brands.
Marketing researchers and practitioners are showing substantial interest in social media communication, trying to understand the challenges and opportunities associated with this new cultural and ...social phenomenon. In this research, the authors examine social media as a new attachment phenomenon, positing likely predictive links to marketing-related social media behaviors. Researchers have demonstrated useful applicability of psychological attachment theory to a variety of other marketing contexts, including special possessions, places, brands, and services. Attachment to such varied focal targets has been shown to influence behaviors of interest to marketers. However, research to date has yet to develop a conceptualization or operationalization of attachment in the social media context. The authors seek to contribute to the literature in two primary ways: first, we provide a foundational definition of attachment to social media, and conduct four initial studies to develop a measure that meets desired reliability and validity standards. Secondly, in a fifth study, we use this validated measure to test its empirical usefulness in predicting social media behaviors in an applied retail setting. Taken together, the results are particularly valuable in demonstrating that attachment to social media is a distinct, measurable phenomenon that helps to explain various activities on social media platforms, including C2C advocacy and C2B supportive communication behaviors. Results reveal practical guidance for marketing managers wrestling with developing effective social media marketing strategies.
•We provide a foundational definition of attachment to social media (ASM).•Demonstrate ASM is a distinct, measurable phenomenon predictive of various consumer-related social media activities.•Demonstrate ASM’s empirical usefulness in predicting social media behaviors in an applied retail setting.•Reveal practical guidance for marketing managers wrestling with developing effective social media marketing strategies.
This research conceptualizes the distinction between pay-it-forward and direct-reciprocity tendency from a construal level perspective, and examines such differences in three studies. Study 1 ...develops Pay-It-Forward Tendency scale and validates it in both the U.S. and India. Study 2 uses the scale to gather data from software engineers in both the U.S. and India, showing that Indian software professionals have a lower pay-it-forward (vs. direct-reciprocity) tendency, which in turn leads to more pay-it-forward behavior, whereas American software professionals have similar levels of pay-it-forward and direct-reciprocity tendency. Consistent with the construal level account, Study 3 shows that individuals high (vs. low) in direct-reciprocity have lower preferences for charitable causes with delayed (vs. immediate) impact, whereas those high and low in pay-it-forward show equal preferences for these causes. Similarly, donation intention-behavior consistency is positively related to pay-it-forward, but negatively associated with direct-reciprocity. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.
Extant research on salespersons’ regulatory foci has mainly focused on behaviors that are congruent with salespersons’ regulatory orientations (dominant pathway) to the neglect of alternate, yet ...essential salesperson behaviors that may render less “fit” (supplemental pathway). Moreover, the literature is also silent on managerial actions that can motivate salespeople to perform
even
when the environment is not conducive to perceived fit. Using a triadic dataset from salespeople, their managers, and archival performance records, the authors find that a competitive psychological climate can strengthen the regulatory fit of promotion focus and adaptive selling, which can be further reinforced (inadvertently disrupted) if managers deploy outcome (behavioral) control. By contrast, prevention focus shows an opposite pattern, in which behavioral control strengthens, whereas outcome control weakens, the perceived fit of prevention focus and service behaviors in a highly competitive climate. Importantly, our findings elucidate the complementary (as opposed to contradictory) nature of the dual process model of dominant and supplemental pathways, by illustrating their positive synergistic effect on salesperson performance. Together, these findings clarify the underlying dual mechanisms of regulatory foci and their respective boundary conditions, thereby shedding light on ambiguities in extant literature and providing actionable managerial guidance.
Since the inception of the concept, researchers have hypothesized that customer orientation plays a fundamental role in explaining sales performance. However, Franke and Park's (2006) meta-analysis ...challenged this notion with findings of a nonsignificant effect of customer orientation on objective sales performance. This counterintuitive result was explained by noting that the impact of customer orientation on objective sales measures may be present in the long run. In this research note, we evaluate that notion by testing a model in which customer orientation is used to predict individual rates-of-change in sales performance over time. Longitudinal salesperson performance in dollars, from the database of a direct selling organization, is merged with survey responses and modeled using an emerging method called latent growth modeling (LGM). Results confirm Franke and Park's findings that customer orientation has a nonsignificant direct effect on the static initial-level aspect of objective sales performance. However, as postulated, customer orientation does show a significant direct effect on longitudinal sales performance trajectories. Our findings also suggest that customer-oriented selling's nonsignificant direct effect on cross-sectional performance may be due to a fully mediated indirect effect through adaptive selling.
Much has been written about the importance of focusing on customers to drive organizational success. In this paper, aspects of manager-salesperson relationships are examined as drivers of deeper ...customer focus in salesperson-customer interactions. In particular, managers' servant leadership, a leadership style emphasizing genuine concern for subordinate welfare, is examined as a catalyst of parallel concern by salespeople for their customers. Salesperson perceptions of managers' servant leadership empirically relate to salesperson customer orientation, in turn driving adaptive selling behaviors, customer-directed extra-role behaviors, and sales performance outcomes. Other results and implications for management and sales leadership research are presented.
Generation Y is a cohort of the population larger than the baby boom generation. Consisting of approximately 80 million people born between 1981 and 2000, Generation Y is the most recent cohort to ...enter the workforce. Workplaces are being redefined and organizations are being pressed to adapt as this new wave of workers is infused into business environments. One critical aspect of this phenomenon not receiving sufficient research attention is the impact of Gen Y ethical beliefs and ethical conduct in workplace contexts. It is widely accepted that distinct generational experiences shape ethical ideologies and ethical ideologies in turn affect the way people function in the workplace. Thus, Gen Y's unique cohort experiences are likely to shape their ethical ideologies and consequent workplace judgments and actions. In this article, we examine Gen Y's ethical ideology and study its impact on workplace functioning regarding leadership style, teamwork, and judgments about ethical violations. Our analyses indicate that Gen Y'ers tend toward situationalism (high idealism and high relativism), and their socially connected orientation produces more lenient judgments of collaborative vs. unilateral ethical violations. However, Gen Y'ers do exhibit individual variation. Relativist Gen Y'ers are more tolerant of ethical violations, whereas, Gen Y Idealists are less tolerant of ethical violations. High Idealists also show stronger teamwork and leadership characteristics. In addition, Gen Y'ers possessing servant leader traits exhibit incrementally better teamwork, and greater perceived unacceptability of ethical violations. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for managing ethical climates and conduct.
Sales force retention is frequently deemed a critical organizational objective. Responses from 501 full-time salespeople from a variety of industries were used to test a model that examines the ...impact of servant leadership on salesperson's turnover intention. This study shows that servant leadership affects turnover intention through a complex moderated and mediated chain-of-effects that involves ethical level, person-organization fit, and organization commitment. This study also shows that servant leadership gains importance when the organization is perceived by the salesperson as unethical. Managerial implications and directions for future research are also provided.
In this paper, we examine servant leadership as a promising leadership style for today's dynamic sales environments. Conceptual and empirical literature points to servant leadership's strong ...potential in facilitating benefits to salespeople and the organization. Yet that same literature evidences a problematic lack of consensus regarding components that distinctly reflect servant leadership. Existing conceptualizations include dimensions like humility and providing direction, which clearly overlap with various other leadership styles. In this paper, we first consider unique distinctives of servant leadership. We then propose an extension of the augmentation hypothesis from the transactional and transformational leadership literature. Specifically, we posit that servant leadership distinctives are hierarchically built on transformational characteristics, which themselves are built on transactional characteristics. Using secondary data from a sample of professional salespeople, we apply Guttman scaling and show this hierarchical conceptualization to be empirically tenable. We demonstrate that sales leadership at higher levels on the hierarchy produces incremental gains in salesperson satisfaction, salesperson performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and corporate social responsibility. We confirm our findings in a validation sample and demonstrate an additional relationship with customer-directed extra-role behaviors. Our results imply that sales organizations can reap enhanced multi-faceted benefits through higher levels of servant leadership.
PDF
