The Faces of Success Peng, Ling; Cui, Geng; Chung, Yuho ...
Journal of marketing,
07/2020, Letnik:
84, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Given the positive bias toward attractive people in society, online sellers are justifiably apprehensive about perceptions of their profile pictures. Although the existing literature emphasizes the ...“beauty premium” and the “ugliness penalty,” the current studies of seller profile pictures on customer-to-customer e-commerce platforms find a U-shaped relationship between facial attractiveness and product sales (i.e., both beauty and ugliness premiums and, thus, a “plainness penalty”). By analyzing two large data sets, the authors find that both attractive and unattractive people sell significantly more than plain-looking people. Two online experiments reveal that attractive sellers enjoy greater source credibility due to perceived sociability and competence, whereas unattractive sellers are considered more believable on the basis of their perceived competence. While a beauty premium is apparent for appearance-relevant products, an ugliness premium is more pronounced for expertise-relevant products and for female consumers evaluating male sellers. These findings highlight the influence of facial appearance as a key vehicle for impression formation in online platforms and its complex effects in e-commerce and marketing.
This paper examines the use of social media by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople to assist in their job functions. The authors propose that a salesperson's attitude toward social media ...usefulness, as well as a salesperson's learning orientation, will influence how much a salesperson uses social media to assist in day-to-day job tasks. Additionally, the impact that the use of social media has on collecting knowledge about competitors, adapting to customers, and sales performance is considered. Accordingly, a broad literature review is provided to introduce extant theory contributing to the proposed model. The practical uses of social media by salespeople will be described, and then the theoretical foundation is built, encompassing social media use, goal orientations, and adaptive selling theory. Results of an empirical model are provided, followed by a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.
•Findings of the study suggest that social media is one way to enhance sales performance, but its use alone does not guarantee such enhancement.•Social media use will affect performance of salespeople through affecting their competitive intelligence collection and adaptive selling.•Perceived usefulness of social media was not significantly related to salesperson social media use.•Results support linking collection of competitive intelligence to a salesperson’s adaptive selling behavior.
The increased usage and proliferation of businesses entering the gig economy has meant more employment options for individuals wishing to participate in the gig economy. However, not all gig ...employment opportunities are the same. Typically, gig employment opportunities fall into one of two categories: the sharing economy or direct selling. These two types of gig employment are unique in the perceptions of those that choose to engage in them. This research seeks to provide insights into the drivers of gig worker perceptions of the product, organizational trust, job outcome status and satisfaction. Results suggest that direct sales workers have higher levels of self-congruence, and lower levels of perceived commerciality, leading to positive evaluations of the product offered, organizational trust and job satisfaction. Conversely, sharing economy workers have much lower levels of self-congruence, and higher levels of perceived commerciality, leading to a more complicated relationship with the outcome variables.
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•Combined TEA and LCA of an integrated PtL-SAF system.•The MJSP is OPEX intensive due to high electricity consumption.•The WtWa GWP falls below the UK-SAF mandate threshold.•The WtWa ...water footprint of the PtL-SAF is greater than the one of fossil jet fuel.•SAF certificates could help to break-even with the conventional jet fuel.
The current research critically evaluates the technical, economic, and environmental performance of a Power-to-Liquid (PtL) system for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). This SAF production system comprises a direct air capture (DAC) unit, an off-shore wind farm, an alkaline electrolyser and a refinery plant (reverse water gas shift coupled with a Fischer-Tropsch reactor). The calculated carbon conversion efficiency, hydrogen conversion efficiency, and Power-to-liquids efficiency are 88%, 39.16% and 25.6%, respectively. The heat integration between the refinery and the DAC unit enhances the system's energy performance, while water integration between the DAC and refinery units and the electrolyser reduces the demand for fresh water. The economic assessment estimates a minimum jet fuel selling price (MJSP) of 5.16 £/kg. The process is OPEX intensive due to the electricity requirements, while the CAPEX is dominated by the DAC unit. A Well-to-Wake (WtWa) life cycle assessment (LCA) shows that the global warming potential (GWP) equals 21.43 gCO2eq/MJSAF, and is highly dependent on the upstream emissions of the off-shore wind electricity. Within a 95% confidence interval, a stochastic Monte Carlo LCA reveals that the GWP of the SAF falls below the UK aviation mandate treshold of 50% emissions reduction compared to fossil jet fuel. Moreover, the resulting WtWa water footprint is 0.480 l/MJSAF, with the refinery’s cooling water requirements and the electricity’s water footprint to pose as the main contributors. The study concludes with estimating the required monetary value of SAF certificates for different scenarios under the possible UK SAF mandate guidelines.
Sales research has widely noted the growing importance of social media in contemporary B2B selling. Yet, scholars have noted that measurement issues represent a challenge for advancing the study of ...social media use in selling, since research is lacking on high-rigour measures that provide insights into how salespersons are leveraging social media in their work. Accordingly, this study develops and validates activity-based measures for social selling based on two empirical studies. We find support for all three social selling dimensions of insight generation, connecting and engagement. The findings also extend the current knowledge about the outcomes of social selling by showing that salesperson thought leadership and acquisition performance mediate the sales performance relationship. On the antecedents' side, we show novel evidence that management plays a central role in boosting social selling among the sales force through social media strategy, social media sales tools and firm content support. In turn, sales technology orientation and social influence represent the key individual-level drivers.
•This study develops an activity-based measure for Social Selling (SS).•It consists of 3 dimensions: 1) insight generation, 2) connecting, 3) engaging.•SS predicts thought leadership, acquisition performance, outcome sales performance.•Management can support SS by social media strategy, tools and content support.•Social influence and sales technology orientation are key individual drivers of SS.
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Even as salespeople increasingly adopt social media, sales research and practice struggle to understand how their application can help salespeople acquire customers. This article therefore explores ...empirically under which conditions social media adoption enhances or impedes the customer acquisition performance of salespeople. According to motivation literature, the outcomes of salespeople's social media adoption should depend fundamentally on the interplay of the level and direction of social media adoption. Based on a multi-level data set containing objective performance data and surveys of salespeople, the results of this study reveal that salespeople's social media adoption increases customer acquisition performance if salespeople communicate in a customized way (indicated by customer orientation). Strikingly, the study also unveils that this effect is negative if salespeople communicate in a standardized way (indicated by, for example, performance orientation). These findings in turn offer several managerial and theoretical implications.
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2022.2033624 .
Team selling and the increasing representation of women in the sales force are two current trends contributing to the complexity of managing the sales environment, yet little work exists ...investigating the impact of women on selling team performance. This paper anchors on cognitive resource diversity theory and integrates relevant prior research to propose a new proposition-driven framework that explains why gender diversity of team members improves team performance. Specifically, we provide evidence to suggest that the addition of females to all-male selling teams should positively impact team performance by reducing the average turnover rate of high performers within the team; by enhancing relational skills, organizational citizenship behaviors, and shared leadership within the team; and by building on the favorable effects associated with team heterogeneity. We also consider the moderating effects that potentially deeply ingrained connections among members of all-male teams may have on changes in team gender composition, as well as the importance of a culture of organizational inclusion on the favorable effects of team heterogeneity overall. Managerial implications of increased female presence on teams are proffered, along with suggested next steps in research and limitations of the present conceptualization.
•A proposition-driven framework is proposed for mixed-gender team performance.•Increased presence of females affords several routes to increased team performance.•Average turnover rate of high performers should be reduced.•Enhanced relational skills, organizational citizenship behaviors, and shared leadership should benefit the team.•Favorable direct effects of team heterogeneity also should enrich team performance.
This research is among the first to examine salespeople's acceptance of AI (artificial intelligence) and we investigate the drivers of their AI acceptance from the perspective of the managers. In ...this study, we propose and empirically demonstrate that perceived ease of use, self-efficacy, perceived management support, and digitalization are positively related to salespeople's acceptance of AI. Moreover, we show that digitalization mediates the relationship between salespeople's prospecting/adaptive selling capabilities and their AI acceptance. The results suggest that in order to incentivize AI acceptance, managers need to build adequate digital infrastructure, cultivate organizational support to encourage AI adoption and usage, provide professional training to educate salespeople on the proper usage of AI, and reduce salespeople's perceived risk of AI usage. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed subsequently.