Gerrit van Bruggen

Corporate associations and consumer product responses: The moderating role of corporate brand dominance

This study investigates the effect of corporate brand dominance—that is, the visibility of a companys corporate brand in product communications—on the relationship between corporate associations and product evaluations. The results show that corporate brand dominance determines the degree to which associations with the companys corporate ability and corporate social responsibility influence product attitudes, as well as the nature of the moderating effects of fit and involvement.

Informants in organizational marketing research: Why use multiple informants and how to aggregate responses

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental response data from informants within organizations. This article discusses why using multiple informants improves the quality of response data and thereby the validity of research findings. The authors show that when there are multiple informants who disagree, responses aggregated with confidence- or competence-based weights outperform those with response data-based weights, which in turn provide significant gains in estimation accuracy over simply averaging informant reports. The proposed methods are effective, inexpensive, and easy to use in organizational marketing research.

A Viral Branching Model for Predicting the Spread of Electronic Word of Mouth

In a viral marketing campaign, an organization develops a marketing message and encourages customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach and how marketers can influence this process through marketing activities. This paper develops such a model using the theory of branching processes. The proposed viral branching model allows customers to participate in a viral marketing campaign by 1 opening a seeding e-mail from the organization, 2 opening a viral e-mail from a friend, and 3 responding to other marketing activities such as banners and offline advertising. The model parameters are estimated using individual-level data that become available in large quantities in the early stages of viral marketing campaigns. The viral branching model is applied to an actual viral marketing campaign in which over 200,000 customers participated during a six-week period. The results show that the model quickly predicts the actual reach of the campaign. In addition, the model proves to be a valuable tool to evaluate alternative what-if scenarios.

Managing Marketing Channel Multiplicity

Advances in information technology and changing customer needs for channel service outputs have dramatically affected the routes to markets in many industries. The authors propose that these changes have led to significant alterations in how customers interact with firms and consequently to a phenomenon that we dub ‘‘channel multiplicity.’’ Channel multiplicity is characterized by the customer’s reliance on multiple sources of information from independent (and often disparate) channel organizations and increasing demand for a seamless experience throughout the buying process. The authors identify the new market operating realities driving channel multiplicity and provide an overview of the consequences for channel design and channel management: a broadened view of products and services, channel leadership challenges, alterations in channel structure, and an expanded view of distribution intensity. The authors also identify issues triggered by these developments, which calls for further research in this field.

The dependent variable in research into the effects of creativity support systems: quality and quantity of ideas

Creativity support systems (CSS) aim at enhancing the creativity of users. There is an emerging stream of research in which the effects of CSS on the creative output of respondents are measured. In this research, it is important to make a clear distinction between the dependent variable, creative output, and the independent variable use of CSS. Furthermore, the research design should take the potential effect of other factors on creative output into account, most notably, creative ability as a trait of the respondents. An experimental study on the value of creativity support systems was recently reported in MIS Quarterly (Massetti 1996). That study yielded interesting insights with respect to the value of CSS. However, because of the methodology applied in analyzing the data, the study underestimated the effects of CSS on the creative output of decision makers. In this note, Massettis experiment is positioned in the broader perspective of current research in the area of CSS, and an alternative framework for analyzing the data is proposed.

The impact of the quality of a marketing decision support system: an experimental study

textabstractIn this paper we present the results of an experimental study of the impact of the quality of a marketing decision support system (MDSS). The experiment was conducted in the MARKSTRAT environment. The quality of an MDSS was operationalized as the predictive precision of its simulation models. The results show that marketing decision-makers using a high-quality MDSS outperform marketing decision-makers using a medium-quality MDSS. The superior performance with the high-quality MDSS was obtained for both low and high time-pressure.

Broadening the perspective on marketing decision models

Marketing models are of invaluable importance for the advancement of marketing science. Regarding the role of models in marketing decision-making in practice we question the claim that marketing models are routinely used by many companies. Marketing models are suitable for certain types of marketing decision situations but much less for others. We advocate the development of integrated marketing management support systems (MMSSs), in which the strong points of marketing models are combined with the strengths of other types of MMSSs.

Bridging the marketing theory–practice gap with marketing engineering

New developments in marketing management support systems (MMSSs) have provided the marketer with a growing supply of tools that can enrich decision making. In this paper, we describe the concept of marketing engineering — an approach to solving marketing decision problems — popularized by Lilien and Rangaswamy [Lilien GL,Rangaswamy A. Marketing engineering: computer-assisted marketing analysis and planning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998.]. We describe how marketing engineering harnesses marketing data and knowledge to facilitate decision making. We provide several illustrations of the successful application of the marketing engineering concept. We also summarize developments that we believe will further encourage the adoption of the marketing engineering concept and tools for both teaching about marketing decision making, and for improving the practice of marketing decision making. We conclude with some challenges for the academic research community.

Prediction Markets as institutional forecasting support systems

An attractive feature of Prediction Markets (PMs) is that they provide economic incentives for informants to share unique information. It is unclear whether PMs are appropriate for applications with few knowledgeable informants as is the case for most institutional forecasting tasks. Hence, we compare the performance of small PMs with traditional judgment-based forecasting approaches. Our results show that forecasts from small PMs outperform traditional approaches in settings of high information-heterogeneity (i.e., where the amount of unique information possessed by informants is relatively high) and are no worse in settings of low information-heterogeneity.

Matching management support systems and managerial problem-solving modes:: The key to effective decision support

This study investigates the impact of management support systems (MSS) on managerial decision-making. We hypothesize that the success of MSS depends on the extent to which they match with the problem-solving modes that are employed by managerial decision-makers. A problem-solving mode is a cognitive model that characterizes the problem-solving process of a manager. We test our hypothesis in the field of marketing by analyzing data of 38 management support systems. The results confirm our hypothesis implying that a demand-oriented approach to the design and implementation of management support systems is important for these systems to be successful. The demand-side perspective on management support systems developed in this paper offers help in analyzing and removing discrepancies between the demand and supply of decision support. Doing so will improve the impact of these systems.