Isabelle Prim-Allaz

“Friendly” Complaining Behaviors: Toward a Relational Approach

The relational approach is often presented as a strategy to retain customers, but it may also be an appropriate approach to encourage customers to complain, as a review of literature shows. Using information contained in complaints and giving the right answers (distributive, procedural and interactional) to such complaints is essential. Relational marketing may also be used to induce customers (but not all of them) to complain about the attributes of certain products/services. This article focuses on these issues and should stimulate further research in this new field.

The environment-strategy-structure fit and performance of industrial servitized SMEs

The purpose of this paper is to examine the environment-strategy-structure fit in the context of industrial servitization and its impact on the profitability of manufacturing SMEs.,Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with the CEOs of 184 French manufacturing SMEs. These primary data were complemented by the indicators extracted from a financial database to ensure objective measures of financial performance. Analyses were conducted by means of partial least squares structural equation modeling.,The research tests the impact of the organizational design (customer interface, service delivery system and service culture (SC)) on financial performance. It also tests the moderating effect on this relationship of servitization strategies adopted by the firm (added services (AS), activities reconfiguration (AR) and business model reconfiguration (BMR)) and the environment in which the firm is situated (industry dynamism, competitive intensity and industry munificence).,This study considers the coalescence of the environment-strategy-structure to be a driver of firm performance in the context of industrial firms’ servitization. Three specific servitization strategies (AS, AR and BMR) are suggested based on the service offering’s impact on the customer’s activity chain or business model.,The research proposes some optimal organizational design depending on servitization strategy and environmental factors; for example, SC has a strong impact on financial performance when BMR is adopted.,This empirical study is based on an extended sample of 184 SMEs and provides quantitative support for the claim that good alignment between strategy and organizational design based on environmental factors increases profitability.

Obsolescence perçue, décision de renouveler et destinée des produits : le cas du téléphone portable

L’acceleration du renouvellement des produits est un enjeu economique, societal et environnemental majeur. Elle est notamment provoquee par la mise en marche par les entreprises, d’innovations rapides qui rendent obsoletes les modeles precedents, et par les comportements des consommateurs lorsqu’ils tendent a remplacer leurs produits technologiques bien avant leur fin de vie technique. L’objectif de cet article est d’identifier et de comprendre le destin des produits, du moment de la decision de leur remplacement prise par le consommateur (obsolescence percue) jusqu’a leur destinee finale. L’etude qualitative menee sur 64 personnes, en utilisant le cas du telephone portable, a permis d’identifier quatre formes d’obsolescence : technologique, economique, psychologique et sociale. La majorite des repondants garde leur ancien produit, le privant ainsi d’une deuxieme vie. Cependant, si l’etat du telephone au moment du changement n’influence pas le fait de le garder ou de s’en debarrasser, il semble influencer la destinee que lui reservent ceux qui decident de s’en debarrasser. Enfin, la nature de la valeur percue du telephone portable evolue entre le moment de son remplacement et la decision concernant sa destinee, passant d’une valeur d’usage a une valeur residuelle.

Profiting from Diversity in the Banking Sector

The participation of women in entrepreneurship has increased tremendously over the last decades and is now significant in most developed countries and in many developing countries (Brush, 1992; Minnitti et al., 2005). In France, small and medium businesses and very small firms of Industry, Trade and Services (ICS) numbered 2,613 million (INSEE, 2005). Women represent only 28 per cent of all entrepreneurs in small and medium businesses and they constitute 46 per cent of the workforce. In the United States, they represent 48 per cent of all entrepreneurs (APCE, 2007). The increase of female entrepreneurs has attracted academic interest, and female entrepreneurship has developed as a separate research field (Verheul, 2005). However, little attention has been devoted to a feminine perspective of business ownership (Bird and Brush, 2002). Entrepreneurship is often depicted as a form of masculinity (Mirchandani, 1999; Bird and Brush, 2002; Bruni et al., 2004), with entrepreneurs described in terms that are associated more with men than women, for example, ‘the conqueror of unexplored territories, the lonely hero, the patriarch’ (Bruni et al., 2004, p. 407).