Jason B. MacDonald

The effects of technology-mediated communication on industrial buyer behavior

Sellers are embracing technology-mediated sales communication tools such as videoconferencing systems, cellular phones, web sites, and electronic data interchange (EDI) systems in an attempt to control selling costs while maintaining the personal touch. What is unclear at this point, however, is if investment in communication technology actually pays dividends for industrial suppliers. This research explores the topic by examining the effects of buyer satisfaction with the adoption of technology-mediated communication (STMC) on channel partner relationships. STMC is found to have significant, positive, direct effects on future intentions (FI). Furthermore, these effects are found to be partially mediated by trust and commitment. D 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

How Does Financial Performance Affect Marketing? Studying the Marketing-Finance Relationship From a Dynamic Perspective

In this article, the authors provide a dynamic framework for understanding the relationship between marketing and financial performance. They suggest that firms market to financial markets as well as to consumption markets and that some mixture provides superior long-term performance. The authors discuss the potential pitfalls of overemphasizing one market to the detriment of another and then provide a theoretical model of the factors that influence the extent of marketing to financial markets. This is followed by a discussion of implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Applying Sun Tzu's terrain and ground to the study of marketing strategy

In the ancient text The Art of War, military strategist Sun Tzu suggests that to be successful in war you have to understanding the environment in which you will do battle. In this paper, the authors apply Sun Tzus discussion of ground and terrain, the controllable environmental variables, to the study of marketing strategy. The authors demonstrate how Sun Tzus ground and terrain can serve as parsimonious typologies of competitive market situations that are useful for the study of marketing theory and practice. Marketing is merely a civilized form of warfare in which most battles are won with words, ideas, and disciplined thinking. (Albert W. Emery, xxxx)

A Framework for Measuring the Complexity of Cost Systems

Firms routinely employ product costs in decision making. The question of how to design a cost system that is well-suited for this purpose has received considerable practitioner and academic interest. The design or, equivalently the required complexity, of cost systems has been hotly debated over the last several decades. Prior research has attempted to identify situations when different levels of cost system complexity (CSC) are most beneficial for improved decision making and profitability. Although cost system design includes many attributes and assumptions, previous studies have generally measured CSC based solely on how indirect costs are assigned to products. In this study, we propose and validate a comprehensive measure of CSC based on a framework consisting of nine different continuums of cost system design: (1) which costs are included in product cost, (2) level of tracking direct costs, (3) level of tracking indirect costs, (4) type of cost drivers used to allocate indirect costs, (5) use of standard costing, (6) ability to disaggregate fixed and variable costs, (7) measurement of unused capacity costs, (8) level of variance analysis, and (9) usage of replacement costs for depreciation.Using data collected from a cross-section of German-speaking firms and PLS-based structural equation modeling, we find strong evidence that contextual and organizational factors which can be expected to encourage complex costing systems are more strongly related to the framework-based CSC metric than to simpler measures of complexity. This expanded framework will facilitate consistent measurement and comparison of different costing approaches, enable richer studies of appropriate CSC for different situations, and provide practical guidance to designers and users of costing systems to achieve the optimal level of costing accuracy.