Joel Hietanen

Exploring virtual worlds: success factors in virtual world marketing

Purpose – Drawing from recent work on online social networking and communities of consumption, the purpose of this paper is to explore, identify, and postulate key factors facilitating the growth and success of marketing in virtual worlds.Design/methodology/approach – An empirical study was conducted employing netnographic evidence from three different virtual worlds and related user‐generated blog discussions.Findings – The findings suggest mechanisms which enable virtual worlds to gain and maintain the interest of their users and therefore underlie successful marketer practices.Research limitations/implications – This is an exploratory study based on qualitative and ethnographic online research methods, and therefore the results are of a descriptive nature. The study was conducted to initiate the academic discourse about marketing in virtual worlds. As such, the paper believes that it can act as a reasonable starting‐point for future discussion.Practical implications – The study suggests that traditiona...

Business model innovation vs replication: financial performance implications of strategic emphases

The purpose of this article is to examine the financial performance implications of a firms strategic emphases with respect to business model innovation vs replication. It is also examined how the financial performance implications differ between larger and smaller firms. Based on survey data including top managers reports from approximately 500 firms, the authors analyze the differences in average profitable growth across firms that differ in their strategic orientations. It is found that firms that have a high strategic emphasis on business model innovation as well as a high emphasis on replication exhibit a higher average value of profitable growth than firms that do not strategically emphasize either dimension. Concerning a strategy that puts a high emphasis on business model innovation but low on replication, a difference is found between small and large firms. Large firms with a high emphasis on business model innovation but low on replication exhibit, on average, weaker profitable growth than large firms with low emphases on both business model innovation and replication. In contrast, small firms with high emphasis on business model innovation but low on replication exhibit, on average, stronger profitable growth than small firms with low emphases on both business model innovation and replication.

Market practices in countercultural market emergence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing marketing literature that investigates markets as “configurations”, i.e. networks of market actors engaged in market-shaping prac ...

Assessing the Societal Impact of Research: The Relational Engagement Approach

Marketing and policy researchers aiming to increase the societal impact of their scholarship should engage directly with relevant stakeholders. For maximum societal effect, this engagement needs to occur both within the research process and throughout the complex process of knowledge transfer. The authors propose that a relational engagement approach to research impact complements and builds on traditional approaches. Traditional approaches to impact employ bibliometric measures and focus on the creation and use of journal articles by scholarly audiences, an important but incomplete part of the academic process. The authors recommend expanding the strategies and measures of impact to include process assessments for specific stakeholders across the entire course of impact, from the creation, awareness, and use of knowledge to societal impact. This relational engagement approach involves the cocreation of research with audiences beyond academia. The authors hope to begin a dialogue on the strategies researchers can use to increase the potential societal benefits of their research.

Awareness, action and context‐specificity of blue ocean practices in sales management

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the role of new value creation mechanisms in a companys sales strategy. Using value creation and strategic marketing as theoretical approaches, the study explores the underpinnings of blue ocean strategy (BOS) and categorizes ways in which BOS is reflected in sales management activities. The link to performance and the influence of contextual moderation are also examined.Design/methodology/approach – The article reports on a study on sales management in a 168‐respondent survey of CEOs and sales directors of Finnish companies across industries. The operationalization is quantitative, and principal component analysis with the varimax rotation method is used to examine the companies approach to executing BOS and the firms are categorized using the cluster analysis method. Furthermore, the linkage to self‐reported business performance is statistically analyzed.Research limitations/implications – This study identifies four approaches to using BOS: strategic awareness‐...

“Managerial storytelling”: how we produce managerial and academic stories in qualitative B2B case study research

With a focus on case study research methods, this study continues the epistemological debate about qualitative research approaches in the IMP literature by reconsidering the reliance on managerial interviews as a primary empirical source in the production of knowledge claims. In this empirical approach, researchers seem to often treat the interview process and the analysis and reporting of research findings in a manner that generally gives situational credence to the veracity and factuality of the interview data. In line with several epistemological approaches that have already surfaced in IMP literature, this study further emphasizes the context-dependent, ephemeral and ultimately unstable nature of managerial “truths” imparted in the interviews. We argue that the data should be empathically and reflexively understood as the production of stories and their reporting as a form of academic storytelling of pragmatic academic and managerial value.

Sales activity systematization and performance: differences between product and service firms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the impact that systematization of sales activities through sales process management has, at the firm level, on profitable sales growth in business-to-business (B2B) companies. The research aims to compare companies focusing on service offerings to those focusing on product offerings. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on survey data. Findings – Despite the emergence of service-dominant logic, B2B service and product companies still differ in how sales process management contributes to firm performance. Research limitations/implications – The findings suggest that differences between service and product firms in their sales process management stem from the different underlying modes of interaction. The findings are generalizable to B2B companies. Practical implications – The findings help businesses differentiate between productive sales process management practices in product and service firms. Originality/value – The study contributes to the ...

Companion for the videography ‘Monstrous Organizing—The Dubstep Electronic Music Scene’

This companion essay contributes to video-based organizational research by critically assessing conventional representational modes of videographic practice and conceptualizing an ‘expressive’ ontology for videographic research. We offer an image of thought that foregrounds the creative and powerfully affective potential of both videographic work and spectatorship. To advance this perspective and to inspire future research, we present our videography (length 30u2009minutes) that integrates various ‘expressive’ elements in montage form. We use the film to scrutinize the potential of video-based research and several methodological considerations tied to it. In doing so, we argue that video-based organizing of research activities can be seen as ‘monstrous’, an entire emergent mode of aesthetic storytelling that comes into being not in ‘capturing’ or ‘recording’, but rather as an affective production of potentialities.

Bringing the Body Back into the Study of Time in Consumer Research

Abstract nPurpose nThis conceptual chapter explores the role of embodiment in phenomenological experience of lived time, and the implications it may hold for studying consumption. n n nMethodology/approach nConceptual chapter. n n nFindings nWe argue that though consumer research scholars have become increasingly cognizant of the embodied foundation of temporal experience, the relation between embodied experience of time and consumption activity still remains under-theorized and researched. Through a phenomenological perspective we are able to understand the consumer as temporally directed toward the world where value is realized emergently through embodiment of affordances. n n nOriginality/value of chapter nWe build an existing work in consumer research to open up a possibility for a phenomenological experience of consumption that is, to a great extent, precognitive, temporal, and based on the ability to experience lived time.

Generative mechanisms in project marketing - an agenda for inquiry

Project-based exchanges have become the dominant mode of doing business for many industrial firms, and therefore research into project marketing activities has come to be of interest for many B2B academicians. In this study, we contribute to this discourse by proposing three macro-level generative mechanisms for connecting project marketing to business performance. To do so, we outline a critical realist philosophy of science and suggest generative mechanisms that constitute business performance. Specifically, the mechanisms we propose are: (1) project construction, (2) project implementation, and (3) project transition & leveraging. Additionally, we suggest that these mechanisms and the micro-mechanisms of which they are constituted could be explored from a critical realist perspective through the use of event-structure analysis (ESA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).