Michael A. Levin

Predicting mobile app usage for purchasing and information-sharing

Purpose – Mobile applications, or apps, are an increasingly important part of omnichannel retailing. While the adoption and usage of apps for marketing purposes has grown exponentially over the past few years, there is little academic research in this area. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the mobile phone platform (Android vs Apple iOS), interest in the app and recency of store visit affect consumers’ likelihood to use the apps for purchasing and information-sharing activities. Design/methodology/approach – The paper tests a model by analysing survey data collected from customers of a major US retailer using partial least squares regression. Findings – The analysis finds that the level of interest in a retail app is positively related to the consumers intention to engage in both purchasing and information-sharing activities. In addition, the recency of the consumers last visit to the retail store has a moderating effect on both types of activities; the more recent the last visit, the larger ...

Toward Understanding New Sales Employees’ Participation in Marketing-Related Technology: Motivation, Voluntariness, and Past Performance

Firms want sales representatives to use social media technologies to connect with relational partners, including customers, suppliers, and other employees. As a result, firms attempt to recruit business students who are experienced with different forms of social media. The focus of this research is on high self-disclosure, low media-richness social media, such as blogging, that works well for central route persuasion. To better understand sales employee participation in blogging, we consider motivation to use sales- and marketing-related technology. This study extends the research on motivation by (1) distinguishing between three forms of motivation—intrinsic, extrinsic, and apathetic—and (2) exploring the potential moderating effects of (a) voluntariness on intention-to-use to actual use and (b) past performance on use to objective outcome. We collected data at two time periods for voluntary and involuntary respondents, and analyzed the data using PLS regression. We find that apathetic motivation appears independent of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Including apathetic motivation improves the explanatory power of motivation and extends the understanding of the moderating influence of voluntariness and individuals’ past performance in the model.

The value of competition: competitive balance as a predictor of attendance in spectator sports

This paper investigates the role of competitive balance among teams in a league in predicting attendance at spectator sporting events. It also controls for the demographic and economic characteristics of the leagues markets, and changes in the number of teams in the league. The research relies on a sample that includes 707 non-major professional team seasonal win-loss records (12,956 games) from five sports, aggregated into 75 seasons to develop a model consistent with extant literature. The authors find that competitive balance and average income in the leagues markets are significant predictors of leaguewide attendance.

Getting out of the rankings game: a better way to evaluate higher education institutions for best fit

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative model to conventional higher education institution (HEI) rankings that can better communicate meaningful differentiation to prospective students. A five-step approach is followed to form clusters and classify HEIs. Cluster analysis is performed on two separate datasets containing (1) public HEIs and (2) private HEIs. For the final model, 42 variables were incorporated to group 761 private HEIs and, separately, 414 public HEIs. A five-cluster solution for each dataset is presented and described. Each cluster contains a description and a managerial recommendation. The application cluster analysis to group HEIs differs from the more popular but more problematic approach of ranking HEIs. Grouping resolves the problems that stem from ranking and provides possibly more useful information.

Competitive balance as a predictor of season attendance among North American non-major sports leagues

Models that predict attendance at sporting events rely on samples from a major professional sports league. These models include different approaches to capture competitive balance. This paper draws on a sample of non-major professional sports leagues to further isolate the role of competitive balance in predicting attendance. The linear model includes independent variables that attempt to capture competitive balance and the supply of games. An interaction effect based on competitive balance and the supply of games is introduced. League attendance appears as the dependent variable. The model is tested using regression. The interaction effect is shown to have a greater impact on attendance than competitive balance and the supply of games in isolation.

A Sales Representative Is Made: An Innovative Sales Course

Job openings for nonscientific business-to-business sales professionals will increase over the next 10 years. A small private university in the Midwest has developed an innovative sales course to help create professionals who are ready to fill this need. This article addresses the challenges of creating a meaningful, hands-on, experiential course for undergraduate students who are trained and developed in sales skills, practice with a live client, and receive a commission for a successful close. Writing skills, speaking skills, and critical thinking skills are honed in a supportive environment through a variety of hands-on, class activities in this teaching innovation.

A Progressive Approach to Teaching Analytics in the Marketing Curriculum.

With the emerging use of analytics tools and methodologies in marketing, marketing educators have provided students training and experiences beyond the soft skills associated with understanding consumer behavior. Previous studies have only discussed how to apply analytics in course designs, tools, and related practices. However, there is a lack of study on the practice of teaching analytics systematically in the marketing curriculum. This article fills the gap by introducing a progressive approach to teaching analytics across different marketing courses by focusing on program-wide curriculum mapping and design. We delineate the framework to develop the curriculum with an analytics component.

An Analysis of Managers' Resource Allocation Dilemma in a Fixed Capacity Situation

Managers of museums, repertory theaters, sports leagues, and symphony orchestras invest resources in order to optimize attendance over a season. They must choose between investing resources evenly across a balanced portfolio of offerings or disproportionately concentrating resources on a few more desirable offerings at the expense of the rest of the portfolio. The better strategy is not always apparent. The authors investigate this research question in non-major league sports leagues using the Gini coefficient, a measure of equality/balance adapted from the field of economics. The spread of team success in a league, based on winning percentages and represented by the Gini coefficient, is used as an indicator of resource investment concentration. The findings indicate that availability, that is, season length, influences whether consumers value more a balanced or unbalanced investment strategy.