Rajan Varadarajan

CRM Implementation: Effectiveness Issues and Insights

Conceptually, customer relationship management (CRM) has been widely embraced by businesses. In practice, however, examples of success contrast with anecdotes where the diffusion of CRM into organizations continues to be a slow process and/or where CRM implementation outcomes have fallen short of expectations. Successful implementation depends on a number of factors such as fit between of a firm’s CRM strategy and programs and its broader marketing strategy, and intraorganizational and interorganizational cooperation and coordination among entities involved in implementation. Building on the results of a survey of the CRM-implementation-related experiences of 101 U.S.-based firms, in this article the authors identify factors associated with successful CRM implementation and advance directions for future research.

Asymmetric New Product Development Alliances: Win-Win or Win-Lose Partnerships?

Interorganizational alliances are widely recognized as critical to product innovation, particularly in high-technology markets. Many new product development (NPD) alliances tend to be asymmetric, that is, they are formed between a larger firm and a smaller firm. As is the case with alliances in general, asymmetric alliances also typically result in changes in the shareholder values of the partner firms. Are the changes in shareholder values of the partner firms significant? Are asymmetric NPD alliances win-win or win-lose partnerships? Are the gains or losses symmetric for the larger and smaller partner firms? What factors drive the changes in shareholder values of the partner firms? These important questions remain largely unexplored as evidenced by the dearth of empirical research on the effect of asymmetric NPD alliances on shareholder value and on the apportionment of this value between the partner firms. We develop and empirically test a model of short-term changes in shareholder values of larger and smaller firms involved in NPD alliances, using the event study methodology on data covering 167 asymmetric alliances in the information technology and communication industries. In this model, we examine alliance, firm, and partner characteristics as potential determinants of the changes in shareholder values of the partner firms due to an NPD alliance announcement. Our model accounts for selection correction, potential cross-correlation across the residuals from the models of firm value changes for the larger and smaller firms, and unobserved heterogeneity. The results suggest that both the partners experience significant short-term financial gains, but there are considerable asymmetries between the larger and smaller firms with regard to the effects of alliance, partner, and firm characteristics on the gains of the partner firms. The results relating to alliance characteristics suggest that while a broad scope alliance enhances the financial gains for the larger firm, a scale R&D alliance (relative to a link alliance) contributes positively to the financial gains for the smaller firm. With regard to partner characteristics, while partner alliance experience positively influences the financial gains for the larger firm, it has no significant effect on the financial returns for the smaller firm. Further, partner innovativeness is positively associated with the financial gains for the larger firm, but partner reputation is unrelated to the financial gains of the smaller firm. Regarding firm characteristics, the magnitude of the financial gains accruing from a firms own alliance experience is considerably higher for the smaller firm than it is for the larger firm. We outline the implications of the research findings for future research and management practice.

Interactivity in the electronic marketplace: An exposition of the concept and implications for research

It is widely recognized that a better understanding of interactivity and its implications is essential for facilitating research focused on the emerging electronic marketplace. However, deficiencies persist in our understanding of this important concept. Building on research in various fields of study (e.g., information systems, marketing, and computer-mediated communication), this article presents a conceptualization of interactivity from a marketplace perspective that is missing or inadequately articulated in the literature. Specifically, interactivity is conceptualized as a characteristic of computer-mediated communication in the marketplace that increases with the bidirectionality, timeliness, mutual controllability, and responsiveness of communication as perceived by consumers and firms. The article concludes with a research agenda focusing on issues relating to measurement, conceptual refinement, and management of interactivity in the electronic marketplace.

Brand portfolio, corporate image, and reputation: Managing brand deletions

Brand portfolio management addresses, among other issues, the interrelated questions of what brands to add, retain, or delete. A small number of brands in a firm’s brand portfolio can often have a disproportionately large positive or negative impact on its image and reputation and the responses of stakeholders. Brand deletions can be critical from the standpoint of a firm being able to free up resources to redeploy toward enhancing the competitive standing and financial performance of brands in its portfolio with the greatest potential to positively affect its image and reputation. Against this backdrop, the authors focus on the organizational and environmental drivers of brand deletion propensity, the predisposition of a firm to delete a particular brand from its brand portfolio. The authors propose a conceptual model delineating the drivers of brand deletion propensity and suggest directions for future research, including the related concept of brand deletion intensity.

Exploring salesperson turnover: A causal model

Abstract Considerable attention has been focused on various aspects of salesforce turnover in recent years. However, a formal model of the turnover process for salespeople has yet to be proposed. The objective of the present article was to present a causal model of the turnover process for salespeople. The model is developed using four existing models of turnover behavior. Twelve relationships are proposed and discussed. Research questions for investigation within the context of the turnover model are proposed, and managerial implications of the model are outlined.

Does Success Diminish Competitive Responsiveness? Reconciling Conflicting Perspectives:

Previous research provides conflicting evidence of the association between the past performance of a business and its competitive responsiveness, with researchers observing both positive and negative relationships. To clarify this issue, the authors test a model using survey data from the retailing industry. The model delineates direct and indirect mediated paths through ability to respond, motivation to respond, and awareness of competitors’ actions to show how past performance can have both positive and negative influence on competitive responsiveness. However, the overall impact of past performance of an organization on its competitive responsiveness is positive. The implications of these findings for research, practice, and theory are discussed.

Manager's intentions toward entering into strategic marketing alliances: an empirical investigation

The precursors, processes, and outcomes associated with strategic alliances are shaped in important ways by the background of the decision-makers involved in alliance formation. Building on the theory of planned behavior and employing a multi-industry sample, the research reported investigates the relationship between a managers attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control and intention to enter into strategic alliances, and the moderating effect of the managers prior strategic alliance experience. The hypotheses are tested in the context of strategic marketing alliances. We discuss managerial isomorphism as a competing explanation for the study findings.

Advances in strategic marketing and the advancement of the marketing discipline: the promise of theory

ABSTRACT Hunt (2018, Advancing marketing strategy in the marketing discipline and beyond: From promise, to neglect, to prominence, to fragment, (to promise?). Journal of Marketing Management, 34, 16–51. doi:10.1080/0267257X.2017.1326973) provides a synthesis and critical review of over 100 years of marketing literature organised into four eras. In his prognosis of the outlook for Era V, Hunt notes that there are reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for both the marketing discipline, broadly, and the field of strategic marketing, specifically. However, he also draws attention to the concerns voiced by a number of marketing scholars regarding the current state of the field and the future outlook for the field. Hunt argues that the prospects for the marketing discipline and the field of strategic marketing are closely intertwined, and that the health of the latter contributes significantly to that of the former. Against this backdrop, this commentary focuses on the promise of theory for advances in strategic marketing and the advancement of the marketing discipline.

Programmatic, programmatically non-programmatic and beyond: reflections on the role of collaboration, serendipity and strategic windows in my research pursuits

I am honored and humbled to have been selected for the 2008 Paul D. Converse Award and thank everyone involved in my nomination and selection. Given that both of my papers nominated for the award, as well as a significant portion of my publications to date, happen to be co-authored works, I owe a big debt of gratitude to all my co-authors. I am particularly indebted to one group of co-authors, my former doctoral students, who account for the largest portion of my co-authored papers. Given my 25 plus years of close association and collaboration with doctoral students at Texas A&M University, I was delighted to learn that a new enhancement to the Converse Symposium, beginning with 2008, is the participation of Converse Doctoral Fellows. Bearing this in mind, in my remarks, I will focus on issues that, hopefully, may be of value to doctoral students as they begin to ponder about their career in the academe. My two journal articles that were nominated and selected for the Converse Award (Ramanujam&Varadarajan, 1989; Varadarajan & Cunningham, 1995) are part of a broader research agenda and associated journal articles focusing on issues relating to diversification and strategic alliances, respectively. In turn, my research on diversification and strategic alliances constitute two ofmultiple research streams that I have explored over the years in the field of strategy. On the one hand, a firm’s diversification strategy has a major impact on (and is also impacted by) the marketing strategies of businesses in its portfolio. On the other hand, a host of other issues pertaining to the diversification behaviors of firms may be of little interest to most marketing academics and practitioners. With that in mind, rather than limiting the scope of my comments to the two articles chosen for the Converse Award, I will attempt to provide a retrospective on some of the major research streams in strategy and specific topics therein that have been the focus of my research (i.e. the impetus for focusing on specific issues and the links between various research streams) and a prospective on the road ahead. Toward this end, in the next section, I first present an organizing framework for delineating the strategic behaviors of firms in product markets and related issues.

First-Mover Advantage in the Internet-Enabled Market Environment

The past quarter century has been characterized by major and game changing market developments such as the evolution of the competitive market environment from a physical market environment (PME) to an Internet-enabled market environment (IME) that encompasses both the physical and electronic marketplaces, and the digitization of an increasing number of information products. Such developments raise questions concerning the extent to which extant perspectives on first-mover advantage developed in the context of the PME hold in the IME, generally, and for information products in digital form specifically. This chapter addresses this issue by developing a conceptual framework that focuses on selected sources of first-mover advantage delineated in the extant literature and advancing two sets of propositions. The first set of propositions focus on sources of first-mover advantage (network externalities, consumers’ non-contractual switching costs, technological leadership and innovations, consumers’ information asymmetry and consumption experience asymmetry, spatial resource position and installed capacity) that can be expected to have a greater versus lower effect in the IME relative to the PME. The second set of propositions focus on the moderating effect of product form (information products in digital form versus information products in analog form and non-information products).