Sandeep Krishnamurthy

A Comprehensive Analysis of Permission Marketing

Godin (1999) has proposed a new idea- permission marketing. Here, consumers provide marketers with the permission to send them certain types of promotional messages. This is seen as reducing clutter and search costs for the consumer while improving targeting precision for marketers. This paper makes three contributions: First, a critical analysis of the concept and its relationship to existing ideas in the marketing literature is discussed. Second, a taxonomy of four models used to implement permission marketing today, direct relationship maintenance, permission partnership, ad market and permission pool, is presented. Permission intensity is seen as a key differentiator among models. Finally, a comprehensive conceptual cost-benefit framework is presented that captures the consumer experience in permission marketing programs. Consumer interest is seen as the key dependent variable that influences the degree of participation. Consumer interest is positively affected by message relevance and monetary benefit and negatively affected by information entry/modification costs, message processing costs and privacy costs. Based on this framework, several empirically testable propositions are identified.

A Managerial Overview of Open Source Software

Open-source software(OSS) programs (e.g. LINUX, Apache) provide access to the source code to any interested party. This leads to a distributed innovation model where users actively participate in the development of the product. The main purpose of this paper is to help managers who have to choose between OSS and commercial software. Not all OSS products are free. OSS products are distributed under a wide variety of public licenses. They are more reliable, provide greater flexibility and choice to the user and are frequently free. On the other hand, OSS leads to a proliferation of versions and may appeal only to the high-end user. Vendors of open-source products make money by selling the program on a CD, providing support services to enterprises and authenticating versions. The open source system leads to fascinating competitive and cooperative relationships among companies, between a company and a community and among communities.

Using brand websites to build brands online: A product versus service brand comparison

ABSTRACT This study analyzes important content, function, and design elements of brand sites along six dimensions: text information, multimedia information, interface design, loyalist support, promotion synergy, and interactivity. A total of 219 brand websites for a product category (i.e., drinks and candies) and a service category (i.e., accounting firms) are examined. Results indicate that accounting firms treat their brand sites as corporate-image building vehicles and virtual information sources while drinks and candies firms use entertaining design elements to build customer relationships through greater interaction. Companies may be underutilizing elements related to interactivity, cultivating loyal customers, and supporting cross-channel promotions.

The international e‐marketing framework (IEMF)

Purpose – International e‐marketing is emerging as an important area for marketers, as global online markets expand. This special issue is an attempt to encourage, showcase, and guide research in the area of international e‐marketing.Design/methodology/approach – In the editorial, Introduces the international e‐marketing framework (IEMF) as a guiding template for future research in international e‐marketing.Findings – The IEMF should help shape scholarly inquiry in the domain of international e‐marketing, classify current intellectual contributions in this area and delineate the gaps in the literature.Originality/value – The editorial presents the IEMF and classifies various papers in this issue using this framework. Finally, concludes with several compelling research questions to motivate future research in this area.

Enlarging the Pie vs. Increasing One's Slice: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Generic and Brand Advertising

Generic advertising promotes the general qualities of a product category and, therefore, benefits all firms—regardless of who has contributed to the campaign (e.g. “Got Milk?”). Such campaigns are organized either by independent contributions by industry members or through government legislation. In this paper, we study the relationship between brand and generic advertising in these two cases. In the independent-contribution case, a free-riding or cheap-riding generic advertising equilibrium is predicted. Interestingly, in the free-riding equilibrium, we show that dominant firms in industries should be indifferent to free riding by lesser firms. They should incur the entire industry advertising expense and be better for it. In the cheap-riding equilibrium, a group of equally dominant firms foot the bill. In the government-sponsored case, we establish that industry spending on generic advertising is greater. But, we find that there is an increase in total spending on brand advertising as well.

Communication effects in public good games with and without provision points

In this study, 1 investigated the impact of pre-play, non-binding, face-to-face communication on contributions in continuous and provision point games. I find that such communication increases cooperation leading to greater contributions. This effect is found both in the short-term (i.e. periods with communication) as well as in the long-term (i.e. periods with no communication that follow periods with communication). Both the short-term and long-term effects are stronger in the provision point games. In addition, I find that the magnitude of communication has a negative relationship with contributions. Groups that meet more often to communicate and those that communicate more tend to contribute less. This is a preliminary result that must be investigated more fully in future research.

Bounty Programs in Free/Libre/Open Source Software

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the impact of a bounty program on a corporation, an individual developer and a project. Bounty programs are commonly used in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities to motivate developers for the tasks which are not of their primary interest by providing monetary incentives. These tasks include creating new programs, improving the security of an existing software, solving a specific bug, giving product improvement suggestions, helping maintain the codebase, and preparing documentation. The rational response to a bounty by applying the model is analyzed. This chapter focuses on the financial rewards to FLOSS developers via bounty programs. They are used to improve the security of an existing product, to solve a specific bug, to obtain product improvement suggestions, to help maintain the code base and to prepare documentation. Agents that offer bounties benefit by a favorable reprioritization of project development tasks and, influence the agenda of the project.

Greater Good: How Marketing Makes for Better Democracy

Quelch and Jocz’s Greater Good is an attempt to conjoin marketing with democracy. The authors’ central argument is that marketing and democracy are consubstantial and seek to achieve the same six goals: exchange, consumption, choice, information, engagement, and inclusion. By arguing that marketing is as necessary for the modern condition as democracy, the authors seek to establish a new raison d’etre for marketing as a discipline. The authors specifically contend that ‘‘marketing is not a superficial irrelevance, but of fundamental importance to society’’ (p. 23). The book strives to achieve this partly by connecting the disparate fragments of a balkanized discipline—social marketing, political marketing, macromarketing, non-profit marketing, marketing of nations, etc. The book invents a new construct—‘‘good marketing’’—a doppleganger of the term marketing. By establishing this construct, the authors seek to distance marketing from its ill-reputed and fraudulent counterparts. The book wishes to equate good marketing with ‘‘good democracy.’’ However, too often, good marketing comes off as utopian rather than pragmatic. This is most transparent when the authors argue that good marketing strives for inclusion; ‘‘most marketers would like to be more inclusive in the people they serve as customers if it were not for the difficulties they face’’ (p. 146). Given the central place of targeting in the marketing discipline, this does not persuade. The authors’ case for good marketing is predicated on a marketplace with empowered consumers. The book argues for a tâtonnement process where good marketers interested in reputation engage with volitional and skillful consumers with the ability to search for low prices and to negotiate when needed. The issue of vulnerable consumers is given passing attention. The authors struggle to define the boundaries of responsibilities between the corporations and the state. Is the marketplace self-correcting or does it require a regulatory regime to ensure fairness? The book does not take a clear position on this; rather, standard arguments on both sides are simply re-stated. The book spends considerable space on how governments can use marketing to advance democracy. The central argument here is that if

Book ReviewTHE LAWS OF THE WEB: PATTERNS IN THE ECOLOGY OF INFORMATION, HubermanBernardo, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003, 105 pages,

Researchers in marketing have long been interested in social network theory (e.g., the word-of-mouth and newproduct diffusion literature are predicated on a network view of the market). Therefore, in considering The Laws of the Web, Six Degrees, and Linked, my purpose is to make this work accessible to researchers in marketing and to excite them about the potential extensions and applications of this work in marketing. All three books are written for the general intellectual audience and aim to increase the exposure of work published in reputable academic journals (e.g., Nature, Science). Readers who expect complicated statistical models will be disappointed and must turn to the original journal articles, which are extensively referenced. Even though Huberman, Watts, and Barábasi have different academic backgrounds (sociology, computer science, and physics), their discussion of the social network phenomenon and their results are remarkably similar. They are aware and knowledgeable about one another’s work and exhibit a true interest in interdisciplinarity. There is also an interesting interplay among the authors’ research teams; for example, Watts shared data with the Barábasi team at one point, in the interest of advancing the field. Readers who want an introduction to this area may want to read Huberman’s book first, which is the shortest. The Barábasi book is excellent general reading and has a great value-to-page-length ratio; the author also includes various examples, including a few business ones (e.g., Hotmail). Watts’s book suffers from a disproportionate sense of its place in history. It is substantive, but it is written in a selfindulgent, awe-filled style that may put off some readers. Moreover, the orientation of the book is entirely sociological, whereas Barábasi and Huberman attempt to be interdisciplinary. Borrowing from fields such as graph theory and building on famous results in sociology (e.g., Milgram’s small-world experiments, Granovetter’s theory of weak ties), all three books provide unique insights into how networks form and evolve. The results are general and equally applicable to various network forms, yet they are most applicable to the largest information network: the Internet. Indeed, the Internet and the World Wide Web have provided the authors with the measurement tools necessary to measure these phenomena quantitatively. As Huberman states (p. 4), “the Web becomes a gigantic informational ecosystem that can be used to quantitatively measure and test theories of social interaction.”