Zannie Giraud Voss

Strategic Orientation and Firm Performance in an Artistic Environment

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that a customer orientation provides a firm with a better understanding of its customers, which subsequently leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and firm performance. However, there are cautions that being too customer focused can lead to inertia, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be better to “ignore your customer” when developing new products. Building on the market orientation research stream, the authors examine the impact of three alternative strategic orientations—customer orientation, competitor orientation, and product orientation—on a variety of subjective and objective measures of performance in the nonprofit professional theater industry, which is marked by high rates of artistic innovation and largely unpredictable customer preferences. The results indicate that the association between strategic orientation and performance varies depending on the type of performance measure used. However, the most unambiguous result is that a customer orientation exhibits a negative association with subscriber ticket sales, total income, and net surplus/deficit.

Strategic Ambidexterity in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Implementing Exploration and Exploitation in Product and Market Domains

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a critical challenge that is particularly difficult for smaller, nascent organizations that lack the resources, capabilities, and experience necessary to successfully implement ambidexterity. To better understand how small and medium-sized enterprises achieve ambidexterity, we develop theoretical arguments that link organizational performance to strategic combinations of exploration and exploitation in both product and market domains. We test the hypotheses with a longitudinal study in a dynamic industry that combines objective measures of competition, firm size, age, and revenue performance with self-reported measures of product and market exploration and exploitation. The empirical results offer new insights with respect to several tensions at the heart of the ambidexterity challenge: (1) pure strategies that combine product exploration with market exploration or product exploitation with market exploitation have complementary interaction effects on revenue, (2) cross-functional ambidexterity combining product exploitation with market exploration also exerts complementary interaction effects on revenue, (3) product ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for older and larger—but not younger and smaller—firms, and (4) market ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for larger—but not smaller, younger, or older—firms. Two ambidexterity paradoxes emerge: (1) larger, older firms have the resources, capabilities, and experience required to benefit from a product ambidexterity strategy, but larger, older firms are less likely to implement product ambidexterity; and (2) only larger firms have the resources and capabilities required to benefit from a market ambidexterity strategy, but developing and sustaining market ambidexterity is necessary to drive long-term growth.

An empirical examination of the complex relationships between entrepreneurial orientation and stakeholder support

Purpose – This paper seeks to integrate stakeholder theory with the entrepreneurial orientation literature to explore relationships between distinct entrepreneurial behaviors and support from stakeholders with divergent interests.Design/methodology/approach – A longitudinal study in the non‐profit professional theatre industry examines how relationships between entrepreneurial orientation and stakeholder support evolve over time. A series of regression analyses examine how support from diverse stakeholders influences entrepreneurial behaviors and, subsequently, how those entrepreneurial behaviors influence future stakeholder support.Findings – The findings support a multi‐dimensional conceptualization of entrepreneurial orientation, point to tensions inherent in satisfying multiple stakeholder demands, and illustrate that different stakeholders support entrepreneurial behaviors in unique and sometimes unexpected ways. The findings offer insight into the complex balancing act that entrepreneurial managers ...

Implementing a relationship marketing program: a case study and managerial implications

Proposes that successful implementation of a relationship marketing program requires a complement of strategies that satisfies and motivates customers through different phases of relationship development. To accomplish this, firms simultaneously implement transactional marketing strategies and relational marketing strategies. Offers a case study of a non‐profit professional theater to demonstrate how a firm can implement multiple marketing strategies to achieve different relational objectives, and extends these findings to offer recommendations and managerial implications.

Aligning Innovation with Market Characteristics in the Nonprofit Professional Theater Industry

In this study, the authors integrate theories of innovation diffusion, relational exchange behavior, and organizational learning to explain the roles of innovation, product exploration experience, promotion, and market sophistication in determining firm performance. They test the research questions using objective measures of financial performance from a sample of 124 firms in the nonprofit professional theater industry. The results suggest that the independent variables interact in systematic ways to influence firm performance across two different customer segments: relational and transactional. The findings lend empirical support to two theoretical perspectives that have received little prior empirical examination: (1) Innovation performance is determined by characteristics of the overall marketplace and target market segments, and (2) product exploration experience enhances organizational learning and performance.

How sex differences in perceptions influence customer satisfaction: a study of theatre audiences

We explore the effects of sex-related, value-expressive and functional image perceptions on satisfaction through a study of audience members at two theatres. Results suggest that satisfaction is higher for men when they perceive an elevated level of functional service quality and for women when they perceive that the theatre possesses pro-social values. Satisfaction overlap exists when either men or women perceive market or artistic values. Existing literature has suggested that women begin elaboration of message cues at a lower threshold than men; however, it appears that a zone exists where both sexes elaborate on some image attributes, while women further elaborate on communal attributes and men focus on agentic attributes. Contrary to prevailing evidence in the services management literature, no direct link surfaced between perceived quality of the core service and customer satisfaction. Post hoc tests for mediation indicate that tangible quality of the core service is important to both men and women, driving their engagement in elaboration of image attributes, but it is not important enough to directly stimulate satisfaction when other factors of the consumption experience are taken into account in complex encounters.

Beyond the “Studio System”: Public Support for Films in the United States

This chapter describes the dynamics and implications of government funding of the film industry of the United States. It first contextualizes the overall development and structure of public arts funding in the United States, followed by a discussion of how public monies impact on both commercial and nonprofit profit film industry players. Research focused on subnational cultural policies given the proportionally larger role that subnational governments have upon direct spending for the arts. We found that state-level public incentive schemes intended to lure film production have mixed results and, arguably, create more costs than benefits for states providing them. We conducted deeper analysis on the population of nonprofit film organizations using the theory of organizational ecology and data obtained from Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research. Results of the data analysis found California and New York to be centers for nonprofit film organizations, although 58% of nonprofit film organizations are based elsewhere. Population patterns also appeared to correspond with the emergence of state-level public funding programs, suggesting that public support for films can stimulate the birth of nonprofit film organizations.

Conceptualizing Marketing Relationship Models and their Impact on Customer Response

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework consisting of four marketing relationship models – market, hierarchy, partnership, and community - that a company can enact to coordinate its interactions with customers. These models describe the proactive or reactive posture of the firm and its customers concerning their respective status and role in the value creation process. We develop conceptual arguments that identify the exchange characteristics that are best suited for each relationship model and hypotheses that link market and hierarchy models to transactional customer response and partnership and community models to relational customer response.