Research summary: This article analyzes the personal, professional, associative, and institutional relationship networks in which the entrepreneur is involved and the resources embedded therein, and it proposes that an entrepreneur's social capital resources are determinants of his/her business' economic performance. The effect of social capital resources is moderated by competitive intensity in the industry and the entrepreneur's experience. A questionnaire survey and a sample of 951 small-and medium-sized firms were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Results show that economic performance is influenced more by professional and institutional network resources than by the other network resources. However, competitive intensity reduces the effect of institutional resources and increases the relevance of personal resources, whereas the entrepreneur's experience in the sector reinforces the impact of professional and institutional resources.Managerial summary: Insofar as small business entrepreneurs lack sufficient resources of their own to ensure the growth of their businesses, entrepreneurs' relationship networks can provide them with access to strategic resources. Hence, small business entrepreneurs must place all their own networks at the service of their firms. However, networks are not all equally advantageous, and each network does not prove equally advantageous in all situations. Our results show that professional and institutional networks generally contribute more to improving performance than do associative and personal networks. Moreover, as an entrepreneur's experience in the sector increases, so does the ability to exploit the advantages afforded by professional and institutional networks. In contrast, as industrial competitive intensity increases, so does the relevance of personal networks at the expense of institutional networks.

The goal of this paper is to analyze industrial buying behavior. First, the paper reviews the previous work on the relation between the participation, influence, characteristics of the purchase situation, individuals and organizational structure. Among purchase situation conditions frequently mentioned are: novelty, product complexity, buying situation complexity, buying importance, time pressure and perceived risk associated with the purchase. With respect to individual characteristics, the paper includes personal stake and level of experience. Finally, the paper considers the set of variables which characterizes the company's organizational structure and try to determine if the influence of the different functional areas of the firm in the buying center, and the participation of individuals and the composition of it, vary significantly according to the stage of the buying decisionmaking process. The paper subsequently tests the explanatory power of these variables for a sample of Spanish industrial firms.

Creating and developing a firm-hosted virtual brand community forms part of a relationship marketing strategy; therefore, it makes sense to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of relational outcomes. In an attempt to know how marketers can foster the relationship with the brand through virtual communities, we posit and estimate a model of relational efficacy for a firm-managed Facebook brand page (FBP) in which the brand posts created by the firm influence the behavioural engagement of individual users through the utilitarian and hedonic values derived from their interactive experiences within the FBP. The findings highlight that information posts stimulate user behavioural engagement through the utilitarian experiential route. Aside from any experiential route and adopting a more direct path, interaction posts are the main drivers of engagement behaviour. Image posts contribute towards the perception of utility, but in no way affect engagement. Finally, in order to gain a deeper insight, we explore the moderating effect of user brand purchase intensity on the relations posited in the model.

Purpose-The aim of this paper is to analyze the behavioral and affective loyalty of retailer customers in order to establish the role played by loyalty programs in the development of these variables. Design/methodology/approach-Research data were taken from a survey carried out on 750 customers from a Spanish supermarket chain. Several ANOVAs are employed to compare the two loyalty dimensions among participants and non participants in loyalty programs. Findings-The results show that participants in loyalty programs are more behavioral and affectively loyal than non participants. Nevertheless, most customers do not change purchase behavior after joining a loyalty program. The strategy is therefore to retain loyal customers and to achieve the reinforcement of affective bonds linking the customer to the retailer. Practical implications-Companies should focus their efforts on developing a reward plan as adapted as possible to concrete needs of each participant in the program to achieve true loyalty. Originality/value-The main contribution of this paper is the completion of an exhaustive analysis of customer loyalty. On the one hand, it is a pioneer in the study of the influence of loyalty programs on affective loyalty and, on the other hand, it confirms results from other researches on behavioral loyalty of program participants. In addition, this is one of the few papers developed in this field using the survey as a source of information.

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is one of the most widely used psychological theories in academic literature to account for how advertising information is processed. The current work seeks to overturn one of the basic principles of the ELM and takes account of new variables in the model that help to explain the online persuasion process more clearly. Specifically, we posit that in a context of high-involvement exposure to advertising (e.g., Web pages), central and peripheral processing routes may act together. In a repeated-measures experimental design, 112 participants were exposed to two Web sites of a fictitious travel agency, differing only in their design--serious versus amusing. Findings evidence that a peripheral cue, such as how the Web pages are presented, does prove relevant when attempting to reflect the level of effectiveness. Moreover, if we take account of individuals' motivation when accessing the Internet, whether cognitive or affective, the motivation will impact their response to the Web site design. The work contributes to ELM literature and may help firms to pinpoint those areas and features of Internet advertising that prove most efficient.