Firms are under increasing pressure to justify their marketing expenditures. This evolution toward greater accountability is reinforced in harsh economic times when marketing budgets are among the first to be reconsidered. To make such decisions, managers must know whether, and to what extent, marketing's effectiveness varies with the economic tide; however, surprisingly little research addresses this issue. Therefore, the authors conduct a systematic investigation of the business cycle's impact on the effectiveness of two important marketing instruments: price and advertising. To do so, they estimate time-varying short-and longterm advertising and price elasticities for 150 brands across 36 consumer packaged goods categories, using 18 years of monthly U.K. data from 1993 to 2010. The long-term price sensitivity tends to decrease during economic expansions, whereas long-term advertising elasticities increase. During contractions, the long-term own and cross price elasticities increase. Moreover, throughout the observation period, the short-term price elasticity became significantly stronger. Finally, patterns differ across categories and brands, which presents opportunities for firms that know how to ride the economic tide.

Service providers sometimes face mass service failures. These problems occur across service industries, ranging from severe Internet outages to severe delays for airlines or trains. A key question that has not been addressed in the literature is: how do service crises impact perceived service quality (PSQ) over time? To address this question, the authors introduce a Double-Asymmetric Structural Vector AutoRegressive model. It captures not only the short-and longterm effects of objective service performance on PSQ, but also the differential effects of service crises versus service restoration. The authors analyze a unique dataset from a major European railway company, spanning seven years of monthly observations. During this period, severe winter weather caused dramatic service crises. The authors find that performance losses not only loom larger than gains in the short run, but in the long run they also have permanent negative effects on PSQ. Consequently, a crisis followed by a restoration will result in a net negative long-term effect on PSQ. The impact of a crisis also depends on the prior trend in objective service performance.

No abstract

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o

The advent and enormous growth of digital technologies, and associated data, force firms to respond to novel digital challenges and increasingly lead them to transform their existing business models. Importantly, given that digital transformation has a strong impact on multiple disciplines, such as logistics, marketing, and strategy, and involves multiple stakeholders, such as service providers, platforms, employees and end-users, it also requires researchers and businesses to adopt a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder perspective, in which multiple research and business fields cooperate in order to create collaborative solutions. In this editorial to the special issue, we aim to bring together insights from multiple research fields to account for the multi-faceted nature of digital transformation. We discuss the relevance of this multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder perspective, propose an overarching research framework, and highlight future avenues of research.