The authors examine 308 firms in the United States and four other Western countries to understand how different types of firms relate to their markets. Comparative analysis shows that though there is some support for consumer and goods firms being more transactional and business and service firms being more relational, there are many exceptions. The results also show that firms can be grouped into those whose marketing practices are predominantly transactional, predominantly relational, or a transactional/relational hybrid. Each group constitutes approximately one-third of the sample and includes all types of firms (consumer goods, consumer services, business-tobusiness goods, and business-to-business services). This suggests that marketing practices are pluralistic and managerial practice has not shifted from transactional to relational approaches per se. Nicole E.A s with most organizational processes, the nature and practice of marketing has evolved over recent decades. The academic field has also developed considerably, and there is a fuller understanding of the complexities of marketing practice in different types of firms and market contexts. Distinct subfields have now emerged within the discipline, reflecting research interests in areas such as business-to-business, services marketing, and, most recently, relationship marketing. Although these developments have enriched the understanding of marketing, there are still certain unresolved issues. Although business-tobusiness and services marketing are treated as distinct areas for examination (as evidenced by the variety of specialist journals, textbooks, and courses on both topics) and anecdotal reports indicate that they differ from consumer and goods marketing in terms of their practical implementation, little empirical data demonstrating their distinctiveness are available. Similarly, few empirical studies compare marketing issues across customer and product contexts, fewer still examine marketing practices per se, and none involve comparative research across a combination of market and product types. Finally, although relationships have long been of interest in the business-to-business and services literature, the extant comparative research has been conducted solely in the more traditional, transactional context of the marketing mix.These issues take on particular importance given Day and Montgomery's (1999) view that a better understanding of how firms relate to their markets is fundamental to the marketing field and their observation that the field has shifted its emphasis from transactional to relational exchanges. However, the practice of relational marketing has not been examined relative to the practice of transactional marketing, nor have the specific approaches implemented by different types of firms been examined in a comparative or cross-national setting. As such, providing empirical data on the contemporary marketing practices of a cross-section of firms, serving different types of customers with different product offers and from several cou...

In this study we compare consumer brand loyalty in online and traditional shopping environments for over 100 brands in 19 grocery product categories. The online purchase data come from a large traditional grocery retailer that also operates an online store for its products. The offline data corresponds to the exact same brands and categories bought in traditional stores by a panel of homes operated by ACNielsen for purchases made in the same city and over the same time period. We compare the observed loyalty with a baseline model, a new segmented Dirichlet model, which has latent classes for brand choice and provides a very accurate model for purchase behavior. The results show that observed brand loyalty for high market share brands bought online is significantly greater than expected, with the reverse result for small share brands. In contrast, in the traditional shopping environment, the difference between observed and predicted brand loyalty is not related to brand share.Brand Choice, Probability Models, Internet Shopping

The benefits of developing customer relationships are well established. However, a well-intentioned relationship marketing strategy may fail because of poor implementation. In this study, the authors look at the effects of implementing a customer relationship strategy. Specifically, they examine the implementation of a personal-banker strategy as a means to developing customer relationships in the retail banking industry. The authors show that an “excellent” personal banker can increase overall customer satisfaction and loyalty compared to customers who do not have a personal banker. However, a poorly performing personal banker can result in lower overall customer satisfaction and loyalty than if no personal banker had been available. Moreover, the effects seem to be asymmetric, with the negative effects of a poor relationship strategy exceeding the positive benefits of an “excellent” strategy.

The use of coupons delivered by mobile phone, so called "m-coupons," is growing rapidly. In this study we analyze consumer response to m-coupons for a two-year trial at a large shopping mall. About 8,500 people were recruited to a panel and then received 3 text message m-coupons whenever they "swiped" their mobile phone at the mall entrances, with downstream redemption recorded. Almost 144,000 m-coupons were delivered during the trial, comprising 38 stores that supplied 134 different coupons. We find that an important feature of m-coupons is where and when they are delivered, with location and time of delivery significantly influencing redemption. Also important is how long they are valid (expiry length), because redemption times for m-coupons are much shorter than for traditional coupons. This suggests that their expiration length should be shortened to help signal time urgency. Nevertheless, traditional coupon features, like face value, still dominate m-coupon effectiveness, as does the product type, with snack food coupons being particularly effective.

In this study, the authors develop an inexpensive method to help firms assess the relative effectiveness of multiple advertising media. Specifically, they use a firm's loyalty program database to capture media exposure, through an online media survey, for all the media in which the firm advertises. In turn, the exposure data are matched with the purchase history for these same respondents, thereby creating single-source data. The authors illustrate their method for a large retailer that undertook a short-term promotional sale by advertising in television, radio, newspaper, magazine, online display ad, sponsored search, social media, catalog, direct mail, and e-mail channels. In this case, seven of the ten media significantly influence purchase outcomes. Finally, the authors demonstrate how to use their advertising response model to determine the optimal budget allocation across each advertising media channel.