In the increasingly complex retailing environment, more and more retailers operate in more than one channel, such as brick-and-mortar, catalogs, and online. Success in this dynamic environment relies on the strategic management and coordination of both online and offline pricing. This article provides an overview of findings from past research in both offline and online domains and presents an organizing framework, as well as an agenda to spur additional research.

This research investigates how national culture interacts with marketing strategy to influence consumers' organic post-consumption satisfaction ratings of entertainment products rich in cultural content. Drawing upon a communication theory framework, we develop hypotheses concerning multiple interaction effects between culture and marketing strategies on consumers' product evaluations. We test these hypotheses by analyzing consumer reviews of 260 movies in 25 country markets. In support of our hypotheses, we find that the cultural congruence between the product and the market improves consumer reviews, and that the effect is stronger in cultures characterized by collectivism, femininity, and uncertainty avoidance, as well as for products more heavily loaded with cultural content. In addition, we find that the negative effect of delay in product launch timing weakens for cultures characterized by long-term orientation, and that the positive effect of advertising spending on consumer evaluations is stronger in cultures characterized by high power distance belief. These results provide practical insights into how managers should make decisions concerning product design, launch timing, and advertising strategies in international markets.

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The slandering of a firm's products by competing firms poses significant threats to the victim firm, with the resulting damage often being as harmful as that from product-harm crises. In contrast to a true product-harm crisis, however, this disparagement is based on a false claim or fake news; thus, we call it a pseudo-product-harm crisis. Using a pseudo-product-harm crisis event that involved two competing firms, this research examines how consumer sentiments about the two firms evolved in response to the crisis. Our analyses show that while both firms suffered, the damage to the offending firm (which spread fake news to cause the crisis) was more detrimental, in terms of advertising effectiveness and negative news publicity, than that to the victim firm (which suffered from the false claim). Our study indicates that, even apart from ethical concerns, the false claim about the victim firm was not an effective business strategy to increase the offending firm's performance.