Leyland Pitt

Simon Fraser University · Beedie School of Business

Purpose This methodological paper demonstrates how service firms can use digital technologies to quantify and predict customer evaluations of their interactions with the firm using unstructured, qualitative data. To harness the power of unstructured data and enhance the customer-firm relationship, the use of computerized text analysis is proposed....

Academic dishonesty (AD) continues to threaten the integrity of post-secondary institutions around the world with new scandals publicized every year. While AD has received considerable research attention, most of these studies have focused on quantifying the characteristics of cheaters and cheating behaviour, primarily at the undergraduate level. I...

Today’s students will work in an increasingly diverse environment which requires the ability to understand and connect with consumers from different social groups and cultures. The expectations placed on marketing practitioners to connect with a multiplicity of consumers requires a nuanced understanding of the different lifestyles, lived experience...

Brand love is an often ignored, yet important dimension in consumer-brand relationships. Especially consumer-brand relationships with masstige brands that are hedonic and symbolic in nature. Using an experimental design (n = 465), this study investigated the interplay between brand love and brand loyalty, and its impact on brand equity. Contrary to...

Any number of industries and their offerings have fallen victim to managerial shortsightedness. Firms often believe themselves to be invincible and see themselves as immune to threats from seemingly unrelated technologies. There seemed to be no apparent link between bound paper books and the emerging internet, no discernible ties between the video...

In recent years, marketers have placed increased reliance upon artificial intelligence (AI) and, subsequently, the use of virtual agents in customer service contexts is on the rise. Despite such service digitalization, service can still fail. While there is an increasing literature on the effect of virtual agents in service settings, questions rema...

Those who gamble compulsively, and those who shop or buy in a compulsive manner share a number of common characteristics, stemming from similar impulse-control issues. As such, it is predicted that a lexical analysis of personal narratives of compulsion would share similarities. Using secondary data from an online mental health forum, Psychforums,...

Customer loyalty is central to both the study and practice of marketing. Some marketing managers have designed programs to create, maintain, and build customer loyalty in a game-like nature, which can be described as gamification. Built upon the conceptual foundations of customer loyalty, this chapter discusses how gamification, and its underlying...

The impact of COVID‐19 on global human resource (HR) management has been swift, dramatic and has fundamentally changed HR processes. The prompt online migration of business has altered the skills required by employees to succeed in the workplace of the future. This research examines the hard and soft skill gaps that exist in the digital marketing a...

Consumer subversion refers to consumer acts that are intended to impede the ability of marketers to develop and implement a marketing strategy, including market segmentation, target marketing, and the formulation of a marketing mix. Consumer subversion has featured across many bodies of marketing literature, yet it has not been explicitly defined a...

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have recently drawn considerable attention, highlighted by a digital art piece that sold for $69M USD in early 2021. Though they have only just started receiving coverage by traditional media outlets and interest from casual observers, the foundations of NFT technology date back to advances in computer science in the late...

The discipline of marketing is undergoing a significant transition that seems to have both positive and negative effects in the type and pace of knowledge it creates (Eisend 2015). Specifically, scholarly research has become more specialized and fragmented and potentially meaningful to industry but not necessarily producing forward-thinking relevan...

Interest in entrepreneurial ecosystems—the geographically-bound social networks of institutions and cultural values that give rise to and sustain entrepreneurial activity—have intensified in recent years (Roundy 2016; Spigel 2016). This growing attraction is driven by a need to better understand the concentration of high growth ventures in regions...

Hunt’s (AMS Rev, 10, 189–198, 2020) notion of the re-institutionalization of marketing as a discipline provides the background for this commentary. This forward-looking context is used to address issues the marketing discipline is facing to reconcile problems we identify. Academic marketing research has become fragmented and polarized into narrow a...

Signaling how virtuous a brand is has become an ever more common strategy. Brands have recently outcompeted one another to align themselves with various causes. We explore the rise in virtue signaling and review prominent examples of brands who have linked themselves to social movements: some successfully, some unsuccessfully. We draw on evolutiona...

Killer applications, or killer apps, are technology applications that profoundly change the way any society thinks, works, and functions. This paper explores Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a killer app, with specific application to marketing. Specifically, this paper employs the lens of technology history to explore the relationship between market...

To address a shortcoming in the current state of scholarly inquiry into brand stories from a strategic management perspective, a comprehensive bibliographic analysis is conducted on all papers in the journals included in the Web of Science database on brand stories. We employ the VOSViewer tool to complete our bibliographic analysis. VOSViewer allo...

The diffusion and growth of the web and the social media applications that it has provided have seen people increasingly turn to social media to express their feelings, frustrations, and ambitions and to generally share life events. Like other internet users, those with a gambling disorder are also known to use specialized online forums to read the...

http://ltu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1500397/FULLTEXT02.pdf The expansion of the sharing economy has significantly disrupted industries and transformed classifications of employment. The sharing economy has reduced barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, however the decline in entrepreneurship in many countries seemingly contradicts this. Hybri...

Purpose Technology is an important force in the entrepreneurial ecosystem as it has the potential to impact entrepreneurial opportunities and processes. This paper explores the emerging technology of artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for reverse logistics within the circular economy (CE). It considers key reverse logistics functions...

As government-mandated lockdowns and steep declines in trade set in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a common theme became apparent in the advertising of the time: it was all the same. Regardless of the product category or brand personality, many ads were remarkably similar, beginning with melancholy music, voiceovers reminding the audience th...

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS) using two samples of employees of organizations in various sectors. The scale is designed to gauge perceptions of the extent of organizational bullshit that exists in a workplace, where bullshit is operationalized as individuals within an organiz...

Many retailers seek growth by strategically enabling a category captain to manage a category on their behalf. Past research assesses the efficacy of category captaincy from a retailer perspective, with results showing effective categorycaptain arrangements depend on the respective abilities of actors to effectively operate in such a network structu...

Many employees unexpectedly were required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. With this abrupt change came the challenge of blurred lines between career and personal life. Lacking designated home office spaces, countless individuals had to create improvised work setups in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms—wherever there was space...

There has been much discussion within the marketing literature about marketing’s influence both within the firm and within the family of academic business disciplines (e.g. Clark Key et al. 2014; Eisend 2015; Homburg et al. 2015). This begs the question of whether or not marketing provides the relevant answers and knowledge base needed in areas of...

Experts’ reviews shape consumer’s preferences and purchase decisions because they are often perceived as unbiased and trustworthy. Wine industry is a high value agricultural industry from the perspectives of both the main raw agricultural and the value added in the finished products. As a high value industry to both governments and consumers, count...

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) was born in the mid-twentieth century to describe endeavours in computer science focusing on the simulation of human learning. Since then, advances in computing, data collection and data storage have made AI an increasingly important area for researchers and practitioners across a range of disciplines in...

False information that appears similar to trustworthy media content, or what is commonly referred to as ‘fake news’, is pervasive in both traditional and digital strategic communication channels. This paper presents a comprehensive bibliographic analysis of published academic articles related to ‘fake news’ and the related concepts of truthiness, p...

This paper is composed of scholarly essays that explore the problematic nature of marketing’s influence within the academy and organizations, potential explanations and causes, and how conceptual and theoretical research can address and move our discipline forward. Each section represents material and research developed through interactive sessions...

The editor and assistant editor consider the past, present and future of the Journal of Wine Research. They contemplate its origins as a unique journal serving those who grow wine, make wine, sell wine and consume wine. They also observe the current state of the journal, and outline where the journal might go in the future.

Experts guide consumers’ preferences and purchase decisions because they are often perceived as unbiased and trustworthy. Countries spend billions on marketing their agricultural industries to not only their own citizens but also foreign citizens all over the world, including these experts. The wine industry is a high-value agricultural industry fr...

Fake news is one of the most discussed phenomena in politics, social life and the world of business. Recent literature has indicated that it can be a serious threat to brands and their management. Brands can be both victims of, and either unwitting or deliberate agents of fake news. This paper presents the results of a three-round Delphi study of a...

There has been much discussion within the marketing literature about marketing’s influence both within the firm and within the family of academic business disciplines (e.g., Clark Key et al. 2014; Eisend 2015; Homburg et al. 2015). This begs the question of whether or not marketing provides the relevant answers and knowledge base needed in areas of...

Objectives This article provides an in-depth understanding of the history of Mindfulness and identifies trends in the papers the journal has published to date. Specifically, the article analyzes indicators that measure the nature of the scientific output of Mindfulness, by investigating the following metrics: characteristics of articles; thematic a...

Entrepreneurial ecosystems represent an active and growing area of research. Recognized as a contributor to foster regional competitiveness by stimulating economic growth and promoting innovativeness, interest in the concept spans across disciplines. Despite evolving and inter-disciplinary discussions on entrepreneurial ecosystems, a comprehensive...

Healthcare consumers are increasingly turning to online sources such as educational websites, forums and social media platforms to share their experiences with medical services and to demystify the uncertainties associated with undergoing various procedures. This study demonstrates a non-invasive way of understanding the feelings and emotions that...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main developments from the early days of manual content analysis to the adoption of computer-assisted content analysis and the emerging artificial intelligence (AI)-supported ways to analyze content (primarily text) in marketing and consumer research. A further aim is to outline the many opportu...

Many organizations are drowning in a flood of corporate bullshit, and this is particularly true of organizations in trouble, whose managers tend to make up stuff on the fly and with little regard for future consequences. Bullshitting and lying are not synonymous. While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bulls...

Since the infancy of the Delphi Technique for collecting and aggregating expert insight, this methodological tool has been discussed, adapted and applied in over 2,600 published scholarly papers to date. This paper mines the major citation indexing services to analyze five dimensions of these data: primary contribution (methodological or applied),...

This paper corroborates Hirschman’s (1987) “People as Products” work by first replicating it in a different context, and then extending it by using new methodologies that examine partner-seeking through a different theoretical lens. The replication finds that some of the original hypotheses hold, some did not, and some, in fact, reversed. This exte...

While it is seldom spoken about openly, opportunism always prevails in client–agency relationships and could lead to their demise. This study directs attention to client–agency opportunism by describing how it happens and ends with a discussion on how today’s client–agency dynamics can be improved.

Purpose Fake news is presently one of the most discussed phenomena in politics, social life and the world of business. This paper aims to report the aggregated opinions of 42 brand management academics on the level of threat to, the involvement of, and the available actions of brand managers resulting from fake news. Design/methodology/approach A...

We spend our days looking at them, talking to them, and touching them. We sleep with them, work with them, and play with them. They increasingly consume our time, attention, and money: we are addicted to our digital devices—or, more precisely, the digital experiences they enable. This addiction is both akratic (we are aware of the negative conseque...

Through the presentation of the case of James Reid, a hybrid entrepreneur that transitioned towards full-time entrepreneurship, this paper discusses a number of entrepreneurial marketing issues faced by a small business. When presented with several opportunities for business growth, Reid evaluates the extent to which growth could impact his busines...

This research provides knowledge and builds theory related to how and why consumers engage in unsolicited innovation with existing products in order to create new ones. Specifically, this research presents an in-depth qualitative exploration of the motivations consumers have for innovating with existing offerings, of their reasons for innovating au...

The strategic renewal literature recognizes that organizations should employ some form of management control system to ensure that their strategic goals and related capabilities are aligned with their environmental conditions, such as the dynamics of environmental change. This chapter focuses on these issues. Using gamification as a management cont...

University-industry partnerships emphasise the transformation of knowledge into products and processes which can be commercially exploited. This paper presents a framework for understanding how social capital in university-industry partnerships affect knowledge transfer strategies, which impacts on collaborative innovation developments. University-...

Overview: A bibliometric study of Research-Technology Management (RTM), conducted for the 20-year period 1998–2017, examined citations, authors, industry sectors, and topics for 550 articles published during the period to identify relevant trends. Along with providing guidance to prospective RTM authors and reviewers regarding the journal’s areas o...

The transition of ResMed, the world’s leading manufacturer of therapies and devices for Obstructive Sleep Apnea, from a goods producer to an information-intensive firm presents a compelling opportunity for marketing scholars to revisit fundamental issues in strategic marketing’s theoretical past. These issues are still vitally relevant today and sp...

Motivation is one of the most studied facets of the management of employees and team members. Countless scholarly papers, articles in magazines, and best-selling books have been written on the subject. The role of coaches in motivating successful sports teams is also a much-loved topic of popular conversation and receives considerable attention in...

In an age of digital distractions, mindfulness has become a billion-dollar industry that extends well beyond training to include products, services, and experiences. Attitudes on mindfulness vary from the cautious to the starry-eyed. However, one thing is certain: mindfulness is here and it is here to stay, as the conditions that gave rise to its p...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the mechanisms that organizations use to keep their innovations secret. This paper examines how, when and why secrecy appropriation mechanisms (SAMs) can enable innovators to appropriate value from their innovations. Design/methodology/approach Building from an extensive literature review...

Free-to-play online games create significant revenues through sales of virtual items. The argument that the sale of items that provide a competitive advantage (functional items) fuels a pay-to-win culture has attracted developers to business models that are solely based on the sale of non-functional items (items that provide no objective competitiv...

CfP on "Emerging Technologies in Business and Industrial Marketing" Special Issue in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7837 Submission Deadline: September 30, 2018

There has been much discussion within the marketing literature about marketing’s influence both within the firm and within the family of academic business disciplines (e.g., Clark et al. 2014; Eisend 2016; Homburg et al. 2015). This begs the question of whether or not marketing provides the relevant answers and knowledge base needed in areas of the...

“…the marketing discipline faces an urgent need for a rethinking of its fundamental purpose, premises, and implicit models that have defined marketing for at least the past 50 years” (Webster & Lusch p. 389, 2013). Recently, there has been much discussion within the marketing literature about marketing’s influence both within the firm and within th...

Brands can interact both directly and indirectly with fake news. In some instances, brands are the victims of fake news and, other times, the purveyors. Brands can either finance fake news or be the targets of it. Indirectly, they can be linked via image transfer, where either fake news contaminates brands, or brands validate fake news. To control...

In the past US election cycle, and mirrored by similar events in Europe, two trends have come to dominate social discourse: truthiness (the validity of something based on how it feels) and post-fact (taking a position that ignores facts). Human discourse has always contained elements of these, but the nature of the Internet and social media has pus...

Marketing scholars and practitioners are keenly interested in brand engagement in social media because brand engagement has strong links to brand equity. However, much of the marketing literature focuses on customer brand engagement and often in a consumer market setting. This paper advances this literature in two ways by (1) focusing on employees,...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how brand personality and its dimensions can be applied to wine tourism, and how a content analysis of the text taken from a wine estate’s website can be used to derive a snapshot of how brand personality is communicated. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses the text analysis software DICT...

Purpose Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this article is to understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communica...

Apps on smart devices such as phones and tablets have enabled financial services firms not only to provide greater convenience and flexibility to customers, but also to get them to do a lot of the work entailed in these services. This has changed the character of service in many ways, including the nature of service quality where service is no long...

Purpose Calculating brand equity, the price differential that a branded product is able to charge compared to an unbranded equivalent, often suffers from a lack of a means to truly determine equivalence. Luxury wines have the benefit of an established measure of equivalency – the Parker score. Robert Parker’s influence as a tastemaker provides a p...

Without realizing it, managers can often adopt their own cultural perspectives instead of those of the culture where they seek to market their products and services. Overcoming this natural perspective is seen as a critical element in achieving effective business adaptation as it enables the recognition of the uniqueness of foreign markets that may...

For this special session, we propose to have an interactive panel session in which expert panelists explore the social, technological, and organizational issues related to emerging types of wearable technology or the wide range of devices that people can wear on almost any part of the anatomy; for example, some of the most well-known wearable devic...

Natural disasters are a rare, yet inevitable part of living on Earth. As a result, disaster planning and preparedness are crucial for the continued safety and well-being of a city or nation’s population. Planning and preparedness are also important for organizational well-being and success, and for the cohesive synergy of the individuals in a compa...

Brands and their management have become a focal point of marketing practice and academic study in recent years. There has been a great deal of controversy and discussion regarding what brands are, what they do, how they can be valued and how they should be managed.1,2,3 As observers such as Tom Peters4 admonish one to ‘Brand, Brand, Brand!’, some c...

More than 100 billion dollars are spent annually on gifts in the U.S., which makes gift-giving behaviour an important area of study. Belk (1996) describes a perfect gift as a luxury good which is exclusively relevant to the recipient. By means of selecting and transferring gifts, the giver is aiming to convey an important symbolic massage (e.g., lo...

Websites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter have attracted much attention for their ability to enable organizations and individuals to raise funds from ordinary people who contribute for a number of reasons. This phenomenon is called crowdfunding. Crowdfunding permits organizations and individuals to obtain investments they otherwise might not recei...

Wearable computing devices promise to deliver countless benefits to users. Moreover, they are among the most personal and unique computing devices of all, more so than laptops and tablets and even more so than smartphones. However, this uniqueness also brings with it a risk of security issues not encountered previously in information systems: the p...

From the seclusion of monastic life to the noise of Silicon Valley, the ancient practice of mindfulness has ‘come out of the cloister.’ As an antidote to mindless cognition and behavior, the practice of mindfulness—with its principle of grounding attention in the present moment—has been shown to have powerful and positive effects at both the indivi...

Marketing instructors using simulation games as a way of inducing some realism into a marketing course are faced with many dilemmas. Two important quandaries are the optimal size of groups and how much of the students’ time should ideally be devoted to the game. Using evidence from a very large sample of teams playing a simulation game, the study d...

This special session intends to explore the use of wearable technology in greater detail. Current perspectives identify a number of fundamental questions regarding wearable technology. Wearable technology is emerging as one of the key areas companies are investing in. In March 2014, Facebook announced that it had plans to acquire Oculus VR, a firm...

This chapter investigates the effect of objective and subjective knowledge on exploratory acquisition in consumers’ purchase of wine. The main research questions investigated are whether there is a link between a consumer’s objective knowledge of wine (what they really know) is linked to their subjective knowledge (what they think they know), and w...