Rajan Varadarajan

• PhD in Business
• Professor at Texas A&M University

Purpose This paper aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers to utilization of healthcare services. Also, it aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for mor...

A review of research on innovation and new product development points to certain foundational issues of concern such as the use of (1) different definitions of constructs germane to the field (e.g., definitions of innovation, innovativeness, and specific types of innovations), (2) different construct labels to refer to specific innovation types, an...

Hunt et al. (2022, in this issue) provide a perspective on the evolution of the marketing discipline spanning five eras, its current state, and outlook. Looking back, they view certain developments in the evolutionary trajectory of the discipline during Era 4 as troubling. Looking ahead at Era 5, they propose certain course correction initiatives f...

During the past quarter-century, digital technologies-based innovations for creating, communicating, and delivering products of value to customers have significantly risen in importance to the competitiveness of firms. Digital technologies-based innovations have been transformational in numerous ways, such as the impact on firms’ marketing behavior...

Some firms have successfully maintained their position as sales leaders for years, as evidenced by their presence on the annual Fortune 500 list. While sustained investments in both marketing and R&D are crucial to sales leadership maintenance, should firms invest more in marketing or R&D? Is the relative emphasis on marketing versus R&D for sales...

Dr. Shelby D. Hunt is a world-renowned marketing scholar and thought leader. Over the course of his first five decades of distinguished and illustrious academic journey, he has made numerous seminal contributions to the advancement of marketing thought and practice. Hunt’s scholarly contributions have been greatly influential in shaping the content...

This commentary presents a dissenting point of view on some of Key et al.’s (AMS Review, 2020) observations concerning the relevance and rigor of scholarly research in marketing, impact of scholarly research in marketing on research in other disciplines, and influence of the marketing function in firms at the top management level.

Recollections: Dr. Robert F. Lusch by Rajan Varadarajan.

Lusch (2017), in an insightful article published posthumously, enumerated and elaborated on four macro observations concerning Homo sapiens and exchange. He noted that Homo sapiens massively (1) engage in exchanges with each other, (2) create tools to facilitate exchanges, (3) engage in exchanges with the vast majority of costs being unseen, and (4...

Over the years, marketing scholars have voiced concerns regarding the dearth of indigenous theory development in marketing, reliance on theories developed in other disciplines, and the downward trend in conceptual articles published in marketing journals. Advancing marketing theory encompasses developing organic marketing theories, refining and ext...

Chief among a firm's market-based resources are its relational resources such as brand equity, customer equity and channel equity that result from its interactions with customers and marketing intermediaries, and intellectual resources – accumulated knowledge about entities in the market environment such as consumers, end use and intermediate custo...

Emphasizing customer satisfaction as a strategic lever for enhancing business performance is a widespread business practice. However, just over 25 years of empirical studies by academic researchers has produced evidence that is sometimes contradictory. Hence, greater academic clarity and improved managerial understanding could result from a meta-an...

Morgan et al. (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1), 2019) propose a new conceptualization of the domain and sub-domains of marketing strategy and employ them as a framework to assess the current state of research in marketing strategy. Based on an analysis of articles addressing marketing strategy related issues published in six lead...

Purpose – The purposes of this chapter are to propose definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, marketing innovation, innovation strategy, and strategic innovation, elaborate on their literature and conceptual underpinnings, and provide an overview of the conceptual domains of innovation, innovation strategy, and str...

Hunt (2017, Advancing marketing strategy in the marketing discipline and beyond: From promise, to neglect, to prominence, to fragment, (to promise?). Journal of Marketing Management. doi:10.1080/0267257X.2017.1326973) provides a synthesis and critical review of over 100 years of marketing literature organised into four eras. In his prognosis of the...

For more than a quarter of a century, a large body of research in marketing, as well as in other disciplines, has focused on a number of substantive, theoretical and methodological issues relating to market orientation. Reflecting on their market orientation focused research journey, Jaworski and Kohli (2017) offer 22 valuable lessons for researche...

Doing well by doing good (DWDG) innovations refer to the implementation of new products, processes and practices, and modifications of existing products, processes and practices by firms that benefit society by contributing toward alleviation of specific social problems, and enhancing performance of firms. Social problems refer to certain objective...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that provides insights into major environmental and organizational forces underlying greater levels of organizational responsiveness to the environmental sustainability imperative by a growing number of firms, worldwide. Methodology/approachThe paper is conceptual in its focus, a...

In the lead article of this issue, Hunt (2015) provides an exposition of how the resource-advantage (R-A) theory undergirds the sixteen foundational premises of marketing strategy advanced in Varadarajan (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38 (2), 119-140, 2010). Hunt notes that R-A theory and its three foundational strategies, and the si...

In an environment characterized by growing awareness of environmental sustainability among various stakeholders in organizations, innovating for sustainability can be expected to grow in importance from the standpoints of organizational legitimacy, reputation, and performance. Relatedly, a firm’s sustainable innovations capabilities as a source of...

The past quarter century has been characterized by major and game changing market developments such as the evolution of the competitive market environment from a physical market environment (PME) to an Internet-enabled market environment (IME) that encompasses both the physical and electronic marketplaces, and the digitization of an increasing numb...

In numerous country markets (particularly emerging and less developed markets), inadequate and/or ineffective investments in infrastructure and the resultant quantity and quality gaps in public goods (e.g., water, electricity, sanitation, public transportation) often require consumers to engage in ecologically harmful consumption behaviors that are...

This study contributed to recent efforts aimed at understanding the turnover behavior of salespeople Golson, Dubinsky, and Anderson 1987; Johnston, Varadarajan, Futrell, and Sager 1987; Williamson 1983) by testing relationships drawn from a general model of employee turnover proposed by Mobley (1977). The data used to test the model were gathered f...

The precursors, processes, and outcomes associated with strategic alliances are shaped in important ways by the background of the decision-makers involved in alliance formation. Building on the theory of planned behavior and employing a multi-industry sample, the research reported investigates the relationship between a manager's attitudes, subject...

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a firm’s activities for establishing and maintaining relationships with its customers. Outsourcing refers to a firm’s contracting with another firm to perform activities that were erstwhile performed within the firm. The emergence of a low cost, high speed, global communication network and informatio...

In recent years, the combination of economic growth and population growth in emerging markets and less developed markets has accelerated the progression of globalization of retailing and globalization by retailers. The challenges faced by global and globalizing retailers (retailers who currently have or intend to establish a market presence in matu...

A business’s marketing strategy decisions (how a business chooses to compete in the marketplace) are informed by the characteristics of the firm, the product offering, the target customers, the industry, and macro environment, among other factors. The literature in marketing focusing on the marketing strategy implications of product characteristics...

A cursory examination of marketing literature suggests that the term marketing strategy is used in a wide variety of contexts. At one extreme, marketing strategy is broadly conceptualized as a multidimensional construct encompassing a broad array of integrated and internally consistent set of coordinated behaviors by an organization in the marketpl...

During the past decade, a number of interactive technologies, including the Internet, have fundamentally transformed how retailers compete in the marketplace. In a similar vein, emerging interactive technologies can be expected to significantly alter the retailing landscape through their impact on retailing strategy and operations. Furthermore, it...

This paper proposes a domain statement for strategic marketing as a field of study and delineates certain issues fundamental to the field. It also proposes a definition for marketing strategy, the focal organizational strategy construct of the field, and enumerates a number of foundational premises of marketing strategy. The domain of strategic mar...

Outsourcing refers to the practice of a firm entrusting to an external entity the performance of an activity that was performed erstwhile in-house. Although off-shoring and offshore outsourcing to suppliers have dominated much of the recent discussion and debate on outsourcing in scholarly journals and the business press, the nature and scope of ou...

While there is a sustained interest in research focusing on issues relating to trust development in the electronic marketplace, significant gaps remain in the literature. In particular, little is known of the underlying processes that may be occurring in online trust development. For example, research suggests that factors such as site design and n...

It is not uncommon to come across appeals in business literature exhorting managers to devote greater effort to the pursuit of radical innovations, or to see comments admonishing managers for devoting too much energy to the search for incremental innovations. Over the years, successful radical innovations have undisputedly had a significant impact...

During the past decade, developments such as the rapid growth of the Internet, digitization of information products, and digitization of the information attributes of non-information products, has necessitated businesses to fundamentally rethink, as well as institute major changes in, their marketing strategies. Against this backdrop, we present a...

This analysis suggests that an individual's current level of earnings may be one of the most important variables influencing his/her perception of incremental increases. Also, job difficulty (measured in terms of the average number of nights spent away from home per month on job-related duties) contributes significantly to the explanation of SMPI f...

A business can leverage the potential of the Internet to enhance the effectiveness of its competitive strategy as well as the efficiency of its operations. While the former has received considerable attention in literature, there is a dearth of research on the later. This paper focuses on leveraging the Internet for enhancing the efficiency of a bu...

The competitive market environment has evolved from a physical market environment (PME) to an Internet-enabled market environment (IME) encompassing the physical and electronic marketplaces. At the same time, an increasing number of information products are available in both analog and digital forms. For information products in digital form, the IM...

What characterizes superior organizational performance? The question has always fascinated practitioners and academic researchers, and a string of recent bestsellers attests to the current prominence of performance as an organizational issue. This article brings together recent perspectives on performance and provides some further conclusions of it...

Interorganizational alliances are widely recognized as critical to product innovation, particularly in high-technology markets. Many new product development (NPD) alliances tend to be asymmetric, that is, they are formed between a larger firm and a smaller firm. As is the case with alliances in general, asymmetric alliances also typically result in...

Conceptually, customer relationship management (CRM) has been widely embraced by businesses. In practice, however, examples of success contrast with anecdotes where the diffusion of CRM into organizations continues to be a slow process and/or where CRM implementation outcomes have fallen short of expectations. Successful implementation depends on a...

Previous research provides conflicting evidence of the association between the past performance of a business and its competitive responsiveness, with researchers observing both positive and negative relationships. To clarify this issue, the authors test a model using survey data from the retailing industry. The model delineates direct and indirect...

Brand portfolio management addresses, among other issues, the interrelated questions of what brands to add, retain, or delete. A small number of brands in a firm’s brand portfolio can often have a disproportionately large positive or negative impact on its image and reputation and the responses of stakeholders. Brand deletions can be critical from...

We present a conceptual framework that organizes current thinking regarding increased interactivity in the electronic marketplace and its implications for product migration. Product migration refers to the extent of reliance by buyers and sellers on the electronic marketplace for activities pertaining to information search, purchase, acquisition, u...

It is widely recognized that a better understanding of interactivity and its implications is essential for facilitating research focused on the emerging electronic marketplace. However, deficiencies persist in our understanding of this important concept. Building on research in various fields of study (e.g., information systems, marketing, and comp...

Improving marketing decision making requires a better understanding of the factors that influence how managers interpret and respond to a market situation. Building on extant literature, the authors develop a model that delineates antecedents of and responses to the interpretation of a market situation. Using case-scenario methodology, the authors...

Competitive strategy is primarily concerned with how a business should deploy resources at its disposal to achieve and maintain defensible competitive positional advantages in the marketplace. Competitive marketing strategy focuses on how a business should deploy marketing resources at its disposal to facilitate the achievement and maintenance of c...

Although product innovation is widely recognized as crucial to the success of organizations, the literature still contains certain gaps that limit our understanding of successful product innovation. These gaps include a lack of research employing a decompositional approach (i,e., analysis of the drivers at each stage of the process) to studying pro...

Although strategy exists at multiple levels in a firm (corporate, business, and functional), here is a dearth of research in marketing literature that focuses on the dependency among strategy at different levels. The authors address this issue by examining the relationship between deconglomeration and marketing strategy. Deconglomeration refers to...

Multimarket competition refers to competitive situations in which the same firms compete against each other in multiple markets. The theory of multimarket competition suggests that the phenomenon of mutual forbearance may reduce the market-level intensity of competition between two firms when the multimarket contact between them (the number of mark...

Multimarket competition refers to competitive situations in which the same firms compete against each other in multiple markets. The theory of multimarket competition suggests that the phenomenon of mutual forbearance may reduce the market-level intensity of competition between two firms when the multimarket contact between them (the number of mark...

This article provides an assessment of the state of the field of marketing strategy research and the outlook. Using institutional theory, the authors develop an organizing framework to serve as a road map for assessing research in marketing strategy. Their assessment of the state of the field based on a review of extant literature suggests that sig...

A fundamental aspect of research in most fields is the fact that old ideas and paradigms are sometimes replaced by newer approaches that reflect the wealth of new knowledge accumulated through advances in the substantive, conceptual, and methodological domains. Sheth and Sisodia's (1999) call for revisiting lawlike generalizations in marketing is p...

Strategic alliances, a manifestation of interorganizational cooperative strategies, entails the pooling of specific resources and skills by the cooperating organizations in order to achieve common goals, as well as goals specific to the individual partners. Gaining access to new markets; accelerating the pace of entry into new markets; sharing of r...

This study examines the similarities and differences in the attitudes of marketing and nonmarketing executives towards marketing practices, consumerism, and government regulation in India. Research in the areas of consumerism, organization theory, strategy, and marketing are used to develop the hypotheses. The results reveal a high level of skeptic...

The environmental management perspective assumes that marketing strategies can be used to control, manage, or change the context within which organizations operate. This article considers the factors underlying differences in the extent to which organizations are proactive in managing their environments. Literatures relating to the environmental de...

The conceptualization of strategy in terms of corporate, business, and functional level strategies has gained wide acceptance in the strategic management and marketing literatures. Under this schema, strategy at each level is presumed to have a well defined domain, and key decisions associated with each level are presumed to be made by decision mak...

Numerous conceptual and empirical studies advance the notion that first movers achieve long-term competitive advantages. These studies purport to demonstrate the presence of a systematic direct relationship between order of entry for products, brands, or businesses and market share. However, an objective assessment of the literature suggests that t...

An issue debated frequently in the international marketing literature centers on whether a business should pursue a strategy that is standardized across national markets or adapted to individual national markets. Of the two aspects relating to standardization of marketing strategy across national markets-(1) standardization of the pattern of resour...

The purpose of competitive strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) and thereby enhance a business's performance. The authors focus on the distinctive organizational skills and resources underlying SCA in service industries and the moderating effects of the characteristics of services, service industries, and firms within an...

An issue debated frequently in the international marketing literature centers on whether a business should pursue a strategy that is standardized across national markets or adapted to individual national markets. Of the two aspects relating to standardization of marketing strategy across national markets—(1) standardization of the pattern of resour...

The purpose of competitive strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) and thereby enhance a business's performance. The authors focus on the distinctive organizational skills and resources underlying SCA in service industries and the moderating effects of the characteristics of services, service industries, and firms within an...

A number of researchers in the marketing, management, and economics disciplines have expressed reservations regarding the validity and generalizability of the reported relationships between market share and profitability. Against this backdrop, the authors performed a meta-analysis on 276 market share-profitability findings from forty-eight studies...

A number of researchers in the marketing, management, and economics disciplines have expressed reservations regarding the validity and generalizability of the reported relationships between market share and profitability. Against this backdrop, the authors performed a meta-analysis on 276 market share-profitability findings from forty-eight studies...

This study examines organizations that emphasize differing types of marketing skills. It is based on a national survey of Health Maintenance Organizations. The organizations are first classified into groups based on their distinctive marketing skill configurations. Six groups were identified. Next, differences between these organization types are e...

Numerous conceptual and empirical studies advance the notion that first movers achieve long-term competitive advantages. These studies purport to demonstrate the presence of a systematic direct relationship between order of entry for products, brands, or businesses and market share. However, an objective assessment of the literature suggests that t...

Numerous conceptual and empirical studies advance the notion that first movers achieve long-term competitive advantages. These studies purport to demonstrate the presence of a systematic direct relationship between order of entry for products, brands, or businesses and market share. However, an objective assessment of the literature suggests that t...

The process of knowledge utilization within firms has come to be viewed as an increasingly important area for research in light of its implications for organizational effectiveness. However, our current understanding of this phenomenon is limited because the process of knowledge use in organizations is complex and difficult to conceptualize and mea...

This paper focuses on the strategic and organizational determinants of superior corporate performance in retailing. Previously published studies on excellent companies at large, and on excellent retailing companies are reviewed, and the results of a content analysis of a small sample of excellent retailing companies are reported. Cheif among the ha...

It has been pointed out that managers constitute a very distinct group because of their dual roles in national marketing systems. As consumers, they are either beneficiaries or victims of the system, but, as decision makers, they play a major role in the design and functioning of the marketing system. Against this backdrop, this study examines the...

The 1970s and '80s were interesting as well as challeng-ing times for marketing academics whose interests spanned the myriad facets and nuances of marketing, business, and corporate strategy. During this period, the strategy literature significantly benefitted from the confluence and integration of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological perspe...

This study examines organizations that emphasize differing types of marketing skills. It is based on a national survey of Health Maintenance Organizations. The organizations are first classified into groups based on their distinctive marketing skill configurations. Six groups were identified. Next, differences between these organization types are e...

The myriad facets of consumerism have been examined by several authors during the last two decades in the context of industrialized nations. However, there is a dearth of research on consumerism in reference to developing nations. Against this background, the study by Bharadwaj, Thirunarayana and Varadarajan assumes importance as it focuses on cons...

Market share plays a central role in a number of portfolio planning models. This article presents an exposition of the underlying relationship between market share, market size, market growth rate, product sales volume and product sales growth rate. Three constructs—the market share multiplier, the physical volume multiplier, and the dollar volume...

A new, multi-item scale for operationalizing Miles and Snow's (1978) strategic typology— defenders, prospectors, analyzers, and reactors—is proposed and field-tested in this paper. Relatively pure strategic types, identified as those organizations classified similarly using both the newly developed, multi-item scale and the traditionally employed p...