Stephen Castleberry

Stephen Castleberry
University of Minnesota, Duluth | UMD · Department of Marketing

Ph.D. Business Administration University of Alabama

About

71
Publications
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1,453
Citations

Publications

Publications (71)
Article
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Business educators’ mission is to help students develop knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and skills that will help them be successful once they graduate. This is certainly true of ethical issues, including the use of deception. This study reports on an assignment that can increase students’ awareness of their own capacity for deceptiveness, self-re...
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Salespeople today are faced with many ways in which to contact their clients, including email, phone, social media, and in person visits. This study reports findings from a survey of buyers regarding their preferred method of contact by salespeople. Overall results indicate that email and voicemail are preferred to other media channels. Differences...
Article
This true account provides a summary of a firm and its CEO caught up in the housing market frenzy that occurred in the mid to late 2000s. Although confronted with a number of economic, strategic management, human resource, ethical, and legal challenges, the owners make decisions that cause the firm to grow at an exponential rate. The case documents...
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Purpose of the Study: It is important for sales educators to provide sales students with skills that lead to immediate performance benefits for the early stage of their career. This paper investigates the performance benefits of questioning skills, customer orientation (CO) and adaptive selling (AD) for sales students.Method/Design and Sample: Dyad...
Article
College student attendance at campus sporting events has been declining for a number of years with administrators looking for ways to reverse that trend. There are multiple reasons for the declining attendance and a multitude of possible solutions have been proposed. This case examines the situation for the football program at one mid-sized univers...
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Recent research on media channel selection theories has called for studies exploring communication in interorganizational business relationships and for specific work functions. The present study addresses this need through an exploration of buyer-seller communication practices in business-to-business contexts. Based on a survey of buyers, it offer...
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A comprehensive project for the Advanced Selling course that has been tested at three universities is introduced. After selecting an industry and a company, students engage in a complete industry analysis, a company sales analysis, a sales-specific SWOT analysis, complete a ride day with a salesperson in that firm, then present their findings in a...
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This case allows students to hear the stories of convicted white collar prisoners from Germany and the United States and learn lessons from their mistakes. Prisoners provide details of their crimes, the resulting prison time, as well as life lessons they feel business ethics students should learn. Students are encouraged to identify anything they,...
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A new interactive computer simulation designed to teach sales ethics is described. Simulation learner objectives include gaining a better understanding of legal issues in selling; realizing that ethical dilemmas do arise in selling; realizing the need to be honest when selling; seeing that there are conflicting demands from a salesperson’s company,...
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The Port of Duluth is a public corporation charged with maintaining the infrastructure and facilities that allow shipping companies to profitability move large quantities of commodities through the port to their destination. One essential element of ongoing operations is dredging; that is maintaining adequate depth for the very large bulk carrier s...
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It is encouraging to note the renewed interest given to professional selling in College of Businesses across the country (Neeb, 1988, Caballero 1989). More and more, faculty are realizing that the primary entry level job for marketing graduates is in selling. This fact, coupled with increased professionalism in the area has resulted in a desire by...
Article
This research updates and significantly extends Akaah and Riordon’s (J Market Res 26:112–120, 1989) evaluation of ethical perceptions of marketing research misconduct among marketing research professionals. In addition to examining changes in perceptions toward key marketing research practices over time, we assess professionals’ judgments on the et...
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Ryan has to help an aspiring tribute artist learn how to best market his music to the elderly market. He does so by collecting data via internet research, sales analysis, field observation, and a survey. The case requires students to evaluate the quality of the research conducted and then provide marketing direction. The case could be used in the f...
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This study is a replication and extension of a study by Castleberry (1990) in which 12 motivational factors related to a sales career were compared across generations. The importance of 12 key motivational factors related to sales positions were rank ordered by 1,390 college students. Respondents represented Gen-X college students from 1990 and Gen...
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As a marketing analyst, Eric is faced with several ethical dilemmas. When asked to engage in unethical and illegal behavior, Eric must decide whether to obey his boss and fudge the numbers (the counts of product purchased in order to get reimbursed more from the manufacturer during special sales) or take the ethical route. The case consists of two...
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This study is a replication and extension of a study by Castleberry (1990) in which 12 motivational factors related to a sales career were compared across generations. The importance of 12 key motivational factors related to sales positions were rank ordered by 1,390 college students. Respondents represented Gen-X college students from 1990 and Gen...
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A 90-minute staff development session was created to examine ethical issues of working with Extension's external partners. The session used a two-part case (included), as well as small and large group discussion to frame issues related to working with funders and partners outside of Extension. The participants in the session worked out ideas and gu...
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Payday lenders are becoming more common across America as they meet the unique needs of consumers unable or unwilling to use the services of more traditional lenders. But many have claimed that certain of their practices are unethical. Do payday lenders take advantage of those less fortunate in our society? Are their fees exorbitant, or are the fee...
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Ethical dilemmas are not always of our making. Carol, a licensed CPA, finds herself in the middle of a scheme concocted by two employees of her firm to defraud the U.S. government. Carol must negotiate both a legal and ethical tightrope. Her choice to do the ethically correct thing could lead to her dismissal or other retaliation by her boss. The c...
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A girl yanks on a pair of hipster jeans. Her mother is aghast, "You can't go to school looking like that," the mother says sternly. The mom then pulls the pants lower, proving she is hip to the current styles.
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Over the last twenty years, the use of disease awareness campaigns has become predominant in our everyday lives. What started out as a technique to market lifestyle drugs for cosmetics and sexual enhancements in the 1980s and 1990s, has now increased in usage to include many other areas of medicine. Its not uncommon to see drug advertisements in co...
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Automated telephone systems (ATS) have been criticized by customers as a frustrating way to interact with an organization. This study seeks to discover ATS best practices, assess how many local organizations (as opposed to 1-800 call centers) are utilizing various ATSs, and determine which ATS best practices these local organizations are adopting....
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Marketing educators bear some responsibility for teaching ethics and legal issues to their students. Visits to white-collar criminals in a federal prison camp are one method of achieving this task. This article develops and empirically assesses ten objectives for such a visit by MBA and undergraduate marketing classes. Undergraduates rated the expe...
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This study fills an important gap in the literature by developing a conceptual model that links salesperson empathy and listening skills to three outcome variables. Responses from a mail survey of 162 buyers from a variety of business organizations were used to test this model using structural equation modeling. The model has an excellent fit (χ 2...
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The primary purpose of this study was further testing of the ILPS scale (Castleberry, et al. 1999). The sample consisted of 101 salespeople from three business-to-business firms in the Midwest. In addition to the ILPS exhibiting good reliability, results are consistent with prior research indicating a significant positive relationship between liste...
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Do firms' web pages contain information that will aid in the proper anticipatory socialization of sales recruits? While most Fortune 100 firms' web pages included general information (e.g., financials, news, product information), few listed industry information or provided an easy contact method for more information. Almost none included video or a...
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Do firms' web pages contain information that will aid in the proper anticipatory socialization of sales recruits? While most Fortune 100 firms' web pages included general information (e.g., financials, news, product information), few listed industry information or provided an easy contact method for more information. Almost none included video or a...
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A marketing research project that is designed to answer research questions based on secondary data is described. The project incorporates Web sources without denigrating the traditional off-Web sources of secondary data. First, a review of the literature highlights the importance of becoming a knowledge worker in the new economy, the value of proje...
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The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a measure of the degree to which salespeople practice effective listening. After defming and discussing the construct, the development of a paper-and-pencil self-report measure of interpersonal listening in the personal selling context (lLPS) is described. Following the procedure used by Spir...
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Consumers' expressed attitudes to brands are often thought to show their commitment and loyalty. But when consumers were re-interviewed, on average only about 50% gave the same attitudinal Yes or No response as before, implying that attitude beliefs are often not very firmly held. This paper reports that the attitudinal repeat-rates for different b...
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Notes that researchers and practitioners recognize that listening is a crucial basic skill on a par with reading, writing, and speaking. Although effective listening is important in almost every profession, it seems particularly significant in business-to-business selling. Effective listening skills assist the salesperson in adapting to the prospec...
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Vertical Exchange theory, also known as Vertical Dyad Linkage theory and Leader-Member Exchange theory, describes the exchange relationship between a manager and subordinate. In the past, the type of relationship has been placed along a continuum with the extreme types labelled cadre and hired-hand. Recently, however, multi-dimensional approaches h...
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Relationship marketing is growing in importance, but academia has been slow to find methods of incorporating it into existing courses. Partnering, a form of relationship marketing, involves personal selling strategies designed to build relationships. This article presents methods by which traditional, single-transaction role-playing in professional...
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When consumers are re‐interviewed about their attitudinal beliefs towards different brands, such as whether it “tastes nice” or is “good value for money”, only about half give the same response as before.This great variability of consumers’ expressed attitude does not seem to reflect any systematic erosion of their liking of the brand, but merely a...
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Although widely recognized as essential to success, little research has focused on effective listening skills in the personal selling context. This paper reviews effective listening as seen in existing sales and communication literature. Further, it presents both a cognitive process model of the interpersonal listening process and a model that expl...
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The study of buying centers has often focused on the functional areas that participate. One question raised by such an approach is how individuals choose to participate. The paper explores individual perceptual factors that may affect participation choice, and reports the results of a study of potential purchase participants. Finding indicates that...
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With the movement in the U.S. economy toward a total quality environment, there will be a greater focus on relationships building within an organization. This study sought to empirically explore the association between sales manager salesperson relationships and salesperson motivation, stress, and evaluation of the manager. Results suggest that cad...
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The purpose of this study is to explore the level of moral reasoning characterized by members of the research chain. The study used a moral development scale developed from moral cognition research (Kohlberg 1969) to investigate the moral reasoning process used by marketing/advertising researchers. Findings from this study of 185 researchers indica...
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National Account Marketing (NAM), a selling method growing in importance across virtually every product and service classification, has received little attention in the sales management literature. This exploratory study was undertaken to learn how firms plan and carry out the hiring of people for NAM positions. In addition, relationships were expl...
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A conceptual definition of quality for marketers of consumer products is offered along with a theoretical model of the quality perception process. Application examples are provided and future research needs are outlined.
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Vertical Exchange Theory was introduced by Castleberry and Tanner (1986) as an integrative framework of the process by which sales managers and salespeople interact. This paper presents the results of two studies that explore propositions of the Vertical Exchange Theory. The findings have implications regarding traditional methods of sales research...
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With the increasing emphasis of personal selling in the curriculum of colleges and universities (Bragg 1988) it is not surprising that many sales recruiters are targeting college students for entry level sales positions. The more information recruiters have about this unique population the greater the odds are that they will be able to recruit exce...
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Considers the extent of the marketers need to communicate quality to the consumer and the best ways of doing so. Examines the results of an experiment involving consumers. Suggests that some communication of quality is generally better than no such communication, although whether specific or non-specific quality appeals should be used depends on th...
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A salespersons commitment to the organization is an important variable to study because of the proposed relationship with performance and other factors. In this study, organizational commitment was positively correlated with performance (whether measured objectively or subjectively), intrinsic motivation, job satisfaction, and the type of relations...
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Practical suggestions are offered for effectively and efficiently videotaping role plays. These include a discussion of methods to reduce "camera fright, " an approach to structure a progressive series of role plays, teaching activities that support the role plays, benefits of the program, and suggestions for implementing it on other campuses.
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A longitudinal field experiment was conducted to assess the effects of out-of-stock conditions both during and after the stockout occurred. Findings suggest that when a brand goes out of stock, low-share brands tend to pick up more sales than high-share brands. After the stockout brands were reintroduced a moderate negative carryover effect was the...
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The Vertical-Dyad-Linkage Model (VDL) is offered as a tool to explore the infrastructure of a sales team. Building on the philosophy found in most sales management literature that salespersons are to be managed as individuals, VDL theory allows an exploration of the underlying social organization that is present in all sales forces. Thus, the style...
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Stockouts do present a threat to a brand's stability in the marketplace. But is that threat as significant as one might initially be led to believe? The results of this study, as well as two prior efforts of similar methodology (Charlton and Ehrenberg 1976; Motes 1980), would suggest not, at least in the context of multi-brand inventories. It is st...
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The introduction and withdrawal of marketing variable inputs at various intervals of time and the subsequent observation of their impact on buyer behavior provide an invaluable aid as to how certain promotional changes work. Results of the present longitudinal experiment using a consumer panel of 133 households provide further evidence that for art...

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