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Leveraging on IT and dynamic marketing capabilities to develop an agile marketing capability

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Abstract

This study aims to explore the key theoretical patterns of IT and dynamic marketing capabilities, in order to develop an Agile Marketing Capability’s propositions. The study per-forms an in-depth literature review towards IT and Dynam-ic Marketing Capabilities to outline the key propositions of the Agile Marketing Capability development. The findings of this research provide a set of agile marketing capabilities which helps the theoretical understanding of the agile mar-keting approach. Given its innovativeness, this study pro-poses a first theoretical analysis on Agile Marketing Capa-bility. In turn, such research will require further theoretical contributions and refinements as well as appropriate empiri-cal tests. This study may represent a useful framework for managers and decision makers to better understand the stra-tegic advantages, which can derive from the employment of agile marketing capabilities. This study analyzes the agile marketing approach, which represents a still little explored field of research. Moreover, it is aimed at investigating the key theoretical foundations which may represent the ante-cedents for the future development of the new trend in the agile marketing realm.

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Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage has become a major area of research in strategic management. Building on the assumptions that strategic resources are heterogeneously distributed across firms and that these differences are stable over time, this article examines the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Four empirical indicators of the potential of firm resources to generate sustained competitive advantage-value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability are discussed. The model is applied by analyzing the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages. The article concludes by examining implications of this firm resource model of sustained competitive advantage for other business disciplines.
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The main focus of this study is on the scientific identification of preconditions for collective intelligence (CI) to emerge and the prediction of possible development scenarios based on qualitative research results. The research subject is online communities that use innovative social technologies encouraging collective decision making, creativity, entrepreneurship and cooperation. The research treats such platforms of indirect communication as environments for the development of CI. The qualitative content analysis aims at exploring similarities, differences, and relations between interview segments and the theoretical framework for CI Potential Index. Qualitative research allows to deepen the understanding of CI and specifies a further direction for theoretical and empirical research. The research conclusions lead to the re-design and alteration of the proposed methodological framework for CI Potential Index.
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Responses from 152 managers from a wide range of industries were used to test a conceptual model examining the influence of information technology (IT) and non-IT resources on IT capabilities and their subsequent effects on predevelopment stage outcomes. It was found that the resources of IT infrastructure, IT embeddedness, firm's outward focus, and competitive intensity have varied effects on the frequency of usage of general-purpose and collaborative IT artifacts. Firms with higher levels of usage of collaborative artifacts in their NPD process have improved predevelopment stage performance, including the number of generated concepts and prototypes, and more efficient new product development (NPD) team collaboration.
Book
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Article
Organizational agility is a significant business capability. Though there have been numerous studies about the effects of information technology (IT) capabilities on organizational agility, there has been limited attention on the enabling effects of IT ambidexterity, namely, the dual capacity to explore and exploit IT resources and practices. We propose that IT ambidexterity enhances organizational agility by facilitating operational ambidexterity, and that the magnitude of facilitation depends on the level of environmental dynamism. We test these relationships utilizing data from a large-scale, matched-pair field survey of business and IT executives. The results confirm that a firm's IT ambidexterity does enhance its organizational agility through the mediated effects of operational ambidexterity, and that the dynamism of a firm's environment affects these relationships.
Article
Purpose – This study aims to examine current practices of social media marketing among major global brands across five product categories (namely, convenience, shopping, specialty, industrial and service). Assessing the frequency, media type and content orientations of corporate Facebook pages, this study aims to isolate the qualitative factors of a brand’s social media message that are most likely to facilitate a consumer response. Design/methodology/approach – A content analysis of 1,086 social media posts was conducted from the corporate Facebook pages of 92 global brands during a one-month (snapshot) time horizon in July 2013. The data collected from each individual post include its media type (i.e. text, photo or video), its content orientation (i.e. task, interaction and self-oriented) and the number and type of consumer response it generated (i.e. likes, comments and shares). Findings – Research findings reveal that global brands actively utilize social media, posting on average three messages per week and generally use photos (as a media type) and interaction-focused content (as a content orientation) to secure consumer responses. However, differences in consumer responses exist along various product categories, message media type and message content orientation. Practical implications – Findings imply that marketers should not only carefully consider the media type they use to message consumers on social media but should also try to consider the individual consumer’s motive for interaction. Originality/value – This article suggests a new way to study social media content by applying pre-existing communication frameworks from salesmanship literature as a way to define message content orientation.
Article
This paper builds a process theory of how participants in an online community deal with a new identity threat. Based upon the in-depth, interpretive case study of an online community of retail bankers, it develops a grounded theory that reveals that participants in an online community deal with new taint by protecting their occupation's identity but not by attempting to repair its external image. In the investigated community, reactions progressed from rejecting the taint to distancing from it and, finally, resigning to it. Overall, the dynamics of an occupational online community reveal that the objective of protecting the existing identity of its members supersede that of taking a more proactive stance to address the identity threat and attempt to influence new regulations affecting the occupation.
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Although it is well accepted that corporate communication has a direct impact on corporate reputation, little is known about the link between firms’ social media communication strategies and the formation of firms’ reputations in an online environment. This article contributes to this body of knowledge by studying the impact of social media communication strategies on firms’ reputations. The setting for our study is the hotel industry. The results offer insights regarding the challenges of developing online communication strategies that affect corporate reputation.
Article
Digitally enabled social networks (DESN) are a complex assemblage of engagement, reflection, action, technology, organization and community. DESN create a unique challenge for researchers who aim to understand what social networks are, what they can become and what enablers and constraints underlie trajectories of member engagement. As DESN continually evolve, knowing them as stable and reified representations or as mere technology artefacts provides a limited understanding of their complexity and emergent properties. While DESN are, in part, the technology that supports the necessary actions for engagement, they are also the people and behaviours that constitute its community. Through the presentation of new methodological considerations towards Digg, a large DESN, we observe that social networks entail practices of engagement, change and evolution within a DESN community. We reveal how engagement is a communal endeavour and that the clash of socio-technical trajectories can result in the emergence of new paths of member participation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of netnography and impressionist tales for contributing to the ongoing pluralistic investigations of DESN and also inform research on engagement and community design and change.
Article
Purpose – Service organizations and marketers have focussed too much of their energy on their core service's performance and too little emphasis on designing a customer journey that enhances the entire customer experience. There is nothing wrong with firms seeking continuous improvement in service quality and customer satisfaction. These efforts are needed for firms to be competitive in the marketplace. The problem occurs when performance levels and service offerings become too similar within an industry, so that price is the only competitive weapon that remains. The purpose of this paper is to argue that in order to break this deadlock, companies need to focus on the small details that make big differences to customers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds on interviews with executives in successful service organizations. It provides an analysis of differentiation strategies in diverse service organizations across consumption contexts, nations and cultures around the world. Findings – The paper develops three research propositions and argues for radical approaches to help service organizations truly understand customers and provide service experiences that engage and delight them. The paper argues that the new challenge for marketing is to help companies find and implement these small details to make a large impact on the overall customer experience. Originality/value – In order to truly understand the customer experience, we need a holistic view of all interactions customers have with a company. We need to understand the customer-firm interactions at all touch points, that is, during search, purchase, consumption and post-consumption. Customer experience involves the customers’ cognitive, affective, emotional, social and sensory responses to the firm. The originality of this research lies in the focus on the small details that make a difference to customers during the service process rather than in the final outcome of the service performance.
Article
Research question: According to an increasingly acknowledged view, customers co-create value with several other actors in the marketplace (e.g. firms and other customers) across multiple touchpoints prior to, during, and after the primary service encounter. This research focuses on professional team sports and examines one form of value co-creation that is particularly important in this context, i.e. customers' co-creation of value with other customers. The present research adds to our understanding of customer-to-customer value co-creation by identifying where (platforms) and how (practices) team sports customers create value with one another. Research methods: The study uses a multi-method qualitative research approach including in-depth interviews, naturalistic observation and netnography. The sampling frame consisted of three live venues (Germany), several virtual platforms (Germany and England), and a number of physical customer interaction sites such as sports bars and fan trains (Germany). Results and Findings: The study develops a typology of co-creation platforms that distinguishes between different spheres (customer sphere vs. joint sphere) and types (virtual vs. physical) of value co-creation platforms. In addition, the data reveal five customer-to-customer co-creation practices that occur across these platforms: associating and dissociating, engaging and sharing, competing, intensifying, and exchanging. Implications: Identifying and classifying customer-to-customer value co-creation platforms is an important first step toward developing approaches for team sports firms to become involved in and manage value co-creation among customers. In addition, knowledge of value co-creation practices will assist managers in shaping co-creation platforms in ways that facilitate the execution of value-creating practices.
Article
Purpose – As the internet has become an increasingly relevant communication and exchange platform, social interactions exist in multiple forms. The research aims to integrate a multitude of those interactions to understand who contributes and why different types of contributors generate and leverage social capital on online review sites. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the literature about social capital, social exchange theory, and transformative consumer research, the authors carried out a study of 693 contributors on a hotel review site. Content analysis and a latent profile analysis were used to research the contribution types and the underlying motives for generating and leveraging social capital. Findings – Through the integration of various customer-to-customer interactions, the results reveal a three-class structure of contributors on review sites. These three groups of individuals show distinct patterns in their preferred interaction activities and the underlying motives. Research limitations/implications – The authors develop the existing literature on transmission of electronic word-of-mouth messages and typologies of contributors. Future research should seek to expand the findings to additional industry and platform contexts and to support the findings through the inclusion of behavioral data. Originality/value – The research contributes to researchers and marketers in the field by empirically investigating who and why individuals engage in online social interactions. The authors expand upon the existing literature by highlighting the importance of social debt in anonymous online environments and by assessing a three-class structure of online contributors.