Business Commons^™

Introduction To International Business, Rajaram Veliyath

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

An introduction to the global business environment, this course examines the discrete and interactive effects of the geographic, historical, sociocultural, political/legal, economic and technological forces that shape business activities across borders and their consequences.

Servqual Measurement In A Healthcare Setting: Before And After Corrective Strategy Implementation, Jerome Christia, Aaron Ard, Lorraine Runion

Atlantic Marketing Journal

In the United States, the most dominant industry is services, yielding the highest volume of total employment and gross domestic product. Due to this insight, academics and business professionals continue to research and apply strategies to achieve distinctive competitive advantages in the services arena. The steady growth and increasing significance of the service sector in the United States and other developed markets has resulted in a sizeable body of related research addressing a variety of issues such as service quality and its characteristics. Healthcare is an impactful service industry that has received a considerable amount of attention. In the healthcare …

Strategy And Marketing: Can Alignment Be Measured?, Stephen Carlson

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Diligence-Based Strategy, Strategic Marketing Ambidexterity, And The Resource-Based View: Informing The Exploitation/Exploration Mode And Valuing Capabilities, Jacqueline Post, J Paul Leavell

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Social Capital And Dynamic Capabilities In A Top Management Team, Blaine Schreiner

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Top management teams greatly influence the performance of their organizations based on their interpretations of the situations they face and the decisions they make built on those interpretations. In addition, the long-term success of the organization relies upon the top management team’s ability to properly balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the organization. The literature regarding the impact of the top management team’s social capital is limited and even less is known about the intra-organizational social capital of this group. This study examines the effect of the top management team’s intra-organizational social capital on exploratory and exploitative dynamic capability …

Marketing Leadership In A Knowledge Economy, Myles Bassell, Sonia Lambert

Atlantic Marketing Journal

Often the most valuable assets of a marketing driven firm are intangible assets such as a brand name, intellectual capital, and the expertise and knowledge of employees. The new breed of marketing leaders understand that it is important for employees to collaborate and be engaged and that leaders must be agents of change, creative, ethical, and global thinkers who can create learning organizations. The research reveals that organizations that are going to thrive in the knowledge economy are those that have marketing leaders who can build learning organizations, encourage diversity, and ensure employees are engaged in meaningful work.

Built To Last: Exploring Family Strategy In Dynastic Business Families, Mark William Auger

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Dynasties entwine family and fortune. They are organizational longevity outliers. Society offers a conflicting view of dynasties. On one hand, dynasties are associated with conflict, divisiveness, conspicuous consumption, and entitlement. On the other hand, dynastic business families employ people, produce and innovate products and processes, and give to community. Linked to values and enacted by strategic leaders, strategy organizes and mobilizes capital toward goals attainment. The firm-centric perspectives of the strategic management and family business strategy literatures overlook the systematic investigation of family strategy as a means of perpetuation. This grounded theory influenced study explores the components of a family …

Cutting The Cord—A Marketing Case: An Examination Of Changing Tv Viewership, John E. Crawford

Atlantic Marketing Journal

Consumers have more choices for TV programming and how that content is acquired than at any other time in the history of television. Through an action referred to as cord-cutting, many consumers are choosing to drop their cable or satellite programming providers in favor of lower-priced and more consumer-friendly programming providers such as Netflix, Hulu, and others. Consumer choices are being driven by many factors, including economics, lifestyle, technological developments, and social trends. This case discusses the cord-cutting trend and how it is impacting consumer choices and the business of providing television content to consumers. The case can be used …

Qualitative Data Mining And Sensitivity Analysis, Brian R. Kinard

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

In today’s consumer centric environment, there is no shortage of outlets for consumers to express their level of satisfaction with a company, employee, product and/or service. For instance, websites such as Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Expedia allow customers the opportunity to provide feedback specific to a product, service, and/or organization. Such feedback is vitally important to business firms, as customer reviews are shown to be more trustworthy than descriptions that come direct from manufacturers. For instance, 73 percent of people trust online reviews and 63 percent of people actively seek out online reviews when making a purchase decision. …

Business Framing For Analytics, Beverly Wright

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Both the academic and business practitioner communities are faced with the challenges of discovery, innovation, and constant learning of their field, particularly within the marketing discipline, where content, processes, and even structure are dynamic in nature, with constantly evolving interests and focus. A solid research agenda with excellent analytics to address pertinent business questions is crucial for successfully expanding our understanding of the marketing function.

Collegiate Competition And The Propensity For Gender Bias, Deborah H. Lester, Aberdeen Leila Borders, Terry W. Loe, Keith Tudor

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Since the dawn of time gender has played a starring role in human behavior. The behavioral implications of an individual’s sex have permeated research findings in a wide variety of academic disciplines. This preliminary investigation will explore the concept and definition of gender, gender bias, and gender stereotype on actions and conduct. Specifically, this inquiry will determine the scope and types of gender bias/stereotypes that exist in the business world with a primary concentration on the area of professional sales. The ultimate objective is to discover the type and level of influence a person’s gender contributes to evaluation, performance and …

College Students Use Social Networking Sites For Sharing With Friends, But Guess Who Else Is Looking?, Liz Alexander, Fred Mader, Deanna Mader

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Jobvite, a recruiting platform for the social web, reports from their annual 2012 survey of recruiters that 92% of U.S. companies are using social networking sites (SNS) for hiring purposes (Jobvit, 2012). Career Builder reported in 2009 that 45% of employers were using SNS to screen and research applicants (CareerBuilder, 2009). It is important that faculty and support staff working to place students, and the students themselves, understand the developments and practices in the use of social networking sites for job search and recruiting and the best methods, as well as detriments when marketing themselves. This study examines corporate recruiters’, …

Perceived Risk Reduction In E-Commerce Environments, C. Michael Powell, Chris Conca

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

During the past three decades, the growth of e-commerce has presented marketers with many new arenas for research and application. Certainly e-commerce has become a significant portion of the world economy and in particular the consumer sector. As previous literature has consistently considered perceived risk as a major factor consumer purchase decisions, this research identifies several major components of consumer perceived risk (PR) and their normative implications in the e-commerce environment

A Systematic Review Of Anti-Brand Website Literature: What We Know And What We Need To Know, David L. Williams, Ellen Kolbas

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

The emergence of Web 1.0 began an evolution in electronic communication. This platform resulted in a unidirectional communication flow (e.g. firm to consumer) that featured firms generating messages for public consumption. Web 1.0 gave rise to Web 2.0 and 3.0 platforms that facilitate bi-directional communication between firms and the public. This new method has resulted in an increase in consumer empowerment to create and disseminate marketing messages of their own (Williams, Crittenden, Keo, & McCarty, 2012). Third party stakeholders are disseminating electronic word-of-mouth communications about companies through the use of video, reviews, forums, microblogs and multiple other channels (Gil-Or, 2010). …

An Application Of Social Media Marketing For Community Sustainable Development, Lei Huang, Amelia Clarke, Wen Tian, Natalie Heldsinger

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Though the social marketing approach has been developed from commercial marketing, it is a holistic approach from various social sciences disciplines like marketing, psychology, sociology, mass communication and economics. It is basically an art to explore new ways of analyzing problems and solving them effectively. For instance, social marketing influences sustainability through the use of marketing principles to increase awareness, understanding, change attitudes, and motivate the society to change, adopt, or sustain a particular behavior. This paper attempts to explore a framework of social media in light of disseminating the knowledge of a community-wide sustainability plan among various stakeholders. Policy …

Being Green And Social Responsibility: Basic Concepts And Multiple Case Studies In Business Excellence, Alan D. Smith, Steven R. Clinton, William T. Rupp

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Through a qualitative business case approach, three major manufacturing firms in Pittsburgh, PA were reviewed for their eco-friendly sustainability strategic initiatives and products/services. Undoubtedly, use of green best practices are value adding steps for a company may be initially difficult to justify to spend the time and resources developing such a process. This is especially true when other core business needs are present, such as driving revenue, product development and meeting governmental or consumer expectations. However, green and sustainability initiatives may not be currently dictated needs, but many companies feel strongly that charting such a course would be to their …

A Research Agenda For Advancing The Marketer's Understanding Of Ethical Consumption In A Post-Modern World, Julie M. Pharr

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

The attribution of moral significance to the choice of everyday consumer goods may well mean that personal consumption is increasingly viewed as an ethical exercise and not simply an economic transaction.

Consumer behavior has emerged as an important moral battleground in the 21^st century. Those in doubt of this statement need look no farther than their local Catholic church. In a church encyclical released 06.18.15, Pope Francis called for radical transformation not only of global politics and economics but of individual lifestyles in the battle to confront the environmental deterioration of Earth. An encyclical is a document that serves …

National Culture Dimensions And Consumer Digital Piracy: A European Perspective, Irena Vida, Monika Kukar-Kinney, Mateja Kos Kokli, James Reardon

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Digital piracy as a ubiquitous phenomenon affects a number of stakeholders, such as consumers, enterprises, and governments. Considering its global nature, it has been of particular interest to consumer researchers. Hence, a large body of digital piracy literature sheds light on the demand side and illuminates various predictors of digital piracy behavior (Harris & Daunt, 2011). Despite these efforts, very little attention has been devoted to applying international perspective in investigating digital piracy across different countries (Ki, Chang, & Khang, 2006). This study aims to fill this void by examining the digital piracy behavior in three EU countries. In addition, …

The Role Of Corporate Social Responsibility Information In The Consumer-Brand Relationship, Lei Huang

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Given the increased interest and empirical research in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI), the interest of this paper is given to the impacts of corporate operational performance (COP) and corporate social performance (CSP) on consumer brand advocacy and brand trust. In this consumer-brand continuum, customers evaluate brand trustworthiness by two scopes: (1) the product or service the firm offers (i.e., product brand) that is usually associated with COP (Rust, Moorman, & Dickson 2002); and (2) the firm which provides the products and services (i.e., corporate brand) that is connected with CSP (Korschun, Bhattacharya, & Swain 2014). In addition, …

Modification And Investment Intention In The Consumer-Possession Relationship, James D. Doyle

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

The present-day automobile is at once a source of physical transportation, of course, but also an extension of self, a potential platform for self-expression and image enhancement, a source of social approval as well as psychological and physiological stimulation, and, perhaps, an object of beauty. This study examines motivations and antecedents of various vehicle-directed consumer behaviors, including modification and the intention of consumers to invest in their relationship with their vehicle. In this study, vehicle modification refers to the voluntary actions taken by a user or owner of a vehicle to differentiate the functional or aesthetic characteristics or performance of …

Fitting Consumer Needs To Perceived Product Value: The Example Of Apple Versus Samsung Products, Yi-Chia Wu, Arturo Vasquez-Parraga

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

This study explores the fitting of consumer needs to product perceived value using the example of two lines of competitive products in the area of communication electronics, Apple products versus Samsung products. Five types of needs regarding digital communication and three types of related product value are evaluated for these two brands in order to know if product value differences have a distinctive effect on consumer needs.

This study focuses on the impact of perceived product values on certain consumer needs. We use Apple products and Samsung products to accomplish this.

Electronic Intervention And Platforms And Their Impacts On Crowdfunding Behavior, Susan Cockrell, Dan Meyer, Alan D. Smith

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Crowdfunding is a method of raising funds for projects, creative pursuits, peer-to-peer lending, and charitable causes. The idea of crowdfunding stems from the more encompassing concept of crowdsourcing, which refers not only to the gathering of funds, but to group participation in the convergence of ideas and content creation. Thus, crowdfunding can be considered to be one type of crowdsourcing. The following study examines the crowdfunding behavior of a sample of business professionals located in the service sector of metropolitan Pittsburgh, PA. In general, the empirical findings suggested that smaller goals tend to have better success ratios, while getting the …

A Taxonomy Of Emerging Markets, Alexander A. Assouad

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Focusing on emerging markets is now a significant imperative for business professionals as well as strategy, management, and international business (IB) scholars. However, there are no accepted categorizations of these countries. Furthermore, major international organizations, institutions, scholars, and multinational, all approach classifying these countries from a multitude of different perspectives. Using institutional theory as a framework and drawing on research from multiple disciplines such as IB, sociology, economics, and economic geography, this dissertation proposes a framework by which a more nuanced reclassification of emerging markets into eight subgroups is considered appropriate. The application of this multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach shows …

Why Empowering Salespeople Is A Double Edge Sword, Lucy Matthews

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Salespeople in business-to-business markets are given autonomy to manage firms’ relationships with their customers. This autonomy implies that salespeople are responsible for making decisions that not only benefit but may also adversely impact customers (e.g., offer an account preferential treatment vs. terminate an established account). While numerous studies establish that autonomy (a critical facet of empowerment) has a positive impact on sales employee’s job outcomes, this study investigates the possibility that salesperson autonomy also has undesirable effects on salesperson job outcomes because it makes them responsible for decisions that have adverse consequences on the customers they are charged with satisfying. …

A Sound Idea: A Theory-Based Synthesis And Explanadum Supporting The Use Of Music In Marketing Strategy, Anthony H. Kerr, Neel Das

Atlantic Marketing Journal

A review and synthesis of research literature regarding the role and influence of music on advertising effectiveness and in-store shopper moods and behavior is presented. A conceptual model is presented, with strong theoretical support found in classical conditioning, information processing, involvement, and mood states literature. The authors posit that a retailer should use a dual, concomitant music strategy as a component of an overall advertising and in-store marketing promotion plan. This strategy is presented in what the authors refer to as the Music Affect Model. While using the positive affects of music on consumer purchasing behavior as its core source …

Licensing And Patent Protection, Aniruddha Bagchi, Arijit Mukherjee

Faculty and Research Publications

We show the impact of technology licensing on optimal patent policy. Strong patent protection that eliminates imitation may not be the equilibrium outcome in the presence of licensing. Depending on the cost of innovation, licensing may either increase or reduce the strength of the patent protection.

An Experimental Study Of Circuit Breakers: The Effects Of Mandated Market Closures And Temporary Halts On Market Behavior, Lucy Ackert, Bryan K. Church, Narayanan Jayaraman

Faculty and Research Publications

This paper analyzes the effect of circuit breakers on price behavior, trading volume, and profit-making ability in a market setting. We conduct nine experimental asset markets to compare behavior across three regulatory regimes: market closure, temporary halt, and no interruption. We find that the presence of a circuit breaker rule does not affect the magnitude of the absolute deviation in price from fundamental value or trading profit. The primary driver of price behavior is information. By comparison, trading activity is significantly affected by the presence of a circuit breaker. Market participants advance trades when a trading interruption is imminent.