This proceedings volume highlights the latest research presented at the 8th International Conference on Research on National Brand & Private Label Marketing (NB&PL2021). The topics covered include: retailing, private label portfolio and assortment management, marketing of premium store brands, using national brands to exclude (delist) and include, optimal assortment size, consumer store patronage, etc. Several contributions also focus on private label pricing and promotion, especially on the relative pricing of standard and premium private labels, and with regard to the national brands in the assortment.

This book highlights the latest research on sub-supplier management while also discussing its current state and related managerial challenges. It provides a process framework for managing sub-suppliers and an overview of the various buyer / sub-supplier relationships and their key characteristics. Furthermore, the respective chapters address essential capabilities to successfully manage sub-suppliers and to discuss how to overcome barriers and challenges associated with sub-supplier management. Concrete examples and cases are also provided, and, in closing, potential research opportunities are outlined and demonstrated.

Break down the art and science of Salesforce consulting. This book will help you refine your consulting skills on the Salesforce platform. Author Heather Negley, a seasoned consultant who has completed over 30 Salesforce delivery projects in the past nine years, equips Salesforce professionals with detailed explanations on the stages of a project and the skills you need for each stage. You will learn the type of roles on a project, so that you can plan your career path. If you need help managing clients, this book teaches you how to effectively work with and advise people. You will go through the following main sections to round out your skills and service offerings: The best learning and community resources, including mentoring programs Tips on how to get job experience The evolution of software development Project roles The parts of a project Consulting skills The consulting skills section of the book breaks down each skill and explains the parts of the project to which you should apply your skills and real-world examples. Topics include client management, communication, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and avoiding cognitive biases. What You Will Learn Identify patterns in your projects through archetype identification Watch out for specific risks common to project types Choose the best consulting tool from your toolbox, depending on the problem that you encounter Who This Book Is For People who work as Salesforce administrators for their industry and want to make a move into consulting. It is an excellent choice for someone who is interested in project work and likes to work with people to help them make decisions.

Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they're obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they're extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren't average consumers--they're superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company's bottom line. Representing 10% of total consumers, they can drive between 30% to 70% of sales, and they're usually willing to spend considerably more than the average consumer. And because they're so engaged and passionate, they can offer invaluable advice to managers looking to improve their products, change their business models, energize their cultures, and attract new customers. In Superconsumers, growth strategy expert Eddie Yoon lays out a simple but extremely effective framework that has helped companies of all types and sizes achieve more sustainable growth: he'll show you how to find, listen to, and engage with your most passionate and profitable consumers, and then tailor your decisions to meet their wants and needs. Along the way, he'll let you into the minds and homes of superconsumers of all kinds, revealing what makes them tick and why they're willing to spend so much more than other consumers. Rich with data and case studies of companies that have implemented superconsumer strategies with great success, Superconsumers is a fun, practical, and inspiring guide for anyone interested in making their best customers even better.

Use inbound principles to build and strengthen your company's future We're in a major shift in a fundamental aspect of how businesses grow, how buyers purchase, and how businesses build meaningful conversations and customer relationships. Companies who align their mission, strategies, action plans, and tools with the way buyers think, learn, discover, and purchase will have a huge competitive advantage. Organizations need to adjust their mindset and build a strategic foundation to deal with these facts and not just update a business plan. Inbound Organization shows leaders how to build their company's future around Inbound principles and strengthen the structural foundations necessary to deal with the changes in buyer behavior. It explains how and why Inbound ideas and how to create a remarkable customer experience belong in the boardrooms and on the desks of founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone who has a responsibility to lead their organizations into the future. - Discover the foundation of inbound principles - Learn how to put ideas into practice today - Read about organizations that successfully apply the principles of Inbound - Keep your business on course to succeed amidst buyer changes Stay ahead of the curve and learn how to use Inbound principles to ensure you're always ahead of the curve.

This empirical thesis analyses the impact of sentiments in online media on consumers, businesses, and society as a whole, and how knowledge of these correlations can be used in a variety of applications. The results show that the sentiment data can be employed in a variety of ways, functioning as an interesting new explanatory variable to complement and approximate survey data in areas such as tourism demand, consumer confidence, and many more. In particular, the cross-country sentiment analysis reveals compelling information on media biases, the reporting on alternative truths, and countries as a filter bubble. In addition to quantitative comparisons, the descriptive statistics reveal important information on the sentiment developments across countries. While this research is able to provide interesting findings for real-world applications for consumers, businesses, and society, the awareness of a media landscape that is heavily and increasingly dominated by negative news is particularly striking. Thus, in addition to the actual applications, above all, the thesis shows the media landscape in which everyone must act in the future.

Consumers' beliefs and attitudes towards online sales significantly influence buying behavior on the internet. However, the impact of these thoughts and beliefs on the decision to make an online purchase is not direct. It can be moderated by the emotions experienced while browsing an e-commerce website. Impulse buying in particular is influenced by a number of factors, for example how stimulating the e-shopping platform is, and how easy it is to click on the cart a certain product, for instance a smartphone. But what happens after an online impulse buy is made? Often the customer can regret the purchase and in the throes of anxiety, look for reasons to justify the choices made. Consumer behaviour scholars and pyschologists call this phenomenon cognitive dissonance, and certain individuals are more sensitive than others in developing this than others. This book offers a deep investigation around online impulse buying and subsequent cognitive dissonance. Specifically, the authors present a research case study of a group of millenials who are shopping for smartphones to study whether an initial positive state can reduce the onset of cognitive dissonance in consumers. Based on substantial research and a sample of 212 impulsive millennial buyers, the book provides a comprehensive, but simple and synthetic framework of impulse buying, cognitive dissonance and positive affect state, highlighting their relationships.

In the context of rapid ICT development, this book focuses on how gamification affects consumer engagement and can be used to create a shared value for customers and companies. Based on the constructs of shared value, consumer engagement and gamification, it creates a conceptual model and a research methodology to enable empirical testing and provide complex empirical research findings. The book demonstrates the use of game elements and the motivation to play games as a means of achieving a psychological effect, i.e., consumer engagement manifested through gamified activities and brand engagement. This joint empirical study, by an expert team, concludes that the analysis of consumer perceived value in the context of engagement in gamified activities should distinguish between not just the theoretically identified company/brand-related economic, emotional, functional and social values, but also between engagement-related social and functional values.

The second volume of this research monograph describes a number of applications of Artificial Intelligence in the field of Customer Relationship Management with the focus of solving customer problems. We design a system that tries to understand the customer complaint, his mood, and what can be done to resolve an issue with the product or service. To solve a customer problem efficiently, we maintain a dialogue with the customer so that the problem can be clarified and multiple ways to fix it can be sought. We introduce dialogue management based on discourse analysis: a systematic linguistic way to handle the thought process of the author of the content to be delivered. We analyze user sentiments and personal traits to tailor dialogue management to individual customers. We also design a number of dialogue scenarios for CRM with replies following certain patterns and propose virtual and social dialogues for various modalities of communication with a customer. After we learn to detect fake content, deception and hypocrisy, we examine the domain of customer complaints. We simulate mental states, attitudes and emotions of a complainant and try to predict his behavior. Having suggested graph-based formal representations of complaint scenarios, we machine-learn them to identify the best action the customer support organization can chose to retain the complainant as a customer.

The overall goal of this book is the identification of design features and prerequisites for a CRM-system, which contribute to an increase in sales and the overall development of corporations in the packaging industry. Particular attention is paid to the identification of requirements of a CRM-system that contribute to an increase in the acceptance of the users.

This research monograph brings AI to the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to make a customer experience with a product or service smart and enjoyable. AI is here to help customers to get a refund for a canceled flight, unfreeze a banking account or get a health test result. Today, CRM has evolved from storing and analyzing customers' data to predicting and understanding their behavior by putting a CRM system in a customers' shoes. Hence advanced reasoning with learning from small data, about customers' attitudes, introspection, reading between the lines of customer communication and explainability need to come into play. Artificial Intelligence for Customer Relationship Management leverages a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), simulation and reasoning techniques to enable CRM with intelligence. An effective and robust CRM needs to be able to chat with customers, providing desired information, completing their transactions and resolving their problems. It introduces a systematic means of ascertaining a customers' frame of mind, their intents and attitudes to determine when to provide a thorough answer, a recommendation, an explanation, a proper argument, timely advice and promotion or compensation. The author employs a spectrum of ML methods, from deterministic to statistical to deep, to predict customer behavior and anticipate possible complaints, assuring customer retention efficiently. Providing a forum for the exchange of ideas in AI, this book provides a concise yet comprehensive coverage of methodologies, tools, issues, applications, and future trends for professionals, managers, and researchers in the CRM field together with AI and IT professionals.

This volume explores the interconnection of social, political, technological and economic challenges that impact consumer relationships, new product launches and consumer interests. Featuring contributions presented at the 2019 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) World Marketing Congress (WMC) held in Edinburgh, Scotland, the theme of this proceedings draws from the Scottish Enlightenment movement of the mid-Eighteenth Century, which centered on ideas of liberty, progress and the scientific method. The core values of this movement are being challenged by the rapidly changing, globally shifting and digitally connected world. The contributions presented in this volume reflect and reframe the roles of marketers and marketing in incorporating and advancing the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment within contemporary marketing theory and practice. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses, and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. The series deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complementing the Academy's flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review (AMSR). Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it's important to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. Tomorrow's customers need to be targeted today! Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines ten easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective. The Customer of the Future explains how today's customers are already demanding frictionless, personalized, on-demand experiences from their products and services, and companies that don't adapt to these new expectations won't last. This book prepares your organization for these increas ing demands by helping you do the following: Learn the ten defining strategies for a customer experience-focused company. Implement new techniques to shift the entire company from being product-focused to being customer-focused. Gain insights through case studies and examples on how the world's most innovative companies are offering new and compelling customer experiences. Tomorrow's customers will insist on experiences that make their lives significantly easier and better. Craft a leadership development and culture plan to create lasting change at your organization!

Almost every advertising, promotion, or marketing communications textbook is based on an inside-out approach, focusing on what the marketer wants to communicate to customers and prospects. This text takes a different view - that the marketer and the customer build the ongoing brand value together. Rather than the marketer trying to 'sell', the role of the marketer is to help customer buy. To do that, a customer view is vital and customer insight is essential. Customer insights allow the marketer to understand which audiences are important for a product, what delivery forms are appropriate, and what type of content is beneficial. "Building Customer-Brand Relationships" is themed around the four key elements marketing communicators use in developing programs - audiences, brands, delivery, and content - but provides an innovative approach to marketing communications in the 'push-pull' marketplace that combines traditional outbound communications (advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, and PR) with the inbound or 'pull' media of Internet, mobile communications, social networks, and more. Its 'customer-centric' media planning approach covers media decision before dealing with creative development, and emphasizes measurement and accountability. The text's concepts have been used successfully around the world, and can be adapted and adjusted to any type of product or service.

This pioneering book on food study pursues an interdisciplinary approach to service science and the service engineering field. Further, it highlights a range of experiments conducted at actual business sites to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies and theories. In modern society, food study has become more complex, as it involves multiple fields of science. For instance, a long-lived society entails a number of problems for human beings. A balanced intake of nutrients is important for a healthy life, but in many cases, healthy food is not the most enjoyable. As such, it is important for the food industry to provide foods that are both tasty and wholesome, based on the sciences of gastronomy and nutrition. Conventional food study proceeds along the lines of a specific field such as nutrition, agriculture, or gastronomy, though it should be conducted in an interdisciplinary manner. This book covers multifaceted research on food study to respond to today's societal demands, based mainly on the natural and social sciences. It addresses a wide range of topics, including: food production management using mathematical modeling, operations research, and production engineering; evaluation of food products based on big data analysis; psychological experiments and ethnography; food products based on consumer behavior; organoleptic assessment and health improvement; design of physical dining environments using virtual reality, pedestrian debt recognition (human indoor position measuring), and observation of behavior. Reporting on and assessing many studies conducted at actual business locations, the book offers a unique and highly practical resource.

This proceedings volume explores marketing opportunities and challenges that exist in the current, fast-changing landscape of the global marketplace. Current global issues such as the rising middle class in emerging markets, disruptive technological breakthroughs, big data analytics, changing consumer habits and concerns over national trade policies have renewed ethical concerns around consumer privacy and the tools companies use to operate, market to, connect and build a relationship with their customers. Featuring the full proceedings from the 2019 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference held in Vancouver, Canada, this book explores and assess the rate of change that drives companies to evaluate and adapt their marketing strategies to remain competitive. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses, and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complementing the Academy's flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review (AMSR). Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

Customer experience engineering applied to the engineering department is rare, but needed. Most companies keep support, UX, engineering, product, and CX separate. To address this gap, this book highlights roles and techniques that are proven to accelerate issue detection and prevention by 30% or more. With the author's vast experience in tech support, he has developed techniques and skills that allow engineers to gain customer insights faster and through new and insightful sources that are within their reach. You will develop a deep understanding of the impact of issues; understand and optimize the speed of the engineering feedback loop (issue resolution time); and develop the ability to calculate the cost of the issues or customer friction to the business (in aggregate and on a case-by-case basis). Organizations can save significant money and add additional revenue by addressing customer friction proactively in collaboration with product, engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE) functions and reduce the average time of an issue resolution by 80%. The cross-functional leadership, mentoring, and engineering techniques you'll learn from this proactive stance are very valuable and teachable, and this book will show you the path forward. What You Will Learn Gain the techniques and tools necessary to validate customer journey success in production Contribute to customer-centric key performance indicators (KPIs) on executive dashboards Create meaningful insights and data points that allowed the feedback loop to be optimized and efficient Who This Book is For Professionals participating in the value stream of digital software engineering for the benefit of customer experiences, directly or indirectly. You may be an engineer practicing DevOps or site reliability, or you might be a product owner, UX designer, or researcher. You might be working in support and seeking for new ways to engage with your engineering teams.

This book is a comprehensive practical guide for account managers, sales teams and account leaders operating in the B2B space. It provides knowledge to excel in developing, growing and retaining top accounts in local and global environments. With a nuanced version of 'account management' that will potentially be a game changer, the book offers a personnel-and-process based agenda that can create a 'competitive advantage' on its own.

Digitalization is the greatest change project that we have ever known, and data is circulating in unimaginable quantities and at unimaginable speed. In this book, the author urges managers and business leaders to embrace this constant state of change in cooperation with their team. He addresses how corporate culture and hierarchies have to change to adapt to new digital workspaces and value chains. These changes also include questions about the use and storage of data, customer relations and international teamwork. The book is especially geared towards managers in manufacturing industries and companies.

Rainmakers are the people who bring money into their organisations and this book is packed with hints and tips to pursue prospective customers and keep them.

This book examines the effective and appropriate integration of project customers in intercultural settings. It first presents the theoretical background and the state of the art in intercultural project stakeholder management. The book then describes the use of qualitative and quantitative (Delphi survey) methods to produce a dataset, and the development of a relational model for customer engagement in intercultural projects based on this dataset. The book can be used to inform future research in the area of international project management, while also serving as a guide for project management practitioners who need to engage culturally diverse users, sponsors and customers.

This book focuses on recent developments in consumer law, specifically addressing mandatory disclosures and the topical problem of information overload. It provides a comparative analysis based on national reports from countries with common law and civil law traditions in Asia, America and Europe, and presents the reports in the form of chapters that have been drafted on the basis of a questionnaire, and which use the same structure as the questionnaire to allow them to be easily compared. The book starts with an analysis of the basic assumptions underlying the current consumer protection models and examines whether and how consumer models adapt to the new market conditions. The second part addresses the information obligations themselves, first highlighting the differences in the reported countries before narrowing the analysis down to countries with a general pre-contractual information duty, particularly the transparency requirements that often come with such a duty. The next part examines recent developments in the law on food labelling, commercial practices and unfair contract terms in order to identify whether similar traits can be found in European and non-European jurisdictions. The fourth part of the book focuses on specific information obligations in the financial services and e-commerce sectors, discussing the fact that legislators are experimenting with different forms of summary disclosures in these sectors. The final part provides a critical appraisal of the recent developments in consumer information obligations, addressing the question of whether the multiple criticisms from behavioural sciences necessitate abandonment or refinement of current consumer information models in favour of new, more adequate forms of consumer protection, and providing suggestions.

Social media has received considerable attention, and many potential benefits, as well as concerns, are now being discussed. This book explores how social media can successfully support business processes in marketing, sales and service in the context of customer relationship management (CRM). It presents the fundamentals of Social CRM and shows how small and large companies alike have implemented it. In turn, the book presents analytic and operational software tools that offer features for enhancing and streamlining interactions with customers. The book concludes with an overview of essential design areas that businesses need to bear in mind when introducing social media into their CRM strategies. In this regard, it also points out key success factors, limitations, and data protection aspects.

Owning a B&B is the dream of many ... More and more people are considering downshifting. Buying a property that can pay for its own upkeep and give you a comfortable lifestyle is a popular option. Not only has the interest grown in becoming a B&B proprietor, so has the interest by the public in the B&B as a viable short-break option. With this rise in popularity, however, come expectations, and this is where this book comes in. - It will help you: - Determine who your customers are - Manage the necessary financial tools - Ready your house for B&B service, or help you buy/build a new one - Successfully market your property - Ensure you make a profit from your enterprise. In short, everything you need to know to make your B&B a truly special place to stay! This book has been written for would-be and current B&B owners. It can be used as a short course giving invaluable insights for the experienced and inexperienced alike.