This accessible field guide covers practical steps and contributes to behavioral theory by reporting intricate details on the strategies implemented by business-to-business firms within an inter-firm context. The coverage is deep, broad, and unique - the authors of the 14 papers all adopt the understanding that researchers need direct viewing - 'eyes-on-the-context' - that goes beyond the use of paper-and-pencil 5-pont and 7-point survey items to achieve accurate descriptions of how decisions are made and progress achieved. Following the customary introductory chapter, the titles of the 13 remaining chapters promise the reader new insights and tools to apply when studying B2B contexts. This new volume in the Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing series is a must for B2B scholars and executives.

Case Study Research: Core Skills in Using 15 Genres examines the processes involved in conducting case research in a number of genres including participant observation, fuzzy set social science, system dynamics, decision systems analysis, forced metaphor elicitation technique, ethnographic decision tree modeling, mapping strategic thinking, the historical method, storytelling research and conversational analysis. The book reviews and applies the best literature on case study methods from a number of disciplines providing a strong rationale for adopting case study research methods alone or in mixed-methods. This fully revised and updated second edition employs a broad and deep coverage of multiple case study research genres to comprehensively explore the topic.

The authors propose that complexity theory holds great promise in improving understanding of guests' evaluations of their service experiences. Volume 9 provides answers to the following and additional behavior and evaluation issues. How do general and behavior specific attitudes work together in explaining air travelers' carbon offsetting behavior? What can the zone of tolerance and importanceperformance analysis (IPA) techniques tell us about the evaluations of convention delegates' perceptions of products and services? How can a "slow city" motivate domestic tourists to visit the destination? Do effective marketing strategies for performing arts require unique designs to attract incidental spectators as well as behaviourally loyal visitors? When do consumers attach themselves strongly to tourist souvenirs as well as to other cherished possessions such as a trophy won during a contest, a gift received from significant others, or a wedding ring? What are the nitty gritty details in how exhibition areas can provide visitors with opportunities to understand corporate brands? Since values influence activities do they also influence holiday preferences?

Volume 22 includes two main chapters in both Part A and B. It appears in two parts because all chapters offer great depth in coverage of core issues senior executives must address for long-term survival of the firm: business intelligence, knowledge management, and understanding of the systems dynamics of interfirm behavior. In the first main chapter of Part A Azizah Ahmad demonstrates that high-performing firms must achieve useful on-going business intelligence (BI). Ahmad shows how plans are designed and implemented for viable BI operations. The main contribution of the study is the identification of the firm's internal resources of BI governance that influences successful BI deployment. In the second chapter Md Nuruzzaman shows how country risk, different political actions from the government, and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply-chains in emerging markets. The outcomes of the study are useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Providing broad and deep coverage, this volume focuses on sensemaking, decisions, actions, and evaluating outcomes relating to managing business-to-business brands including both product and service brands. This book goes well beyond basic marketing textbooks to provide extensive reviews of relevant studies, original research reports, and in-depth implications for the following B2B brand management issues: Building a Strong B2B Brand; Building a Strong Brand to Resellers; B2B Brand Equity - Theory, Measurement, and Strategy; Effective Strategies for B2B Service Brands; Brand Meaning and its Impact in Subcontractor Contexts; Brand Image, Corporate Reputation, and Customer Value; Internal Branding Theory, Research, and Practice; and, Pricing Theory and Strategy Applications in B2B Brand Management. Collectively these chapters address most aspects of the marketing mix for business-to-business and industrial marketers. Each of the papers provides valuable brand management insights for managers. The chapters are original contributions by leading scholars and B2B brand managers; each chapter following the introductory chapter includes a brand management problem-exercise with a separate instructor's note.

Written for marketing executives, new product/service managers, and marketing research professionals, Designing Winning Products (DWP) focuses on design and market testing issues/solutions for new business-to-business products and services. The first three chapters synthesize the product innovation literature; the objective of these chapters is to increase marketing and product managers' technical skills for testing customer acceptance of alternative new product/service designs. Detailed examples of applying these skills are described in seven later chapters - these chapters describe how to apply conjoint analysis and choice experiments with B-to-B customers in specific European and North American markets. A chapter is devoted to describing how superior new products sometimes fail to attract known customers - the nitty-gritty nuances behind the innovator's dilemma.
More than 50 diagrams, tables and figures support the text; the chapter discussions and end-of-chapter references include more than 300 complete citations to additional sources.

Marketing Places and Spaces' covers a broad range of issues that hospitality and tourism executives will benefit from addressing, but frequently forget to do so. To provide an indication of the broad range and exciting coverage of issues, here are a few titles of the 21 chapters in the volume: Conceptualizing the Value Co-creation Challenges for Tourist Destinations: a Supply-Side Perspective; The Emotional Attachment Built through the Attitudes and Managerial Approach to Place Marketing and Branding - The Golden City of Kremnica, Slovakia; Events as a Differentiation Strategy for Tourist Destinations; How do Tourists Turn Space into Place? - A Conceptualisation for Sustainable Place Marketing; the Influence of Slow City in the Context of Sustainable Destination Marketing; Wedding-based Tourism Development: Insights from an Italian Context.Authors include tourism researchers working in Finland, UK, Macau, Japan, New Zealand, and beyond. A practical strategy guide and an in-depth complement with extensions to Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat Pray Love' for hospitality and tourism professionals and educators is the relevant perspective that 'Marketing Places and Spaces' provides.

This volume aims to help increase knowledge, skills and insights into making effective decisions in the 'bigger hall' of marketing management. It contains 17 case studies which are aimed at improving the reader's skills in making and carrying out effective decisions in industrial and business marketing. Each of the case studies provides an understanding of the culture of a particular firm in a particular industry. All are based on field research studies of actual firms. The topics included cover: setting strategic direction; product and customer portfolio analysis; product development; advertising; pricing; channel management; environmental scanning; measuring strengths and weaknesses; understanding competitors' behaviour; auditing marketing activities; and international marketing strategies. These case studies also provide a diversity of industry settings ranging from a small Japanese printing firm located to MacTec Control AB, a Swedish manufacturer of high-tech equipment and from Thomson Consumer Electronics to Cavity Oil Pumps.

From the contents: Advances in applied consumer behavior: a market segmentation program (H. Assael). - The interplay of cognitions and emotions in building services customers retention (J-C. Chebat). - Technology and the new economy: implications for Higher Education and the marketing discipline (J.F. Hair Jr., B.J. Babin). - Selected issues in modeling consumer brand choice: the extended competitive vulnerability model (M. Laroche).

"Advances in Culture, Tourism, and Hospitality Research" ("ACTHR") broadly seeks to increase understanding and description of human behavior, conscious and unconscious meaning, and implicit/explicit decision processes applied to living and making major and everyday choices from where to live, how culture affects thinking and actions; marriage, children; work choices and behavior; leisure pursuits; holiday destination; travel behavior; making tradeoffs among work, play, sleeping, and necessity behaviors; deciding, using, and evaluating short and long term accommodations; and, decisions and behaviors regarding assisted living and death. The objective of "ACTHR" is to promote synergies among culture, work, leisure, tourism, and hospitality scholars. The series focuses on examining individuals and households lived experiences and their cultural and personal antecedents and consequences. Most papers appearing in "ACTHR" will offer advances both in theory and empirical evidence; empirical reports include interpretive, positivistic, or mixed research designs. Arch Woodside is very well known and highly respected figure in tourism in marketing, tourism & leisure. This volume offers a unique and interdisciplinary view on lifestyle. Each volume of the series consists of original articles.

Historical research on firm-level innovation behavior results in the following main insight: firm-level decisions focusing on innovations are critical, difficult, and often result in failure to act. While acceptance is widespread among executives that firms must innovate radically as well as incrementally, success by firms mostly nurtures inertia and eventual failure rather than search and adoption of new superior technologies. What does it take to craft and maintain successful radical NPD programs? Managing Product Innovation (MPI) explains why both manufacturing and customer firms usually reject superior new technologies and how competitors new to the industry become successful (by focusing on previously unnoticed customers and offering higher performance with lower costs via the radically new technologies). MPI provides worthwhile answers on what specific actions executives in established and new firms can adopt to achieve successful radical NPD programs. Related to managing new NPD processes successfully and additional strategic marketing issues, the following few thoughts summarize the wisdom that Volume 13 elaborates upon:

Leverage interfirm relationships
Pay attention to products that can be co-created by interfirm networks
Think and act globally via personal contacts
Stay complex and be uncomfortable with success

Evaluate NPD performance using a life cycle perspective
Identify upstream as well as direct influences on NPD performance.

This volume serves to recognize the uniqueness of the moment; the number of new users of e-services worldwide will double during 2015-2018 (moving from 2 billion users mostly living in the developed nations to an additional 2 billion users mostly living in developing nations). This radical embrace of new e-service technologies will substantially improve the quality of lives for most residents globally. A profound happening occurring now! The new technologies combine rapidly delivering of a multitude of services at extremely low cost to adopters now having extremely low incomes relative to residents living in developed nations. Adoption of e-service among residents in developing nations ends the debate as to whether or not marketing to the "bottom of the pyramid" is possible. The more relevant issues focus on describing and explaining e-service adoption processes in developing nations. How are these processes being implemented? What obstacles had to be overcome in achieving these adoptions? How were these obstacles overcome? Read this volume for research providing useful answers to these questions.

What's really happening? For an organization this question contains at least four sub issues: What actions are being done now help to increase the organization's performance? What actions are wasted motions - what are we doing that does not contribute and wastes our time? What actions harm the organization's performance - what actions are counterproductive in helping the organization achieve what really needs to be accomplished? What actions are we not doing now but really should be doing to increase the organization's performance? A fifth, related, sub issue is how to go about finding out what is really happening-what research methods should executives use, as well as avoid using, to go about finding this out. Executive thinking differs fundamentally from scientific thinking in fundamental ways. Scientists and academic researchers are able to choose the problem, whereas in organizations, the problems (and symptoms of problems) are often thrust upon the executive. Scientists focus on a limited number of problems at a time, whereas executives are confronted with a vast number of potential problems and a myriad of possible presentation problem frames. Scientists have the relative luxury of time to explore the problem at hand, whereas executives, particularly CEOs, do not. The intention is for this volume to be read by executives wanting to learn how to reduce overconfidence, and to become more mindful, in making decisions and in learning how to scientifically evaluate the quality of outcomes that follow from implementing decisions.

Storytelling-Case Archetype Decoding and Assignment Manual (SCADAM) reviews cultural and tourism/hospitality applications of Carl Jung's work on archetypes in shaping behavior and unconscious/conscious thought. SCADAM includes a testing manual on how to use Donald T. Campbell's "degrees of freedom" (DOF) test for story-archetype assignments of what consumers and brands tell about consumption experiences of product/service brands, places, and drama/life enactments. SCADAM includes assignment testing and example scoring for each of 12 archetypes: 1. Caregiver (CA); 2. Creator (CR); 3. Everyman/woman (EV); 4. Explorer (EX); 5. Hero (HE); 6. Innocent (IN); 7. Jester (JE); 8. Lover (LO); 9. Magician (MA); 10. Ruler (RU); 11. Sage (SA); 12. Shadow (SH). SCADAM increases accuracy of researchers' interpretations of consumers' (emic) interpretations of dramas in consumption experiences; SCADAM provides for comparing DOF testing in scoring alternative archetypes. Thus, this manual provides tools for confirming relevancy and falsifying incorrect archetype assignments of stories consumers and brands tell. SCADAM builds on prior studies in the literature by the authors and colleagues.

The volume advances theory on hospitality meanings from both conscious and unconscious processing of stimuli (sights, actions, consequences). It explains how seemingly trivial experiences can have big repercussions in hospitality. Expanding on John Urry's grandmaster thesis, The Tourist Gaze, the volume proposes that assessments occur automatically with perceptions even when perceptions occur unconsciously. As well as a global review of the literature by Woodside and Metin, it includes highly-focused reports on the following topics: user-generated reviews in the hospitality industry; evaluation of the service performances; luxury tourists: celebrities' perspectives; nontrivial behavioral implications of trivial design choices in travel websites; the role of social psychology in the tourism experience model (TEM); destination brand performance measurement over time; perceptions of hotel disintermediation: the French generation Y case; constructing and shaping tourist experiences via travel blog engagement and more. The volume provides "reading assignments" for learning the nuances of perception and assessment processes by tourists.

Hardbound. Volume 9 is a feast. The 16 contributions fill the mind with knowledge, skills, and insights useful for improving the executive's ability to do what needs to be done: scan environments better to find the weak signals on breakthrough technologies; shifts in customers' attitudes and behaviors; changes in behaviors of suppliers, governments, and other stakeholder groups; frame problems/opportunities better by deepening understanding on how we go about making sense of what is happening and can be made to happen; deciding better by gaining deep knowledge on how decisions are actually made and can be improved (e.g., via systems thinking and simulating system operations to uncover powerful levers previously unrecognized); doing better by applying new tools to learn what is really happening when planned strategies are converted into realized strategies.

This book deals with the process of improving our sensemaking capabilities into how to: scan environments actively to gather data that is relevant to pressing issues; interpret usefully what we see -- including recognizing and framing problems/opportunities and skills in transforming data into information; make effective decisions -- including creating useful rules for deciding how to decide, and how to talk with ourselves and others to receive and offer useful information, make wise choices, and implement decisions well; and evaluate well what we have done and what has occurred. These four topics are the activities of sensemaking -- an ongoing conversation with yourself and others about what is really happening and why it is occurring. Sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework that is understandable to ourselves. Usually sensemaking is done automatically -- unconsciously -- without thinking actively about the usefulness or accuracy of our frames, or the process being used in our framing. However, sensemaking can be done consciously, that is, using controlled thinking instead of the usual automatic thinking processes. The contributions in this volume offer skill-building case exercises that are written to help you improve your sensemaking abilities.

The first chapter in this book examines the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through the analysis of quantitative data drawn from managers and employees in residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. The author, Michael Preece, defines absorptive capacity as the ability of an organization to use prior knowledge to recognize the value of new knowledge from external sources, assimilate this new knowledge, and apply it to the benefit of the organization. He provides valuable training in how service organizations go about transforming new knowledge into effective actionable business plans. The second chapter by Mohammad Shamsuddoha provides an application of system dynamics modelling in firms in the poultry industry in Bangladesh. This chapter offers deep knowledge of the "fifth discipline" and beyond. Shamsuddoha uses Vensim, a simulation-based software package, to build a simulation model with appropriate equations, formulae, and connectivity to replicate the real-life operation and outcome in a simulation environment. He also provides the in-depth knowledge necessary to learn to truly understand the fifth discipline.

This volume provides in-depth understanding about business-to-business (B2B) and organizational relationships. Studies included identify real-life relationship paradoxes and explain how firms manage - not solve - these paradoxes. Two research reports are the result of three years of intensive face-to-face data collection of how interfirm relations form, operate, and change. They include unedited direct quotes from suppliers, focal firms, and customers on their interfirm relationships and provide a profound understanding of quality relationships. Additional articles include: Discourses in Organizational Culture; Organizational Innovation and Outcomes in SMEs; Anatomy of Relationship Significance; a review of Markets-as-Networks Theory; and Meta-theories in Research. The volume highlights that making mistakes is inherent in organizational innovations and understanding how organizations work through such mistakes is an important key to understanding success versus failure in innovation outcomes. It provides rich descriptions on how B2B networks form, function and develop and is for readers who want to delve into how B2B relationships actually work and, frequently, do not work.

This portrait of contemporary tourists proposes that these travelers create consumption audio-portraits and self-explanations (identity constructions) through their purchases and use of travel-related services. Their configurations of destinations, accommodations, travel modes, in-route and destination activities, meal choices, sites/attractions visited, and their travel companions inform others and themselves about who they are. These understandings of self through travel are statements of being-where I've been and what I've done tells me and others who I am. Also, one's definition of self (being) affects tourists' future configurations of travel-related buying and consumption. Thus, tourism-related behavior and being represent virtuous and sometimes vicious consumption systems. Consequently, most tourists are identifiable by who they are and what they know about where they have been and what they have done via their summaries of their trips. The chapters in this volume provide tools and evidence useful for deep understanding of tourists' buying, consumption, and being through examinations of consumers' self-descriptions of personal markers of their trip configurations. This volume's core tenet is that thick descriptions and case-based models are essential steps for highly useful research and deep understanding of tourism behavior.

To clarify their own thinking, gain confirmation, and plan, customers tell stories about their interactions with sales and service associates. These stories are told often via blog sites, social-media platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor) as well as informally to friends and family members. Read original first-person stories of problems, opportunities and outcomes with a multiple-choice exercise following each story, as well as a critical review by an independent researcher. This volume describes customers' reports of their experience of interactions with sales/service associates. Chapters also offer a descriptive theory of storytelling narratives of these encounters. Gain an international view with stories by Asian, European, New Zealand/Pacific Rim, and North American customers. The volume highlights small details that have significant impact on customer satisfaction enhancing the reader's abilities to detect nuances in multiple international contexts, understand how customers evaluate sales/service reps' behavior well as providing opportunities to solve real problems. This is a valuable book in the field of customer relationship management that is also interactive.

Trust plays a crucial role in all societies, particularly within the Business-to-Business context where inter-firm relationships, impelled by globalization and the extended enterprise, require a much higher degree of trust to succeed. This 26th volume of Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing examines the value of trust within the B2B context to provide a better understanding of its importance in organizations. New Insights on Trust in Business-to-Business Relationships: A Multi-Perspective Approach applies different theoretical and methodological perspectives to the mechanisms and processes that promote trust between customer and supplier in contexts such as e-commerce, high involvement relationships, industrial service and international cultures. The authors identify the consistencies and distinctions of antecedents, processes, and consequences of trust in various B2B contexts and offer alternative approaches that contribute to a better understanding of the subtleties and multi-faceted nature of trust and trust-related management. The book provides advanced original insights on trust for researchers and practitioners working within Management, Purchasing and B2B Marketing, and offers practical tools to build lasting and successful business relationships.

Volume 3 examines how research tools affect theory advances in culture and tourism research. Using visual narrative art to explicate unconscious thinking that shapes trip plans and visits, building tree diagrams of streams of antecedent conditions associating with extreme behavior (e.g., road rage, chronic casino gambling), and research methods that go beyond quantitative/qualitative taxonomies are examples of the unique themes covered in this volume. The papers focus on how to gain meaning from data to thus look at how streams of antecedent conditions result in tourism behavior.

"Visionary Pricing" is dedicated to Dan Nimer, pioneer of pricing and price management. The volume features leading edge thinking from today's preeminent pricing thought leaders from North America, Europe, and Asia who originally came together 30 years ago to encourage the development of pricing. They now assess the present and future destiny of pricing, pricing innovation, and pricing paradigms that are influencing the evolution of pricing throughout the world. The volume contains four sections: section 1 interviews Nimer and presents his views on the emergence of value-based pricing as an influential pricing paradigm of the 21st century; section 2 focuses on pricing strategy and competitive advantage; section 3 focuses on the difining role of value in pricing; and section 4 focuses on pricing capability and innovation.

This book provides knowledge and skill-building training exercises in managing marketing decisions in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. The topic coverage is broad and deep. The intent is for the book to help answer four questions: (1) what questions should executives ask when crafting and implementing effective strategies in B2B contexts; (2) what tentative answers may be useful for executives to consider to these questions; (3) what skills in crafting strategies and decisions are necessary for executives to excel in for achieving effective outcomes consistently; and how should the B2B go about acquiring these skills?