Marketing managers are supposed to be highly professional in taking information about markets and customer preferences into account when making strategic decisions. However, following the literature on decision behavior, people constantly engage in identity-based decision making which leads to ignorance of relevant information. In the context of managerial decision making, such behavior might jeopardize a firm's market orientation. In three experiments the authors investigate managers' strategic decisions in marketing when one alternative is somehow related to the identity of the decision maker. The findings show that managers tend to make identity-based decisions and ignore relevant market information. Finally, evidence is demonstrated that managers misleadingly project their self-identity-driven preferences onto the preferences of the consumers which clearly points out a detrimental identity effect with regard to managerial decision making in marketing strategy.
Wolfgang Bussmann, Mercuri International, und Dr. Dirk Zupancic, Hochschule St. Gallen, über die Ursachen der Defizite deutscher Unternehmen im Key-Account-Management und über die Zukunft dieses Konzeptes.
This study addresses the important but yet unresolved question of how firms can create com-petitive advantage from their multichannel marketing strategy. More specifically, the authors investigate the antecedents of channel extension strategies and their performance implications. Results from an empirical study including top managers from 308 firms indicate that in addi-tion to environmental factors, a firm's channel expansion is directly related to its strategic channel management capability, and that this capability is more important in turbulent envi-ronments. Furthermore the study reveals that firms need an appropriate customer lock-in strategy to benefit from the addition of novel channel types or traditional channel expansion.
