How does the influence of the marketing department within an organization affect marketing managers' dissemination of market intelligence (i.e., knowledge about customer needs and competitor activities) to managers of other departments? Three studies with 711 executive managers and integrated survey and experimental data offer insights. Rather than the positive relationship indicated by conventional wisdom, the study results indicate a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped effect of marketing's influence on marketing managers' dissemination of market intelligence. Managers in a marketing department with moderate influence within the organization are significantly more likely to disseminate market intelligence than are those in low and, interestingly, those in high influence departments. This finding adds nuance to the existing body of knowledge showing countervailing effects of a strong marketing department and implies that executives need to carefully manage the organization's culture to ensure well-balanced influences of the marketing department in relation to other corporate functions.
Literature has highlighted the need for more useful research and the necessity that scholars and practitioners take each others' perspective to jointly bridge the gap between both communities. Following the idea of structuration theory, we argue that scholars operate in a separate community and assess relevance differently compared to practitioners despite efforts of perspective taking. We investigate 200 pairs of reviews for papers submitted to a marketing journal. Each pair consists of an evaluation of both a scholar and a practitioner. By categorizing practitioners into two groups, we take into account that they may have academical background. Comparing scholars' and practitioners' ratings, our results show that there is no joint interpretation of relevance between scholars and practitioners without academical background indicated by no significant correlation. Contrary, academical practitioners share a similar understanding (r=.230, p<.05). This indicates that scholars and practitioners might differ in their underlying frames of reference in evaluating research. To detail the finding, we use six criteria, including scientific and practical aspects, to assess the quality of research and run separate principal component factor analyses. For scholars, one factor was extracted (60% explained variance). Contrary, we found a two factorial structure, similar for both practitioners' samples (each with 63% explained variance). One factor joints practical attributes, while scientific criteria load on a second factor. Compared to practitioners, scholars do not clearly distinguish between practical and scientific aspects in evaluating research. We discuss implications for the relevance debate and highten the need of joint interpretive forums to enhance a similar understanding.
A core managerial task is forming accurate predictions about customer preferences. This investigation adds to the scarce research on this topic in two ways. First, our results suggest that managers use their own preferences as a cue for their customers' preferences. We label this tendency self-referential ‘bias' because managers' individual tastes are questionable predictors of customer preferences. Second, we examine how cognitive empathy, that is, the mental process of putting oneself into the shoes of customers to understand their needs, influences the bias. Although common wisdom suggests that empathy is associated with an increased customer focus and a decreased emphasis on one's own perspective, our results indicate the contrary, that is, the self-referential bias increases with the amount of empathy. This finding is in line with recent social psychological work according to which (a) empathy increases the perceived social closeness between observers (i.e., managers) and targets (i.e., customers) and (b) observers tend to assume that close others share their own preferences. In an initial experiment, marketing managers completed a case study on a product development process in the automotive industry. They were asked to steer the product development process by assigning importance weights to six product features (e.g., engine power) which were then correlated with their personal importance ratings of the features when buying a new car (as a consumer). For all product features, we find that (a) there is a positive correlation between managers' personal importance ratings and the importance weights in the management task and (b) the correlation significantly increases as managers exhibit greater cognitive empathy. Further results and implications are discussed.
Common wisdom suggests that managerial empathy (i.e., the mental process of taking a consumer perspective) helps executives separate their personal consumption preferences from those of consumers, thereby preventing egocentric preference predictions. The results of the present investigation, however, show exactly the opposite. First, the authors find that managerial empathy ironically accelerates self-reference in predictions of consumer preferences. Second, managers' self-referential tendencies increase with empathy because taking a consumer perspective activates managers' private consumer identity and, thus, their personal consumption preferences. Third, empathic managers' self-referential preference predictions make them less likely to use market research results. Fourth, the findings imply that when explicitly instructed to do so, managers are capable of suppressing their private consumer identity in the process of perspective taking, which helps them reduce self-referential preference predictions. To support their conclusions, the authors present four empirical studies with 480 experienced marketing managers and show that incautiously taking the perspective of consumers causes self-referential decisions in four contexts: product development, communication management, pricing, and celebrity endorsement
Imagine you are asked for participation in a survey. Would your willingness to comply depend on characteristics of the requester? Would you be more likely to answer when there is a similarity between you and the requester? And, particularly, would the degree of similarity affect your willingness? Many studies provide support for the persuasive role of similarity on willingness to comply. When people share similarities, they feel socially connected that is enough to increase compliance with requests. However, contrary to that literature, research on uniqueness empathizes humans' innate drive for uniqueness that leads them to avoid too much similarity. Therefore, we experimentally investigate whether the degree of similarity, manipulated by the first name of the requester, influences compliance with a request. 600 marketing and sales managers were invited to participate in an online survey. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: one third of the participants
were invited by a person with the same first name ("high similarity"), the second third received the request by a person with same first name initials ("low similarity"), and the remaining third was contacted by a person with a completely different first name ("no similarity"). The conditions were identical with the exception of the name that appeared as the requester of the invitation. The results support our assumption of an inverted u-shaped relationship between the degree of similarity and humans' willingness to comply. Persons with identical initials were significantly more likely to participate in the survey than both those who received the request by a person with different initials and those with same first name. We find no difference between high
