In today’s maturing consumer markets, emphasis is shifting from straightforward sales to a more holistic approach to customer life cycle management, with a stronger emphasis on how sales are generated and service provided all along the customer journey. Effectively managing these different...

Sales force performance is predominant in the B2B marketing literature. This chapter reviews how sales force performance has been defined, operationalized and measured. By providing a typology of sales force performance along two dimensions - namely positive versus negative performance and...

Effective service marketing is a complex activity that involves many different strategies, skills, tasks and activities. Customers perceive services in terms of quality of the service and how satisfied they are overall with their experiences. It will be easier for the marketers if they know what...

This mainly conceptual paper suggests a new approach, aimed at supporting SMEs’ strategic realignment in the recovery phase after the economic crisis of 2008-2009. The analysis of the impact of the recent crisis on the performance of the Italian medium-size firms allows the identification of...

The article presents an experiment that illustrates a behavior that I denote “relative thinking.” Subjects in the experiment revealed the minimal price difference for which they were willing to spend 20 minutes and go to a cheaper store. Five different goods and nine different prices were...

The authors present findings from an analysis of articles related to product design published within eight leading journals important to marketing thought. Based on this analysis, which covers the fourteen year period from 1995-2008, the authors propose a conceptual model of product design and...

International communication is becoming ever more important for small and medium sized businesses. Nevertheless, it often fails to function as it should. The main challenge for the next few years is to successfully apply internationalisation not only to brands and products, but to communication....

In Austria and Switzerland, Centers of Excellence for PR have been developed which are now known throughout Europe. PR and Communications Management Qualifications are the order of the day for communications experts in the Alpine countries. But the education and job markets are restricted and...

With the advent of new information & communication technologies (ICT) and its ever growing application in connecting people, online social media have become one of the main platforms for people to people interaction and this has obvious impact on formulation of marketing strategy for better...