Two Articles From UC Faculty
Published In July's 'Journal Of Marketing'

A pair of articles by members of the University of Cincinnati marketing faculty appear in the July issue of the Journal of Marketing, the leading academic research journal for the field.

Assistant professor Andrea Dixon is the lead author on the first article, which introduces a behavioral framework applicable to sales people's recent sales experiences. In the event of a sales failure (i.e. a lost sale), the framework helps managers predict their sales reps' likely response to similar experiences in the future. Two colleagues from Indiana University collaborated with Dixon on the article.

Professor James Comer and associate professor Raj Mehta are co-authors on the second article, a six-year analysis of electronic business-to-business marketplaces - the first in-depth study of its kind. The lead author on that study is Rajdeep Grewal, a former UC College of Business Administration graduate student under Comer and Mehta who is now on the faculty at Penn State.

"Sales is probably the most brutal profession, say next to boxing. And as such, this profession... requires people who can deal with constant rejection," says Dixon of her study. "My colleagues and I set out to discover how people make sense of those failures or - to go back to boxing - which failures knock them out and which allow them to continue on."

The study measured responses from 228 financial services representatives about a recent sales interaction and how they would react during a future, similar situation. The study predicts that certain kinds of sales failures are likely to erroneously be attributed to factors like effort, ability or even luck. That can lead to defeatist attitudes by sales people in the future.

"Managers would find this of value because we are giving them ways to measure how people make sense of their failures and the likely response that they'll have to those failures," she says.

Comer and Mehta's study could serve as an important guidepost for businesses considering their potential prospects in electronic marketplaces. In particular, their work showed that simply "jumping on the bandwagon" because competitors were participating in an electronic marketplace was not beneficial, even if proper information technology (IT) support was in place. A strong organization-wide commitment to the process is also essential.

"Across the globe, business-to-business electronic markets are the fastest growing electronic commerce phenomenon. By 2003, BusinessWeek estimates that this sector will generate $1.3 trillion in global commerce. But little, if anything, is known about the factors that influence the nature of organizational participation in electronic markets," says Comer.

Business-to-business electronic marketplaces can take different forms. Some are on the Internet and open to all companies in an industry. Others are proprietary and run among a group of member companies.

The study looked at behaviors of participant firms in a 15-year-old electronic market of jewelry traders called POLYGON. A company's participation level was categorized as exploratory, expert or passive. Those that successfully reached expert status were motivated by both a drive towards efficiency and an institutional motive to attain legitimacy within their field, the authors observed.

"Firms that join an electronic market for the right reasons and are willing to spend time and effort in learning the system and developing IT capabilities are much more likely to succeed than a firm that joins just because it is 'cool' to be on an electronic market," says Mehta.

The Journal of Marketing is the research publication for the American Marketing Association, the world's largest and most comprehensive professional society of marketers. Having two articles from the faculty published in one edition of the journal is the latest honor for UC's marketing department, which was ranked No. 28 nationally in faculty research productivity among marketing programs in a study that appeared in the December edition of Academy of Management Journal.