Sales Promotional Tools – A Catalyst to Speed Up Sales

Marketers all over the world try to find creative strategies to attract customers, promotional tools are one important aspect of this paradigm. Sales teams use promotional tools to influence customers and entice their purchase behaviour. The aim of the study was to formulate a technique that has a significant positive impact and motivates the consumer to buy a certain product during the sales season. Four promotional tools were studied and analysed to construe their relationship with consumer’s buying behaviour. The study is quantitative in nature, and the data for the study were collected from 300 customer respondents through convenient sampling. Regression analyses were employed through SPPSS to analyze the data. The results have concluded that the price discount has a positive impact on a consumer’s mind and that makes him buy a product more. This study will help marketing managers and decision-makers in the sales team to strategize efficient marketing campaigns.

EXPRESS: Strategic Polarization in Group Interactions

We study the phenomenon of strategic group polarization in which members take more extreme actions than their preferences. The analysis is relevant for a broad range of formal and informal group settings, including social media, online platforms, sales teams, corporate and academic committees, and political action committees. In our model, agents with private preferences choose a public action (voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group decision and truth-telling. In a simultaneous move game, agents strategically shade their actions towards the extreme. The strategic group influence motive can create substantial polarization in actions and group decisions even when the preferences are relatively moderate. Compared to a simultaneous game, a randomized sequential actions game lowers polarization when agents’ preferences are relatively similar. Sequential actions can even lead to moderation if the later agents have moderate preferences. Endogenizing the order of moves (through a first-price sealed-bid auction) always increases polarization, but it is also welfare enhancing. Our findings can help group leaders, firms, and platforms design mechanisms that moderate polarization, e.g., the choice of speaking order, the group size, and the knowledge members have of others’ preferences and actions.

Is Print Recruitment Advertising a Sunset in the Millennial Era? A Case Study of Times Ascent

Reading as a habit is very addictive and we have seen our fathers and grandfathers read newspapers from our childhood. It has been a part and parcel of a morning ritual and is believed in the Indian culture that whatever news is published in the Indian print media is 100% true. That was the belief until recent times and is slowly fading away. The trust and the faith which was prevalent in newspapers in the good old days is losing its shine and glitter. The Times of India as an organization has transformed itself from being a traditional newspaper to an Infotainment paper that is a combination of Information and Entertainment. Advertising revenues are the key focus of the entire sales team in the organization, and sales teams are striving to come up with innovative and customized solutions for the advertisers. Times Ascent is one of the few examples of innovation and customized solutions for its recruitment set of advertisers and the story of its gala launch until its decline is at the core of this case study. Has Times Ascent reached its final stage of the product life cycle? Can anything be done to revive it? Time shall tell how the story of Times Ascent unfolds.

Size effect and merger dominance in salesforce integration

Purpose This study aims to test the authors’ theory that in an integrated sales team, the larger team (either from the acquiring or acquired firm) dominates the smaller team, even though it may be less competent than the smaller one, and that the level of competence of the integrated entity with the dominant but inferior larger team is bound to deteriorate. Design/methodology/approach The study tests the theory by conducting a laboratory experiment. Findings The results from the experiment show that an asymmetrical employee composition structure creates merger dominance in the post-integration group and influences the integration performance. Research limitations/implications Considering the lack of mergers and acquisitions research in the marketing literature, the author believes that this study contributes new information to the literature. The finding that an integrated entity with a dominant but inferior larger partner will demonstrate a resulting degeneration of competence invites empirical research for validation. Practical implications The integration of sales teams is central to ensuring revenue growth and driving the value that mergers promise but often fail to realize. The study findings provide some practical insights in this regard. Originality/value Mergers between asymmetrical partners are common phenomena. However, few studies have investigated how an unequal size of sales teams in pre-merger firms influences the effective integration of different sales teams. To fill this research gap, this study examines whether the involvement of an unequal number of salespeople from pre-merger firms in a post-merger sales team may influence its post-merger performance.

From member creativity to team creativity? Team information elaboration as moderator of the additive and disjunctive models

One of the most fundamental questions in team creativity research is the relationship between individual member creativity and team creativity. The two answers that team creativity research has advanced–teams are more creative when their average member creativity is higher (the additive model) and teams are more creative when their most creative member is more creative (the disjunctive model) are straightforward. Surprising, however, is that neither the additive model nor the disjunctive model is consistently supported, begging the question of what moderates the predictive power of these models. We address this question by integrating individual-to-team creativity models with team process research. We propose that team information elaboration is a key moderating variable, such that average member creativity is more positively related to team creativity with higher information elaboration, and the highest member creativity is more positively related to team creativity with lower information elaboration. A multi-source study of 60 sales teams (483 employees) in a Chinese bakery chain supported these hypotheses. In addition, the study did not support the prediction that the most creative member’s outgoing advice ties (as a conduit for the dissemination of ideas) would further moderate the joint effect of the highest individual creativity and team information elaboration on team creativity.