No description available.

<p> The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that managers in the retail grocery industry use in reducing short-tenured employee attrition in the West Midland states in the United Kingdom. Participants were 4 store managers who had managerial experience in the retail grocery industry, worked as a retail store manager in the West Midlands, and had experience implementing effective strategies to reduce employee attrition. The Herzberg 2-factor theory was the conceptual framework. Semistructured interviews were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using Yin&rsquo;s 5-step data analysis process. The major themes were: training and development, enriched job responsibility, human resources intervention, and employee recognition. Participants relied on training and development, enriched job responsibility, human resources intervention and, employee recognition to reduce employee attrition. The results may provide retail grocery leaders with strategies for reducing short-tenured employee attrition in grocery stores, which may reduce adverse effects on the industry&rsquo;s profitability. Implications for positive social change include improving the quality of life of the community and citizens; improved levels of satisfaction in quality of life translate into developing and maintaining positive relationships with family and friends, as well as helping the local communities and the economy.</p><p>

<p> Capturing institutional memory is a challenge that organizations face in data-driven and digital workplaces. In this project, a system was built to capture institutional memory in the workflow of marketing tasks for the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. The project consisted of three phases of capturing institutional memory: phase one, organizing the marketing shared drive for the Carpenter Performing Arts Center intranet; phase two, creating a database for year-over-year marketing information; and phase three, building a dashboard and series of reports using data captured from the shared drive and database. </p><p> The project was completed using Microsoft Access database tools and Microsoft Excel due to constraints of the project. This report provides a reflection on the decision-making process throughout the project. The result is a system for capturing institutional memory and streamlining workflow processes for greater efficiently in the organization.</p><p>

M. Com. (Business Management) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

<p> Colleges and universities in the United States could end operations in record numbers largely from financial shortfalls. The Urban Institute reported that nonprofit organizations lost $3.4 billion in reneged pledges from 2013 to 2014 from donor dissatisfaction, creating a problem because financial losses can occur from a lack of understanding on how media marketing efforts affect fundraising. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to identify traditional and social media marketing strategies that some nonprofit college and university leaders use to increase alumni financial support. Interviews took place with 7 college or university leaders at 3 private, nonprofit colleges or universities in the southeastern United States. The 7 leaders consisted of 3 vice presidents, 2 provosts, and 2 presidents. The conceptual framework differentiated media into categories, 2 of which were owned media and earned media. As the primary data collection instrument, collection of marketing literature for each school and 7 semistructured interviews occurred. In the data analysis process, transcription of interview data and coding using the modified van Kaam method took place discovering themes. The 4 themes discovered included social media effectiveness, evolution of traditional marketing blending with social media marketing, social media marketing efficiency, and the multiplier effect of social media. Implications for social change included increasing the scholarship ability of schools, creating an affordable environment for students to receive postsecondary education. Additional benefits included enhanced economies for communities where a college or university resides and an improved level of education per capita in the areas surrounding a college or university.</p><p>

Managers and marketing practitioners are spending more time and limited resources on finding new ways to acquire and retain customers. This study pursues the goal, to assist marketing practitioners, with a model of constructs and concepts, encapsulating all relevant sources of sustainable competitive advantages (SCA(s)) they should consider when conceptualizing, planning and implementing strategies to achieve a sustainable competitive edge for his/her SBU or firm in the global marketplace. Qualitative research is employed to establish the terminology currently in use, as well as to expand the list of possible sources of SCA, already identified by academics and practitioners in a wide variety of business disciplines. Quantitative research is employed to rate and rank these sources and to categorize all sources in 4 domains. The resulting SCA model is a circular model with 4 domains and 20 sources of SCA(S). The 4 domains are: Preferred positioning; Superior Finite Resources; Superior Infinite Resources; and Superior Competencies and Capabilities According to the quantitative research results, the majority of respondents rate all four domains as able and important contributors in planning for a SCA for a SBU or firm. The 20 sources of SCA receive very different ratings and rankings from respondents in different subgroups of the sample group. Marketing and business experience of the respondents, as well as the industry which the respondents consider to be their learning ground, has a noticeable impact o the evaluation of the sources. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Marketing Management / MCom / Unrestricted

Most research on sport fans in the sport marketing and fan loyalty fields has been based on pre-conceived conceptualizations and definitions congruent with the mindset of team management. Little is known if sport fans view their experiences in this way. This dissertation examines the experience of being a fan of the National Hockey League's Hartford Whalers from the perspective of the insider. Twenty-four fans were interviewed in-depth to gain an understanding of the process of becoming a Whalers fan, being a Whalers fan, living through the franchise relocation, and living life without the Whalers. By analyzing the stories, existing concepts and definitions in the sport marketing and fan loyalty literature are questioned. Contrary to the literature, few Whalers fans progressed through stages of loyalty from sport to team to player. Many became fans by accident after attending their first game at the Hartford Civic Center. Their stories not only question the fan loyalty literature's conceptualization of team loyalty as being both exclusive and consisting of equal parts behavior and attitude, but also question the ethics of relationship marketing, considering how many fans felt betrayed when the team disrupted the relationship by relocating. This dissertation adds to the understanding of sport fans by discovering new insights not discussed in the literature. Whalers fans felt humiliated that they were outnumbered in the region by New York Rangers and Boston Bruins fans, felt a strong, positive attachment to the team's theme song and logo, appreciated the amount of player interaction in the community that would have been impossible in a larger market, felt the pain of relocation even more after the team chose to move to a city no bigger than Hartford in a region unfamiliar with hockey, developed a kinship with fans of teams in situations that reminded them of the Whalers', and came to see themselves as sophisticated hockey fans who had grown accustomed to live NHL hockey. Because of this sense of sophistication, many Whalers fans have been frustrated in their attempts to recapture what they had with the Whalers through pursuing other hockey or sporting options.

The economics of professional sports in the 1990s, coupled with increased competition for the entertainment dollar, has resulted in a shift of emphasis from acquiring customers to retaining customers. One method to improve retention is through developing strong relationships with customers by constantly striving to provide high quality service. Inability to control the core product, a severe obstacle not faced by other industries, serves to further heighten the need to provide high quality service within this context. With winning in professional sports being cyclical by nature, service quality is one area under the sport marketers control which can be utilized to gain a competitive advantage. Therefore, as in other industries, sport managers are searching for tools to effectively measure service quality. In addition to measuring service quality, marketers have also started to measure the value of individual customers. The availability of information technology has enabled marketers to store information on consumers, assess their value to the organizations, and create individualized marketing efforts. Nonetheless, efforts toward measuring customer relationship value are scarce in the literature. The standard approach for measuring relationship value is customer lifetime value (LTV). LTV is "the present value of expected benefits (e.g. Gross margin) less the burdens (e.g., direct costs of servicing and communicating) from customers" (Dwyer, 1989). While this model focuses on estimated income streams from the relationship, it does not account for the added benefits from the relationship. This study developed and empirically tested a model of expanded LTV. Besides measuring a discounted revenue stream, the model measured the strength of the existing relationship and expanded relationship dimensions, as well as an individual's opportunity cost for being in a relationship with a professional franchise. The sensitivity of model parameters was tested and comparisons were made to the standard LTV model. The model was validated by segmenting customers into LTV deciles, and comparing these segments on their ratings of overall service quality, as measured by SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, et. Al., 1988). This model was empirically tested based on a survey distributed to 5000 season account holders of a professional basketball team (n = 1,380). The expanded LTV model was sensitive to alterations in the inflation rate and discount factor (discount rate adjusted for opportunity costs), but relatively insensitive to changes in ticket price and marketing costs. Additionally, the expanded model captured more information about the relationship between customers and franchises than the standard model. Perceptions and expectations of service quality increased with higher levels of customer investment for both dimensions of service quality and service areas. However, the overall impact of LTV on service quality gap (perception expectation) scores was negligible.

An increase in competition and broader product lines has resulted in cannibalization of product categories. This waste of marketing resources concerns both manufacturers and retailers and has drawn the attention of marketers to the need for effective category management. One strategy to consolidate categories is product elimination. The questions that concern managers are where will the customers of the eliminated brand go and will the customers be captured by the same manufacturer? This dissertation seeks to provide an answer to this question by developing a metric and modeling approach to measure the level of reverse cannibalization and evaluate changes in competitive position as a result of brand exit. This dissertation develops a hybrid reverse cannibalization model that utilizes both customer background information and transactional data to measure changes in competitive position upon the exit of a brand. A brand draw metric was developed as the ratio of the number of customers drawn by a brand from another brand's core group to the size of the competitor's core group. Bootstrapping experiments with 6, 8, and 10 brands were conducted to test the robustness of the brand draw metric. A Multinomial Logit model was specified to examine the plausibility of the proportional draw market share model assumption. The violation of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives assumption provided support for the finding of asymmetries in brand draws. The MNL and hybrid models suggest that some brands compete more strongly with sister brands than with competing manufacturer brands. Strategic implications of the model findings are discussed for each simulated brand exit. The dissertation provides substantive contributions through an enriched understanding of category structures and brand draw effects. The reverse cannibalization model to predict brand choice in the event of a brand exit and the robust brand draw metric that captures asymmetric competitive effects are methodological contributions. The model makes a valuable contribution to marketing practice because it allows marketers to evaluate the potential for strategic changes to product lines through simulated exits.

The aim of this article-based thesis was to develop and test four structural models of the antecedents and outcomes of service climate on data collected from frontline employees, store managers, and customers nested in 70 stores of a South African retailer of home improvement products. The first article explored the extent to which frontline employees’ perceptions of six service-oriented high-performance work practices (SO-HPWPs) predict their work engagement and psychological service climate perceptions at an individual level of analysis. The results showed that service-oriented training predicted both psychological service climate and work engagement, while staffing and involvement also predicted service climate. The second article compared two rival store-level structural models of the interrelationships between service-oriented high performance work systems (SO-HPWS), collective work engagement, and service climate as predictors of frontline employees’ collective in-role and extra-role service performance. The findings supported the climate-centric model in which service climate functions as a direct antecedent of collective in-role and extra-role service performance. The third article tested an expanded store-level structural model in which SO-HPWS and collective work engagement predict service climate, which, in turn, predicts customer satisfaction and, ultimately, also store loyalty. This model fitted the data well, confirming that service climate is a key mediator that links internal organizational variables (i.e., SO-HPWSs and collective work engagement) to important customer responses (i.e., overall customer satisfaction and store loyalty). Surprisingly, the relationships between frontline employees’ collective in-role and extra-role service performance and customer satisfaction were not statistically significant. This may be due to a range restriction in the customer satisfaction ratings. / Thesis (PhD (Marketing Management))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Marketing Management / PhD (Marketing Management) / Unrestricted