The IMU offers the following services and expertise: Management Know-HowThe IMU publishes papers geared towards managers in companies. Subjects highly relevant to business practice are presented here in a compact and concise manner, and scientific research results are efficiently communicated. In many cases, these publications are based on application-oriented research and cooperation projects involving a large number of global companies. Scientific Working PapersThe scientific studies conducted by the IMU analyze new trends that have an impact on marketoriented management. On this basis, practice-oriented findings are derived and published in our series of scientific working papers. Today, many of our publications have been printed in prominent journals and honored with awards at international conferences (e.g., by the American Marketing Association). Series PublicationIn addition to publishing scientific working papers, the IMU, in cooperation with Gabler publishing house, issues a series featuring exemplary scientific findings from the field of market-oriented management. Application-oriented ResearchAt IMU, research aims at generating scientific results that are relevant to market-oriented management. Therefore, the IMU offers you the option of submitting concrete questions arising from your company practice, which are then scientifically analyzed.If you require additional information or have any questions, please contact the Institute for MarketOriented Management, University of Mannheim, L5, 1, 68131 Mannheim, Germany (phone: +49 621 / 181-1755) or visit our website at: www.imu-mannheim.de. The Institute for Market-Oriented Management AbstractThe conventional service profit chain (SPC) proposes that a firm's financial performance can be improved via a path that connects employee satisfaction, customer orientation, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. In this paper, a complementary SPC is introduced which is built on both a conventional path as well as a social identity-based path. The latter SPC part centrally builds on customer and employee company identification as a core construct. On the basis of a large scale triadic data set that included data from employees, customers and firms, we find strong support for the extended SPC, which accounts for important customer (loyalty and willingness to pay) and firm outcomes (financial performance). Also, the effects of company identification exist incrementally beyond the effects of the conventional SPC path.

There is little empirical research on internal marketing despite its intuitive appeal and anecdotal accounts of its benefits. Adopting a social identity theory perspective, the authors propose that internal marketing is fundamentally a process in which leaders instill into followers a sense of oneness with the organization, formally known as "organizational identification" (OI). The authors test the OI-transfer research model in two multinational studies using multilevel and multisource data. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses show that the OI-transfer process takes place in the relationships between business unit managers and salespeople and between regional directors and business unit managers. Furthermore, both leader-follower dyadic tenure and charismatic leadership moderate this cascading effect. Leaders with a mismatch between their charisma and OI ultimately impair followers' OI. In turn, customer-contact employees' OI strongly predicts their sales performance. Finally, both employees' and sales managers' OI are positively related to their business units' financial performance. The study provides empirical evidence for the role of leaders, especially middle managers, in building member identification that lays the foundation for internal marketing.

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Prior research has firmly established that consumers draw benefits from a firm's engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially the feeling of a “warm glow.” These benefits positively affect several desirable outcomes, such as willingness to pay and customer loyalty. The authors propose that consumers do not blindly perceive benefits from a firm's CSR engagement but tend to suspect that a firm's prices include a markup to finance the CSR engagement. Taking customers’ benefit perceptions and price markup inferences into account, the authors suggest that CSR engagement has mixed effects on consumers’ evaluation of price fairness and, thus, on subsequent outcomes such as customer loyalty. The authors conduct one qualitative study and four quantitative studies leveraging longitudinal field and experimental data from more than 4,000 customers and show that customers indeed infer CSR price markups, entailing mixed effects of firms’ CSR engagement on price fairness. The authors find that perception critically depends on customers’ CSR attributions, and they explore the underlying psychological mechanisms. They propose communication strategies to optimize the effect of CSR engagement on perceived price fairness.

While the service literature repeatedly emphasizes the role of empathy in service interactions, studies on empathy in customeremployee interactions are nearly absent. This study defines and conceptualizes employee and customer empathy as multidimensional constructs and empirically investigates their impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A quantitative study based on dyadic data and a multilevel modeling approach finds support for two effects of empathy in service interactions. The study reveals that customer empathy strengthens the positive effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction, leading to more ''symbiotic interactions.'' The findings also indicate that empathic customers are more likely to respond to a dissatisfying encounter with ''forgiveness,'' in the sense that customer empathy is able to mitigate negative effects of customer dissatisfaction on customer loyalty. From these empirical results, the authors derive several implications for service research and the management of service encounters. In particular, the present study provides a valuable basis for strategies of ''interaction routing,'' that is, matching customers and employees on the basis of their psychological profiles to create smooth and satisfying service interactions. The authors elaborate on approaches to implement this strategy in service organizations.

Although the identification of customer needs constitutes a cornerstone of the marketing concept, the accuracy of frontline employees' perceptions of customer needs has never been examined in a systematic manner. Following research in social cognition, this article introduces the concept of "customer need knowledge" (CNK), which describes the extent to which a frontline employee can accurately identify a given customer's hierarchy of needs. The results of two large-scale, multilevel investigations involving data from three different levels (customers, employees, and managers) demonstrate the importance of CNK for the provision of customer satisfaction and customer value. In particular, CNK fully mediates the influence of employees' customer orientation and cognitive empathy on these customer outcomes. Moreover, whereas the length of the relationship between an employee and a particular customer enhances CNK, a large age discrepancy in relation to the customer decreases employees' level of CNK.

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 It is crucial from an employee's point of view to perceive some degree of stability even in times of major organizational change. This paper examines the role of a sense of continuity for organizational identification after an organizational merger. We argue that mergers and acquisitions so often end in failures partly because the change is designed in discontinuous ways and employees do not feel they are doing the same job after the merger as before. Such discontinuous change engenders a critical tension between positive and negative effects of identification that has not yet been fully understood. To deepen the understanding of this tension, in-depth interviews were conducted in a recently merged German industrial company. Based on these qualitative data we demonstrate how features of the postmerger company structure and the way it was implemented may have eroded organizational identification. Finally, we propose a parsimonious model to be tested by future research, in which the sense of continuity is consisting of both observable as well as projected continuity.