Category captainship (CC) is a retailing practice wherein a retailer collaborates with one of the manufacturers in a product category (referred to as the captain) to develop and implement a category management strategy. Although CC has been studied using both theoretical models and surveys, empirical evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of CC is scarce. The authors use a unique data set collected during a CC implementation to empirically examine the impact of CC on the retailer, the captain, and the other manufacturers in the category. The authors find that both the retailer's private label and the captain benefit from CC because of pricing and assortment changes. They also find that some competing manufacturers benefit from CC while others suffer. Specifically, the manufacturers that closely compete with the captain benefit, whereas the manufacturers that are in close competition with the private label suffer because the retailer protects its private label. The authors show that category sales would have been higher if the retailer had not protected its private label. This study sheds light on how joint consideration of assortment and pricing, the presence of a private label, and product characteristics may influence the outcomes of CC implementations.
The ability to demonstrate the impact of marketing action on firm financial performance is crucial for evaluating, justifying, and optimizing the expenditure of a firm's marketing resources. This presents itself as a formidable task when one considers both the variety and potential influence of marketing activity. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model of simultaneous supply and demand that allows us to formally study the financial impact of a variety of marketing activities, including those that operate on different timescales. The supply-side model provides insight into how the firm allocates resources across its various subunits. We illustrate our approach in a services context by integrating data from three independent studies conducted by a large national bank. Our model allows customer and employee satisfaction to influence firm profitability by moderating the conditional relationship between the bank's operational inputs and its proclivity to produce revenue.customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, endogeneity, resource allocation
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.