While interest in customization is growing among consumers and academics, researchers have focused on consumers designing products for themselves. Many customization firms, however, are successfully positioning themselves as key sources for unique gifts. In this research, the authors examine whether factors under the firm's control (i.e., the level of design support provided and the presence of a strong brand) are differentially effective when consumers design products for themselves or as gifts for others. Using participants drawn from the relevant target market, they report two studies involving real customization tasks undertaken on fully functioning customization websites. The findings lead to the surprising conclusion that design support is less effective for consumers designing products intended as gifts rather than for themselves, raising expectations without a corresponding rise in evaluations. However, the results offer some good news to firms targeting gift-giving consumers. Both Studies 1 and 2 reveal that gift-givers place a higher value on their own time and effort and thus report a higher willingness to pay than those designing for themselves. This effect is diminished, however, when a strong brand is present and consumers share credit with the brand for the product's design.
With growing industry demand for sales professionals, recruitment at colleges and universities that have a sales education focus has increased remarkably over the past few years. However, results indicate that hiring organizations face an uphill task in filling sales positions. Recruiters and students struggle to build critical person-job fit during a relatively brief period of interaction. To address these issues, the present article presents a two-staged ideal recruitment process based on a stakeholder perspective. A set of 16 propositions is provided for improving key outcomes of the sales student recruitment process.
Self Efficacy and Sales Shelby Hunt, along with coauthors Chonko and Wood, published a study in 1986 that assessed the impact of marketing education on long-term career performance of managers who held a marketing degree. The researchers found the relationship between the quality of marketing education and performance in a marketing career to be "highly suspect." Surprisingly, very few studies in the area of marketing pedagogy have sought to provide further insight into Hunt, Chonko, and Wood's (1986) investigation of the impact marketing education has on post-graduation performance. Nevertheless, one subfield of marketing, professional selling, has for years proffered anecdotal claims that performance of graduates with formal sales education is higher, and turnover much lower, than their peers (Fogel, Hoffmeister, Rocco, & Strunk, 2012). However, a search of the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature reveals no empirical validation of these claims. One is left to wonder to what extent these assertions hold beyond the wishful thinking of the sales educators that make them! The matter is anything but trivial. Labor statistics point to an increase in sales as a key occupation in the present and future workforce. In his recent book, To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink (2012) points out the number of salespeople in the United States outnumbers the entire federal government workforce by five to one. He cites labor statistics that show changing workforce dynamics where some companies may lose as much as 40% of their sales talent by 2016. Yet these changing dynamics are expected to create two million new sales jobs by 2020, thereby increasing the demand for professional salespeople. Moreover, beyond demand for sales personnel in organizations, Pink suggests that sales, as a vital and necessary skill for the self-employed, will continue to explode as more of the workforce becomes self-employed. The news of an ever-expanding demand for salespeople in the U.S. workforce is not lost on the faculty working in colleges of business, especially in marketing departments. Professional selling has long been a common path for business school graduates entering the workforce. Studies show that professional selling is one of the most common job types for students graduating with a degree in business. Some studies put the percentage of marketing majors accepting a job in sales as high as 88% and as high as 60% for all other business majors (Stevens & Kinni, 2007). As a result of the aforementioned trends, business schools are embracing professional selling as a formal area of study. In the 4 years between 2007 and 2011, sales as a significant 536733J MDXXX10.
The present research leverages the "irrational options" theoretical framework to explore options rationality differences between salespeople and non-salespeople. Specifically, the reported research first examines (Study 1) whether or not salespeople are more likely to place a higher value on diminishing options than individuals who do not work in sales. Two follow-up studies embed a potential internal moderator (salesperson thinking style; Study 2) and a potential external moderator (performance-based incentives; Study 3) of salesperson valuations of diminishing options. The method employed in all three studies is an experimental design tailored after Shin and Ariely's (Management Science 50(5):575-586, 2004) seminal work on irrationality and options availability. The results demonstrate that, compared to non-salespeople, salespeople are more inclined to value option availability (Study 1), with this effect being especially pronounced for rule-bound thinkers (Study 2) and those operating under incentive-based compensation plans (Study 3). The article concludes by highlighting key managerial and theoretical implications, while acknowledging limitations and proposing directions for related, future work.
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