The revolution in information availability and the advances in novel interaction technologies have ushered in two major shifts that call into question the traditional assumptions of buyer–seller interactions. First, buyer–seller
information asymmetry
has greatly decreased in many interactions. Second, face-to-face communication is no longer the main format of buyer–seller interactions. In this article, the authors review empirical research on how these shifts have changed buyer–seller negotiations, an important type of buyer–seller interactions. Several insights arise from this review. First, the shifts have caused fundamental changes in buyers’ and sellers’ roles, power, and aspirations and information processing. Second, the shifts and these fundamental changes together cause major changes in buyer–seller interactional processes and outcomes, including (1) change in buyers’ attitude and behavior, (2) change in sellers’ effectiveness in interacting with buyers, and (3) change in buyer–seller interactional processes. Based on these insights, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the reexamination of existing theories and the development of new theories of buyer–seller interactions.
Many new marketing strategies falter in the execution phase where managers fail to make frontline employees fully committed to implementing the new initiatives. While formal managers can apply transformational and transactional leadership behaviors to increase salespeople's strategy commitment, peers can also exert a great deal of informal influence on salespeople. Building on recent social network perspectives of leadership, this paper investigates the interplay between the sales manager's leadership styles and peer effects during the implementation of a new strategy in a large sales organization. The authors find that salespeople with high network centrality but low strategy commitment not only lower their peers' commitment but also hurt the effectiveness of a transformational manager. Specially, the influence of a central salesperson becomes stronger when the sales group has lower external connectivity.However, sales managers' transactional leadership can decrease the non-committed central salesperson's influence over peers.
Negotiations today are less likely to be characterized by information asymmetry—the notion that buyers are less informed than sellers—due to the amount of information available to buyers. A number of industries have reacted to this change by shifting their attention to earning profits in aftermarkets: products and services that augment the main purchase (e.g., add-ons, insurance, financing, service and maintenance). In these aftermarkets, firms often retain an information advantage, even if information asymmetries are eliminated from the main purchase. This has given rise to an interesting setting untapped by prior research: information “symmetry” in the front end (main purchase) and information “asymmetry” in the back end (aftermarket). The authors argue that symmetry in the front end provides an opportunity to build trust, as the knowledgeable customer can verify the information disclosed by the seller. In an observational study in the automotive industry, the authors find that customers to whom the salesperson revealed the cost of a car at the beginning of the negotiation spent significantly more in the back end than others. As corroborated in subsequent studies, this effect holds only when cost is disclosed at the beginning of the negotiation and when customers can verify the cost information.
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