Strategy

Supply chain management is a complex process that requires a high-level dedicated governing body or steering committee to meet the various needs of the supply chain's multiple customers. Because a supply chain system is complex and nonlinear, there may be multiple reasons for poor performance. Supply chains can fall victim to feedback loops that reinforce negative actions and behaviors. Improving a supply chain requires understanding functional deficiencies and, also, how such deficiencies interact with one another to degrade overall performance.

For the past four decades, dozens of researchers have studied consumer price knowledge, often with disagreements on the extent of consumer' ignorance about prices. While some of these disagreements have been attributed to research design variations among studies, no inquiry has yet been made on the role of the economic environment on consumer price knowledge. Nevertheless, environmental factors such as interest rates, unemployment, and economic growth may significantly influence consumers' knowledge of prices.

The spectacularly successful transformation of Times Square has become a model for other cities. From its beginning as Longacre Square, Times Square’s commercialism, signage, cultural diversity, and social tolerance have been deeply embedded in New York City’s psyche. Its symbolic role guaranteed that any plan for its renewal would push the hot buttons of public controversy: free speech, property-taking through eminent domain, development density, tax subsidy, and historic preservation.

Traditionally the management of brands has been entrusted to middle management. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that brands are of such critical strategic importance, that they are more appropriately placed under the direct responsibility of senior management. Indeed, we believe that senior managers should act as brand custodians. For this new responsibility, senior managers need integrative overviews of brands and their management.

The authors suggest that people strategically manage—specifically, lower—their expectations to increase future satisfaction. Consumers who are more disconfirmation sensitive, that is, those who are more satisfied (dissatisfied) when a product performs better (worse) than expected, are hypothesized to have lower expectations. In contrast, the authors expect that consumers who are perfectionists will have higher expectations than those who are not. Results from a laboratory experiment and a field study are consistent with the hypotheses.

The authors urge that modern strategic theory is robust and provides a solid foundation for legal policy. The striking breakthrough of strategic theory was to establish that predatory pricing can be rational economic behavior.

Despite the importance of decisions regarding international brand names, research on brand naming has focused primarily on English name creation. The authors conceptualize the local brand-name creation process in a multilingual international market. The authors present a framework that incorporates (1) a linguistic analysis of three translation methods—phonetic (i.e., by sound), semantic (i.e., by meaning), and phonosemantic (i.e., by sounds plus meaning)—and (2) a cognitive analysis focusing on the impact of primes and expectations on consumer name evaluations.

This paper argues that it is important to include the other party's payoff in a competitor's utility (satisfaction) function. Examples of the impact are provided as well as implications for multi-stage games (competitions). A sample of 200 provides empirical support for the critical role other party results play in satisfaction, in particular the importance of relative payoffs. Several implications emerge, including a parsimonious explanation for the exponential pattern of shares in mature markets.

The authors examine two aspects of brand loyalty, purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, as linking variables in the chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance (market share and relative price). The model includes product-level, category-related controls (hedonic value and utilitarian value) and brand-level controls (brand differentiation and share of voice). The authors compile an aggregate data set for 107 brands from three separate surveys of consumers and brand managers.