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The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between organizational antecedents, pricing capabilities, and firm performance.

Quantitative survey of 748 managers from mostly large companies globally.

It was found that the following five key organizational resources (the 5 Cs) – center-led price management, organizational confidence, championing behaviors, organizational change capacity, and pricing capabilities – positively influence firm performance. Furthermore, it was found that center-led price management, organizational change capacity, and championing behaviors act as important antecedents to pricing capabilities and, except for the former, to organizational confidence. The authors also examine interaction and mediation effects.

The results thus suggest that generic organizational factors – namely center-led price management – as well as highly idiosyncratic firm, specific capabilities – namely organizational confidence, championing behaviors by top management, organizational change capacity, and pricing capabilities – are key requirements to increase firm performance via pricing.

The literature has paid increased attention to pricing capabilities as a set of distinctive, complex activities, routines, and processes that drive company performance. Despite this emphasis, little research has addressed the pricing-capabilities construct itself, and no accepted measure of pricing capabilities exists. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to document the design, development, and validation of a dedicated pricing-capabilities scale, PRICECAP.

Qualitative plus three quantitative surveys.

The present research describes the development of a ten-item measure, PRICECAP, that can be used to assess organizational capabilities related to pricing.

The reliability and validity of the scales were assessed through three separate quantitative studies using exploratory and confirmatory analysis. The PRICECAP scale has a variety of potential applications and can serve as a framework for future empirical research in marketing theory as well as an instrument to assess, compare, and develop pricing capabilities in marketing practice.

Empirical research has provided scales to measure value creation but a scale to measure value capture – i.e. pricing – capabilites is lacking. This study covers this gap and provides a new, parsimonious, ten-item construct to measure pricing capabilities.

This paper aims to discuss the changing role of the strategic account manager (SAM).

This paper takes the form of an interview.

SAMs, in the future, will be ecosystem captains capable of managing complex relationships and teams, of organizing data and of telling stories with analytics. SAMs in the future will be assessed along with a set of metrics that it is similar to metrics of how top management consultants are evaluated: activities, competencies, intermediary results, sales/margins and quantified business value.

This interview discusses the current and future best practices of strategic account management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the proportion of skilled jobs in subsidiaries is influenced by resource gaps created by subsidiary development.

This paper develops a range of propositions that connect the constructs of effective autonomy and organisational relationships with subsidiary employment. Propositions are built on an extensive literature review based on such approaches as the resource‐based view, transaction cost economics, network approach, and institutional theory.

The framework developed in the paper suggests that a higher proportion of employment in skilled jobs in subsidiaries is most likely in cases where subsidiary entrepreneurship, role specialization, and absorptive capacity are higher. Conversely, the proportion is likely to be lower in cases of increased institutional distance from the parent company.

The conceptual model can help parent company managers assess the likely effects of developments in effective autonomy and organisational relationships in their subsidiaries. Subsidiary managers can assess the possible impact of such factors as development of entrepreneurial activities, specialization within the multinational corporation supply chain and enhancement of absorptive capacity on the proportion of skilled jobs.

This paper is the first to describe subsidiary development from a skilled job perspective. It further develops the concept of autonomy and introduces the term “effective autonomy”.

Public sector reforms of recent decades in Europe have promoted managerialism and aimed at introducing private sector thinking and practices. However, with regard to public sector executives’ self-understanding, managerial role identities have not replaced bureaucratic ones; rather, components from both paradigms were combined. In this chapter, we introduce a bi-dimensional identity approach (attitudes and practices) that allows for different combinations and forms of hybridity. Empirically, we explore the role identities of public sector executives across Europe, building on survey data from over 7,000 top public officials in 19 countries (COCOPS survey). We identify country-level profiles, as well as patterns across countries, and find that administrative traditions can account for these profiles and patterns only to a limited extent. Rather, they have to be complemented by factors such as stability of the institutional environment (indicating lower shares of hybrid combinations) or extent of reform pressures (indicating higher shares of hybrid combinations).

The strategies to assess potential and realized customer value have received surprisingly little attention in management literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine potential customer value assessment strategies for business-to-business (B2B) firms and their special characteristics.

The empirical part of the study draws from an exploratory, two-part field study involving three pilot firms, and seven best practice firms in customer value assessment. The research design followed an inductive, discovery-oriented grounded theory approach. Primary data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 35 business managers from ten B2B firms.

The study identifies three customer value assessment strategies adopted by firms in business markets: Emergent value sales strategy; Life-cycle value management strategy; and Dedicated value specialist strategy. These strategies highlight different ways of managing and coordinating organizational units in different phases of the customer value assessment process.

The study was conducted from the supplier's perspective and is context-bound to firms operating in B2B markets.

Managers need to select an appropriate strategy for customer value assessment depending on market and offering characteristics, and assign clear responsibilities for value potential identification, baseline assessment, and long-term value realization.

The extant literature on customer value lacks understanding on customer value assessment strategies. The present study identifies three strategies that illuminate the required resources and organizational units at different phases of the customer value assessment process.

Many companies lack insights or fact-based support for the pricing decisions they make in an increasingly complex environment. In order to optimize their pricing process, managers need to identify key indicators that may influence the performance of their decisions. The purpose of this paper is to report an investigation of pricing determinants in large companies manufacturing capital goods in France. First a conceptual framework is proposed, in order to fill several gaps identified in the literature on pricing practices and more precisely by operating a distinction between environmental variables (determinants), decision making (pricing strategy and price and product-line structures) and its consequence in terms of price level.

The author conducted an empirical research on the determinants of the pricing process. This study consistedof a questionnaire survey addressed to pricing managers (or executives in charge of pricing) in 98 of the largest manufacturing companies in France about their new-product pricing decision-making process.

The author studies environmental determinants and their influence on the pricing and describes the structure of pricing determinants as a five dimensions construct: market-based, value-based, position-based, competition-based and production-based. The results show that firms rely on environmental determinants as indicators of their pricing flexibility. These indicators operate as pricing levers: a good position on these variables gives firms more pricing power. But in the vast majority of the cases, companies extensively relied on competitive conditions instead of taking advantage of a favorable position, described as pricing myopia.

This paper describes current pricing practices in leading companies with key informants (mainly pricing managers) highly involved in the pricing decision process, and contrasts two pricing orientations, pricing power vs pricing myopia.

The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in the concept of value in business markets. Furthermore, extant literature suggests that value capture can be conceptualized as the return on the firm's customer assets. However, the existing customer asset management literature has a strong bias towards consumer markets. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to create a conceptual framework for managing customer assets for improved value capture in a business market context, and to illustrate the use of the framework empirically.

The authors approach the topic with conceptual development and a longitudinal case illustration from a globally operating forestry product firm.

The findings of the study indicate that B2B firms can increase their value capture by dividing their customer base into customer portfolios, which are managed with differentiated customer management concepts targeted to increase the economic profit contribution of each customer portfolio.

The business practitioners in B2B contexts are likely to find the proposed customer portfolio approach to managing the customer assets more approachable than the prevailing customer lifetime models. In order to gain maximum value capture benefits from portfolio-specific customer management concepts, they should be approached cross-functionally instead of limiting them to the domains of marketing and sales.

The study contributes to literature on value capture and customer asset management by providing a framework for managing customer assets for increased value capture that is applicable to business markets and circumvents the majority of challenges associated with the customer lifetime value models.

In the mainstream normative pricing literature, value assessment is virtually non-existent. Although the resource-based literature recognizes that pricing is a competence, value-informed pricing practices are still weakly grounded in theory. The purpose of this paper is to strengthen the theoretical grounds of such pricing practices.

The paper applies the emerging service-dominant logic of marketing to pricing. More specifically, it apples the ten foundational premises of service-dominant logic to pricing and it places pricing in the frameworks of one of the major building blocks of service-dominant logic, namely the resource-advantage theory of competition.

From a service-dominant perspective, price is the reward for the application of specialized knowledge and skills. Pricing is an operant resource, or competence, that assesses customer value, applies it in multi-dimensional price propositions, and implements it in processes of co-creating prices with customers. Value-informed pricing is the central pricing practice within such competences.

Prices vary among others between “good” and “bad”, firms generate competitive advantage not only through value creation, but also through pricing. Learning is key to develop pricing competences.

This paper is the first to ground value-informed pricing at high levels of abstraction in general marketing theory.

The purpose of this paper is to devise recommendations for firms to formulate modes of value capture for their product innovations, ex ante. More specifically, the research question is: how can innovators try to maximize, ex ante, the appropriation of the rent they can derive from their innovating projects?

A theoretical framework is developed and proposed to assess modes of value capture of product innovations and two illustrations are provided to show how the framework can work in practice for innovation projects.

This paper presents a practitioner's view based on the development of an original concept of rent configuration and appropriable rent.

In terms of research limitations, the possible endogeneity of intellectual property protection and the timing of were not considered.

The framework allows a set of predictions regarding modes of value capture for product innovators.

The paper's contribution lies in the proposal of an integrative framework based on the concept of rent configuration, separating analytically three dimensions of innovation value, namely volume, profit and duration. This concept allows the authors to present a richer set of recommendations in comparison to previous frameworks, in order to avoid adopting the form of a yes/no decision tree that tends to over simplify the issues at stake. The authors also contemplate not only erosion effects, but also amplification effects on the rent, which constitutes another contribution of this paper.