Search results

The purpose of this paper is to define a typology of strategic segmentation accounting for antecedents (potentially conscious or subconscious) that influence marketing managers’ practice of strategic segmentation, thereby formulating a new theoretical basis to bridge the current theory–practice literature gap in strategic segmentation.

Based on the resource-advantage theory, this paper defines a typology of strategic segmentation that depicts how a firm’s access to imperfectly mobile resources relates to the marketing manager’s assumed heterogeneity of the market and to the manager’s approach to the market.

The authors postulate a typology of firms’ strategic segmentation and approach to the market that is heavily influenced, and potentially limited, by the firm’s available resources to effectively segment and address the market.

The typology suggests that resource availability affects a manager’s view and approach to the market. Therefore, testing of this typology should be performed to provide an empirical basis for a taxonomical foundation of strategic segmentation. Empirical testing should examine whether: resource availability is directly related to managers’ views of market heterogeneity, resources are negatively correlated with market approach, market-based intelligence (customer needs) are linked to the market approach, and there is relationship between a firm’s position within the typology and its long-term performance.

This paper provides an understanding that a manager’s knowledge of resource availability may be strategically counter-productive when creating a strategic segmentation. This limitation may lead to short-run choices for segmentation and market approach. Managers should, therefore, consider their strategic goals both with and without limiting their view based on current resources.

This paper provides the first typology of strategic segmentation by considering theoretical foundations of business that could bridge the often-noted theory–practice gap of segmentation.

This paper aims to investigate what activities allow the firm to efficiently and effectively integrate social media into its strategic marketing activities.

As the current research investigates a new area of focus in the literature, an exploratory study consistent with the adoption of new technology in a firm was used to identify salient activities. In-depth interviews with those who oversee their firm’s social media strategies were conducted to discover and assess organizational activities.

Findings suggest that many firms did not adopt organizational activities important for effective social media execution, leading us to the view social media as the “step-child” of corporate functions, not receiving resources more traditional functions would receive; those responsible for the social media function, an exercise in external communications, may be hampered by poor internal communications; and few firms have defined and measured goals for social media where employees are held accountable for supporting an overall marketing strategy.

The findings point the way for future confirmatory empirical research of organizational activities, top management team support and effective internal communication in the rapid-response environment of social media. Findings also provide implications for marketing practitioners for the use and measurement of social media to achieve marketing objectives.

The current research is meaningful and unique in that it approaches social media from the organizational process perspective, which has received little attention in the social media literature.

Shalit and Yitzhaki presented the mean‐extended Gini (MEG) as a workable alternative to the Markowitz mean‐variance approach in 1984. Since then, the challenge has been to extend the MEG approach. The purpose of this paper is to propose a generalization of the MEG approach for making customized optimal asset allocation to control both down‐performance and/or up‐performance.

The MEG approach is used to make strategical allocation tailored to the investor risk aversion and gain propensity measured by characteristic parameters of the extended Gini measures.

The authors set up two optimization problems: the former focused on controlling the risk, the latter on emphasizing the potential gains. Sufficient conditions such that the efficient MEG‐risk frontier coincides with the inefficient MEG‐gain frontier are stated. In the realistic scenarios that portfolios have asymmetrical distributions and/or the investor profile is very conservative or very aggressive, the desirable occurrence that a portfolio is optimal under both optimizations may occur.

The main contribution of this research is to have pointed out that optimal allocation must be tailored to both the investor's risk and gain profile; and, that the optimality may be not preserved if the investor's risk‐gain profile changes. So, the statement “optimal allocation” should be reworded as “optimal allocation personalized to the investor's risk‐aversion and gain‐propensity”.