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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of intuition in successful merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions. M&As are strategic decisions that can create growth, open up new markets and strengthen the company’s position and competence portfolio. Strategic decisions involve, by their very nature, considerable investments and have company-wide and long-lasting implications. At the same time, the decision-makers have access to large amounts of data from various sources, but these data are often uncertain and inaccurate and entail numerous assumptions. Therefore, M&A decisions are only rational to a degree, and emotional elements, such as intuition, likely play a significant role.

Acknowledging how critically important, but also how difficult, M&As are, the authors analyzed nine instances (cases) of successful acquisitions, in which the executives believed that the role of intuition was critical.

The findings show that intuition in strategic decision-making emerges on three levels: individual, collective and environmental.

This paper encourages top executives to proactively acknowledge and take advantage of intuition in their strategic decision-making. It proposes a framework to help with these endeavors.

This paper contributes by highlighting that intuition is not just a factor on an individual level; it can also surface from group interactions as well as the environment. Surprisingly, all the executives interviewed spoke of the positive effects that intuition can have on acquisition decisions. This is in contrast to the dominant view that considers intuition as nonrational and even as a form of bias.

This study aims to identify and analyze the different roles corporate social responsibility (CSR) can play in corporate strategy. By acknowledging that one of the biggest challenges for companies in committing to sustainability is the strategy work, the authors outline specific strategic initiatives to achieve these roles and the strategic outcomes that will follow such initiatives.

Four illustrative case examples show how companies are recasting the role of CSR. The new CSR roles are characterized through two strategic dimensions: an inside-out (firm-oriented) vs outside-in (market-oriented) orientation and an emphasis on leveraging vs an emphasis on prospecting activities.

The findings show that to realize the opportunities of CSR for business, the environment and society at large, the role of CSR in the boardroom must be reconfigured. By recasting its role, CSR can become a driver for the strategy process and a transformative force generating strategic changes.

This paper aims to encourage top executives to take a proactive stance toward responsibility, recognize the new roles and potential impact that CSR can have in corporate strategy and assist strategic decision-making regarding CSR.

The paper aims to move beyond integrating sustainability into existing strategies and business models by demonstrating how sustainability can also inspire strategic changes a priori when the role of CSR is recast in companies. By viewing CSR as a driver of corporate strategy and strategic initiatives, the authors suggest that besides helping the environment, the community and society, CSR can take care of corporate strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and characterise executives’ inside-out (firm-oriented) and outside-in (market-oriented) mental models. As these two orientations are vital for strategic decision-making, yet potentially contradictory, it is important to understand the role of inside-out and outside-in thinking in executives’ agendas.

Qualitative, semi-structured interviews of 15 senior executives were used to capture insights into executives’ mental models. Data analysis was conducted following the principles of abstraction, theory emerging from data and constant comparison.

Four archetypes of executive mental models are identified and characterised along two dimensions (inside-out or outside-in orientation and focus on rational or emotional aspects).

The study introduces a tentative framework for practitioners to identify and deploy the potential of the mental models that guide executive decision-making.

The study extends prior research on mental models by combining this approach with inside-out and outside-in orientations and customer value propositions. In addition, it introduces four archetypes that illustrate the distinct potential of different mental models.

This paper's purpose is to develop a meaning-based framework for customer loyalty by examining how consumers make sense of customer loyalty through meanings and metaphors.

A qualitative study based on in-depth interviews and focus group data in the retail context was conducted with Finnish customers. The data were analysed with qualitative data analysis techniques such as the constant comparative technique.

The empirical findings comprise eight loyalty meanings characterised by two dimensions. The first dimension is reflexive vs. routinised, and the second dimension is private vs. social. The loyalty types are dimensionalised through four metaphors: loyalty as freedom of choice; as being conventional and binding; and as belongingness.

The findings improve the way customer loyalty currently is understood in the retail setting. The paper proposes that customer insight that utilises thick data can be used to grasp loyalty meanings. These data are rich in context and detail, and they take into account customers' everyday lives. Utilising thick data in the form of storytelling fuels customers' meaning-making related to customer loyalty, potentially enriching their relationship with the retailer.

Customer loyalty has been driven largely by a transactional and company-centric perspective. This article presents an alternative view of customer loyalty that accounts for the variety of meanings that customers may assign to their loyalty-related thoughts and behaviours.

The vision should ignite and facilitate strategic change as well as help a company to transform and reinvent itself in the face of competition. Too often executives use vision as a mere slogan without real relevance. The purpose of this study is to show how the vision guides strategic change.

A case study from a successful multi-format, multi-industry service business is used to illustrate the role of vision in strategic change management.

The article illustrates how the vision was used in practice in guiding the strategic transformation process of the case organization. The study presents four focal tasks of the vision and concludes with five practical guidelines for executives.

The article highlights the role of vision as an important tool for managing strategic change.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of expertise on prechoice decision processes and final outcomes. By decomposing verbal protocols collected from 90 individuals who made one complex, mortgage loan decision, we could compare the frequency and type of elementary information processes evoked. We found that experts, relative to less knowledgeable decision makers, made a greater number of problem framing statements; made more references to why an option was being retained for further consideration; and used more compensatory decision rules. In addition, we found that misunderstanding externally provided information mediates the expertise‐choice relationship. Novices were significantly more likely to misunderstand information than were more knowledgeable decision makers. As a result, there was greater variance in novices’ final choices than was the case with experts’. The deleterious effect of mis‐understandings is disconcerting because consumers frequently miscomprehend print communications.

The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the challenges of business-to-business (B2B) research relevance from the point of view of top executives.

Ten in-depth interviews with top executives from different B2B industries were conducted and analyzed by using Arndt’s (1985) elements of a healthy discipline, i.e. knowledge, problems and instruments.

The findings reveal 12 challenges that characterize contemporary B2B research relevance from a top executive perspective.

The research offers genuine top executive insight. More research from different perspectives is needed to broaden the understanding of B2B research relevance.

Reflecting B2B research with the identified challenges can contribute to better research designs, narrowing the gap between B2B scholars and practitioners. Altogether, it contributes to the health of the B2B discipline. The study also introduces a new approach to analyzing research relevance by using the elements of scientific balance.

Despite the fact that customer orientation is increasingly used as a strategic guideline to ensure companies’ long-term success, it is too often left at conceptual level without any managerial or executive translation. To address this practical gap, the purpose of the paper is to build an executive perspective on customer orientation through the mechanism of customer value dimensions.

An intensive case study from a successful retail service business is used to illustrate how customer orientation is applied in actual strategic decision making at the executive level. The case business is a multi-sector service business that took a strategic turn toward customer orientation in the 2000s. As a result, the company has been able to increase their market share to become the market leader as well as stay ahead of the competition and increase customer loyalty.

The study provides a practical tool of disentangling customer orientation into four customer value dimensions and linking them with appropriate executive level strategic decision making.

The study helps executives uncover the inner meaning of customer orientation, move beyond traditional conceptualization of customer orientation, and adopt customer value orientation. This necessitates not only understanding customer value criteria, but also linking the diverse criteria to executive level strategic decision making.

The study concretizes and uncovers how customer orientation can be implemented by incorporating both economic, functional, emotional, and symbolic customer value dimensions into executive level strategic decision making.

Delivering superior customer experiences through experiential marketing strategies has become increasingly important in food retailing. While retailers seek new sources of competitive advantage, the perspective to customer experiences should be extended from the in‐store activities to post‐purchase where the value‐in‐use of the groceries eventually actualises. In this quest for an enhanced customer experience, the possibilities provided by Internet‐based service applications have been an underexplored area of research. Towards that end, the purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse how such service applications can facilitate customers' post‐purchase experiences in the context of food retailing.

A case study research setting was applied focusing on an internet‐based service application that provides customers with detailed information about the healthfulness of their groceries. Altogether 456 submissions of customer feedback data and 16 customer interviews were generated and analysed. Subsequently, a typology of facilitating customers' post‐purchase food retail experiences was constructed to uncover and illustrate how the service succeeds in extending the customer food retail experience towards the customer's context.

The authors identified four types of the typology, including “Playing”, “Check‐pointing”, “Learning”, and “Goal‐orientation”. These four types can be conceptualised through the utilitarian versus hedonic dimensions and the degree of customer transformation.

The paper introduces internet‐based service applications as a suitable experiential marketing strategy. It offers a fresh perspective and new insight into leveraging on the capabilities of the Internet in facilitating customers' post‐purchase food retail experiences.

Existing research suggests a multitude of approaches to value co‐creation that bring with them a range of different ideas on what constitutes the concept. The purpose of this paper is to identify the sources of the differing approaches, and so reduce the complexity of the concept and develop a business‐oriented analytical framework for assessing the opportunities presented by value co‐creation.

Through exploration of the different theoretical approaches to value co‐creation the sources of friction are identified. Addressing the conceptual complexity provides a sound basis for the development of a business‐oriented analytical framework.

The multifaceted nature of value co‐creation arises owing to the differing approaches to what determines the value, the co‐, and the creation elements of the concept. The study concludes that both scholars and practitioners should focus more on identifying and understanding what kind of value is co‐created for whom, using what resources, and through what mechanism.

A business‐oriented analytical framework is developed that helps practitioners to assess and approach the opportunities presented by value co‐creation.

The paper introduces an analytical and fresh perspective on value co‐creation. It helps to clarify the nuances in the nature of the concept and contributes to an enhanced understanding of it.