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This study aims to explore the impact of marketing agility on the business-to-business (B2B) firms’ capacity to address unexpected events such as the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, examining how they reshape their strategies during the different stages of a crisis.

This study follows a theory-building approach and performs an in-depth exploratory multiple-case study in the context of 16 Italian firms operating in the B2B sector.

The study develops an event-sequence-based framework and illustrates how agile marketing strategies empower B2B firms to cope with a crisis across three crucial moments: the event phase, the response management phase and the investigation phase.

This paper contributes to a better understanding of marketing agility in the context of crisis management by showing the agile marketing strategies that B2B firms adopt during the different stages of a crisis. This work provides a useful foundation to assist managers in coping with market uncertainty. It suggests practical guidelines to make more informed strategic and operational marketing decisions, increasing a firm’s capacity to act in today’s fast-moving, complex times.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the typologies of phygital (synaeresis of “physical” and “digital”) customer experiences (CXs) that can arise in high-tech retail based on the intensity of consumers' responses and reactions to the stimuli triggered by firms. Moreover, it explores how firms attempt to shape the architecture of the phygital CXs. Notably, this article identifies the flexible and agile strategies implemented by firms to enhance the several typologies of phygital CXs, with the intention of better exploiting physical and digital features to respond to the differences in customers' needs, preferences and expectations.

This study performs an in-depth exploratory single-case study based on semi-structured interviews with the customers, managers and employees of the Webidoo Store.

This study develops a framework illustrating the main typologies of ordinary (“hostile”, “controversial” and “disappointing”) and extraordinary (“passionate” and “explorative”) CXs that can arise in phygital contexts. Also, it identifies some key flexible and agile strategies (“decompressive strategy”, “mentoring strategy”, “prompting strategy” and “entertaining strategy”) that companies might follow to adjust their offerings and respond quickly to the different forms of phygital CXs to create a more compelling experience tailored to customers' needs, preferences and expectations.

Among the study's limitations are the single-case study methodology and a specific setting like the Italian one. As a result, future studies could broaden the study to include other research contexts and countries. The paper offers significant managerial insights based on the many forms of CX across ordinary and extraordinary CXs. Thus, it provides critical takeaways for businesses to meet customer demand.

This paper analyzes the different typologies of ordinary and extraordinary CXs that could occur in phygital contexts based on the intensity of consumers' responses and reactions to firms' stimuli. Also, it explores how firms attempt to shape the architecture of the phygital CXs through flexible and agile strategies. From this paper, managers and decision-makers can reflect on successful strategies they could use to affect the stimuli to which customers respond in an agile manner, thus enhancing phygital CXs.

Building inclusive businesses (IBs) that generate shared value (a value including both social and business benefits simultaneously) is essential to instill the principles of inclusion, diversity, and equity in society. Yet, few studies specifically address how shared value is created in IBs. Drawing on the exploratory insights of a single case study involving an inclusive company IntendiMe, we provide an empirical investigation of the process of shared value creation. The findings of this study have shown that to create shared value in IBs, firms need to implement different practices that can be grouped into the following three phases: (1) aligning the environment with inclusion, (2) execution of inclusive business operations, and (3) value construction. During the first two phases, business and social values are still perceived separately; only after the execution of the two preparatory phases, in the third phase, IBs build shared value with the close collaboration of different market players and stakeholders. Shared value can be translated into developing innovative, inclusive products and market expansions that satisfy multiple needs of socially excluded people. With this study, we contribute to the literature on IBs and shared value by offering a dynamic analysis of the development of shared value and delineating a concrete set of practices that managers may accomplish in their business to develop a more significant value proposition based on socially inclusive principles.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This paper demonstrated the various ways that marketing agility can help firms to handle crises such as the pandemic.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, socialise and think about their future. The disruptive shock that hit societies all over the world had a significantly negative impact on businesses, creating not only economic discontinuity but also uncertainty and disorientation. This special issue on COVID-19 aims to phrase the pandemic crisis and its impact on how to do business.

The authors follow MacInnis’s (2011) suggestion that a conceptual article sees what others have identified in a new or revised way.

The authors develop the crisis management framework. The authors acknowledge that disruptive events may be repeated, and their consequences will have long-term and permanent impacts. These aspects highlight the need for a systemic approach in which the focus is not limited to an analysis of the cause of the crisis and ways of solving it but includes the paths through which the business, economic and social systems evolve because of the crisis.

Managerial policies, business models and practices that have been effective up to now will probably no longer work. Beyond this backdrop, the articles compiled in this special issue aim to help set the agenda for post-COVID business research

The authors identify four primary themes captured by these articles: strategies, capabilities, organisational transformations and value processes. In their entirety, they represent pieces of a conceptual puzzle that do not provide knowledge of “hard facts” but rather a “soft interpretation of how to approach the “new normal”, i.e. a new social and business context.