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Next to organic food products, an assortment of ethical products is emerging in the supermarket that targets the large market segment of consumers that are open for ethical product choices but do not restrict themselves to them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the positioning strategies that marketers use to persuade consumers in this segment to buy animal-friendly products (AFPs).

The authors approach product positioning from a consumption values perspective from which they examine strategies that make animal welfare (AW) personally relevant to the buyer because they reinforce AW with suitable consumption value (functional, emotional, social, sensory, epistemic and/or ethical). Using data from 129 AFPs from a Dutch supermarket, the authors explore the positioning strategies of these products.

The results identified four different strategies used to position AFPs in a Dutch supermarket. They respectively call upon consumers’ emotions, functional or sensory perceptions, curiosity and sense of public welfare. The findings also show substantial category differences, with fresh products relying predominantly on emotional value and processed food on functional value.

This study is the first to empirically explore positioning strategies of AFPs on the basis of their consumption values. The study offers a novel perspective to understand how companies try to extend the market for AFPs, thus providing a basis for a new research agenda.

This study explores the integration of smallholder farmers into the export market in Vietnam, an emerging economy. By introducing a prospective framework, we seek to provide insight into factors that influence this integration process.

This study examines the expected growth and entry of Vietnamese smallholder farmers into high-value export markets. We collected information from 200 independent farmers as well as from five local extension workers, who provided information on 50 farmers.

The study reveals that the adoption of new business models is more influential than the variables traditionally included in models of export-market integration in predicting expected growth and entry into high-value export markets. In addition, the results highlight divergent views between farmers and extension workers regarding the role of collectors, with farmers perceiving collectors as potential partners, while extension workers see them as impediments to growth.

The prospective model presented in this study highlights the importance of policy interventions aimed at promoting new business models and addressing infrastructure and capital constraints for the sustainable transformation of agricultural sectors in emerging markets.

This is one of the first articles to apply a prospective approach to export-market integration and demonstrate its efficacy through an empirical study. The suggested prospective approach could facilitate the design of policies aimed at export-market integration within the context of dynamic, emerging markets.

As corporate sustainability is systemic, it cannot be achieved without effective involvement of suppliers. This study aims to examine the drivers of supplier companies’ resource allocation to a sustainability issue that affects customer companies and society at large.

Supplier companies’ resource allocation for a sustainability issue is explained from variables at the levels of the institutional, supply chain and internal environments of a supplier company. The framework is tested with a moderated regression model on 102 supplier companies in animal-based supply chains, focussing on their resource allocation for farm animal welfare.

The findings show that supply chain factors have the strongest influence on suppliers’ resource allocation, including a strong effect of investment specificity and a U-shaped effect of chain integration. Also, significant effects from institutional variables, namely, the pressure on consumer companies, and an inverted U-shaped effect of sustainability competition are found. The innovativeness, referring to the internal environment of supplier companies, appears as another important factor for the allocation of resources to animal welfare, as a sustainability issue.

The results have implications for consumer market companies to deal with sustainability issues that require involvement of their suppliers, for supplier companies to increase their competitive positions and strengthen their relationships within the supply chain, and for policymakers seeking solutions for sustainability issues in the market domain.

While existing literature focusses mostly on the corporate sustainability of highly visible and large consumer companies, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the drivers of supplier companies’ resource allocation for a sustainability issue, namely, animal welfare. It provides insights on what drives supplier companies, usually operating outside the spotlight, to become part of a sustainability transition.

This study aims to better understand the impact of norm-challenging products on consumers’ perceptions of mainstream products and retailers. By showing that sustainable market offerings are feasible, products with sustainability labels, such as Fairtrade and organic products, implicitly question the legitimacy of mainstream brands in the market.

This paper uses an experiment, based on scenarios that portray the consumer in a shopping situation for their usual coffee brand when they encounter an organic Fairtrade coffee. The paper distinguishes a situation in which the sustainable and the mainstream products compete, from a situation in which the two brands collaborate.

The results show that norm-challenging products deteriorate perceptions of mainstream products and the companies that produce them but improve the image of retailers that include these products in their assortment. If labelled products are sold under the heading of mainstream brands, they still spill over negatively to other products of that brand but positively to the brand company.

The spillover effects of norm-challenging products to mainstream companies are an incentive for mainstream firms to enhance the sustainability of their activities.

Whereas much literature has focused on the first steps of creating awareness among consumers for sustainability, this paper is the first that tries to understand how typical consumers of mainstream brands develop preferences for products that are more sustainable.

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.

Sustainable products often suffer a competitive disadvantage compared with mainstream products because they must cover ecological and social costs that their competitors leave to future generations. The purpose of this paper is to identify price strategies for sustainable products that minimize this efficiency disadvantage.

The strategies and their determinants from the pricing environment are derived from an inductive sequential case study of certified food products, such as organic and fair trade products. Data are collected through desk research and interviews.

The results reveal six different strategies that build on three basic mechanisms: cost-based pricing in combination with price fairness, increasing willingness to pay through perceptions of quality and/or price, and price stability in which costs are compensated for by scale and/or learning effects.

The framework can help companies that offer sustainable products strengthen their market positions and it can help policy makers that partly rely on markets to achieve sustainability objectives.

The existing pricing literature on sustainability predominantly takes a consumer approach. This study breaks new ground by extending this work with a strategic marketing approach offering a choice set of strategies for managers.

This article aims to address the relationship between price strategies and price‐setting practices. The first derive from a normative tradition in the pricing literature and the latter from a descriptive tradition. Price strategies are visible in the market, whereas price‐setting practices are hidden behind the boundaries of an organization.

The study deals with the relationship between price strategies and price‐setting practices that refer to the use of customer value, competition, and cost information. Hypotheses are tested on survey data on 95 small and medium‐sized manufacturing and service firms in The Netherlands.

The results show that price strategies and price‐setting practices are related because strategies are implemented through price‐setting practices. However, some firms do not pursue any of the strategies indicated by pricing theory, some firms engage in practices for no clear strategic reasons, and some firms insufficiently engage in appropriate practices to implement their strategic choices.

The results are limited to small companies. Researchers should examine why firms may not pursue any price strategy that is offered by pricing theory. They may also focus on organizational learning and pricing capabilities.

Managers need greater awareness about the price strategies they can use, should be cautious about a potential mismatch between price strategies and price‐setting practices, and should reassess whether their firms are capable of engaging in the appropriate practices.

Linking price strategies to price‐setting practices reduces conceptual confusion in the pricing literature and may help to specify the gap between pricing theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the dialogue, access, risk assessment and transparency model of value co-creation processes (dialogue, access, risk and transparency) on new service market performance (NSMP) with the mediating role of value-informed pricing in the context of business-to-business (B2B).

The data were collected through a cross-sectional survey of 230 managers of the telecommunications industry in Malaysia and analyzed through structural equation modeling using SmartPLS v.3.3.3 software.

This study found that dialogue and transparency are predictors of NSMP. The findings indicate that value-informed pricing plays a mediating role in the relationship between dialogue and transparency with NSMP.

Disclosing pricing related information, providing up to date information to the customers, making clear to the customers about new offerings would certainly influence value-informed pricing. Thus, managers can enhance customer engagement in the interaction processes to better understand customer expectations of new services and how the new services should be priced.

The link between value co-creation and value-informed pricing has been only conceptualized in literature. This study has opened a new stream of research, examining the relationship of interactional-based value co-creation process with value-informed pricing and NSMP in the context of B2B relationship from providers’ perspective.

Succeeding in export markets remains a challenging task for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in developing countries. Empirical studies from these regions on SMEs’ internationalisation remain scarce bringing contrasting evidence to those emerging from developed countries. To increase understanding on these issues, the present study adopts a novel fuzzy-set comparative analysis technique to investigate the combination(s) of different resource factors driving Algerian SMEs’ export performance. Using a sample of 103 exporters, the study identifies two distinct resource configurations likely to boost SMEs export performance. The present study holds important implications for the internationalisation literature and the export promotion organisations in developing countries.

The objective of this study is to examine whether sustainability labels like Fair Trade have a spin‐off effect to mainstream products in the consumer perception: do consumers perceive mainstream products and brands more negatively in the presence of a product with a sustainability label?

Five scientific experiments were conducted to test the spin‐off effect of products with sustainability labels on evaluations of mainstream products. Experiments vary with respect to product category, label, respondents, and stimuli. Next, a focus group study was conducted to further explain the findings.

The results show that a spin‐off effect of sustainability labels in the consumer perception is unlikely. None of the experiments shows a significant spin‐off effect, neither directly, nor under the conditions of quality differences between supermarkets, search behaviour of consumers, presence of competing labels, and different involvement categories. Also, a variety of different types of stimuli (scenarios and visual) and research designs (experiments and focus group interviews) did not reveal the hypothesized effect.

The results imply that retailers' fears for a negative spin‐off effect of products with sustainability labels to the rest of the assortment hold little ground. Although the evidence is consistent over different designs, stimuli, contexts, and dependent variables, only a limited range of stimuli‐method combinations is tested.

This study is the first to investigate the existence of a spin‐off effect from products with a sustainability label to mainstream products.