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This paper aims to conceptualize and characterize service ecosystems, addressing calls for research on this important and under-researched topic.

The authors draw on four meta-theoretical foundations of S-D logic – resource integration, resource density, practices and institutions – providing a new integrated conceptual framework of ecosystem well-being. They then apply this conceptualization in the context of a complex healthcare setting, exploring the characteristics of ecosystem well-being at the meso level.

This study provides an integrated conceptual framework to explicate the nature and structure of well-being in a complex service ecosystem; identifies six key characteristics of ecosystem well-being; illustrates service ecosystem well-being in a specific healthcare context, zooming in on the meso level of the ecosystem and noting the importance of embedding a shared worldview; provides practical guidance for managers and policy makers about how to manage complex service ecosystems in their quest for improving service outcomes; and offers an insightful research agenda.

This research focuses on service ecosystems with an illustration in one healthcare context, suggesting additional studies that explore other industry contexts.

Practically, the study indicates the imperative for managing across mutually adapting levels of the ecosystem, identifying specific new practices that can improve service outcomes.

Examining well-being in the context of a complex service ecosystem is critical for policymakers charged with difficult decisions about balancing the demands of different levels and actors in a systemic world.

The study is the first to conceptualize and characterize well-being in a service ecosystem, providing unique insights and identifying six specific characteristics of well-being.

Drawing on value cocreation, this study examines health-care customers’ perceptions of patient-centered care (PCC) in hospital and online primary care settings. This study aims to address how are the key principles of PCC related, how the relationships between key PCC principles and outcomes (subjective well-being and service satisfaction) vary depending on the channel providing the care (hospital/online primary care) and what differences are placed on the involvement of family and friends in these different settings by health-care customers.

This study comprises four samples of health-care customers (Sample 1 n = 272, Sample 2 n = 278, Sample 3 n = 275 and Sample 4 n = 297) totaling 1,122 respondents. This study models four key principles of PCC: service providers respecting health-care customers’ values, needs and preferences; collaborative resources of the multi-disciplinary care team; health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources; and health-care customers involving family and friends, explicating which principles of PCC have positive effects on outcomes: subjective well-being and service satisfaction.

Findings confirm that health-care customers want to feel respected by service providers, use their own resources to actively collaborate in their care and have multi-disciplinary teams coordinating and integrating their care. However, contrary to prior findings, for online primary care, service providers respecting customers’ values needs and preferences do not translate into health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources. Further, involving family and friends has mixed results for online primary care. In that setting, this study finds that involving family and friends only positively impacts service satisfaction, when care is provided using video and not voice only.

By identifying which PCC principles influence the health-care customer experience most, this research shows policymakers where they should invest resources to achieve beneficial outcomes for health-care customers, service providers and society, thus advancing current thinking and practice.

This research provides a health-care customer perspective on PCC and shows how the resources of the health-care system can activate the health-care customer’s own resources. It further shows the role of technology in online care, where it alters how care is experienced by the health-care customer.

This study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.

The authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.

The results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.

Amid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.

Using Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

The purpose of this study is to examine how corporate communication of their social programs on their websites affects the ratings of those programs by independent rating agencies. Firms expend resources on corporate social programs (CSPs) to promote their corporate social responsibility and sustainability credentials. Stakeholders, however, often respond to such “self-promotion” with skepticism because they believe that there are inconsistencies between corporate claims and actions. This research draws on attribution theory as a framework to examine how the perceived CSP performance of firms by uncontrollable sources are affected when firms disseminate CSP information on firm websites, i.e. a controllable source, where their claims may not be verifiable.

This study uses a two-step, mixed method study for the analysis using data from Fortune 500 companies. A qualitative content analysis process identifies the interfaces of CSP and their communications on firms’ website. The process allows the authors to collect CSP data systematically from firm websites and to identify relevant variables through the patterns that emerge from the analysis. The findings are used in a quantitative analysis to study how the patterns underlying CSP communication on their websites affect the ratings of firms’ CSP by independent rating agencies.

Results show that the location, the manner, the content and the scope of CSP information dissemination on firm websites, as well as perceived commitment to CSP identified on the website are important drivers of perceived CSP performance. A robustness check using an alternative independent rating of CSP also provides results that are supportive of the findings. In addition, the effects are found to differ by sector of operation, firm age and profitability.

This research suggests that communication of CSPs at controllable sources of firm information dissemination can have a significant effect on the evaluation of CSP at uncontrollable sources when such communication facilitates the assessment of other information from a firm to determine the motive underlying a firm’s CSP.

The findings show that firms and managers can influence the perceived ratings, rankings or scores of their CSP by stakeholders when they put the right information at the right place on their corporate websites. One of the findings shows that even moderate levels of CSP commitment demonstrated on firm websites result in positive perceptions of CSP, which has marked practical implications.

The findings show that integrating even a medium level of commitment to CSP increases the positive perceptions of a firm’s CSP. Thus, society benefits from the firm’s action without a substantial impact on the firm’s profits.

This research shows that firm-controlled sources of CSP information dissemination to stakeholders can affect uncontrollable sources of CSP information evaluation.

Extant literature indicates that increased product market diversification generates both positive and negative impact on firm performance. This inconclusive pattern hinders the decision-making of deploying a firm’s resources across different markets. This research aims to embed diversification into a moderation-based framework and demonstrates the conditions under which increased diversification produces either beneficial or harmful effects on firm outcomes. The authors introduce another market configuration dimension, viz., market emphasis, and reveal how changes in diversification and in emphasis yield interactive effects on an important firm performance indicator, idiosyncratic risk. An additional moderator, market turbulence, is also incorporated to further enrich the model in a three-way interaction. Results show that when market turbulence is high, and a firm highly skews its resources to some of its markets, diversifying into more market domains will increase firm idiosyncratic risk. A better choice during increased diversification is to evenly emphasize each of its markets. However, in a market displaying low turbulence, the high diversification-high emphasis pattern may be preferred because of lower firm risk.

To test the hypotheses, the authors collected a comprehensive archival data that contained a large group of public traded US-based manufacturing companies from three different resources. These were the Compustat Annual Database, the Center for Research in Security Prices database and Compustat Business Segment Database. These databases and the combinatorial approach are widely adopted in marketing and management research involving firm strategies and financial outcomes.

When market turbulence is high, simultaneously increasing market diversification and emphasis will more strongly raise firm idiosyncratic risk. However, polarizing into either diversification or emphasis reduces firm risk. When in a low turbulence market, expanding to more product markets and simultaneously emphasizing key markets will decrease idiosyncratic risk. One noticeable fact is that irrespective of whether a firm is in high or low turbulence conditions, choosing a diversification strategy always decreases firm risk when market emphasis is low. However, the impact of this effect however is higher when turbulence is greater. The authors also present the boundary conditions under which the three-way interaction holds.

First, the extension to the utilization of idiosyncratic risk stretches the understanding of effective ways of reducing firm risks from an angle of marketing management. This view of firm risk also contributes to further analysis of shareholder value. Classic corporate asset valuation focuses more on the financial performance indicators as well as the firm’s strategic domains. This research thus provides a unique and meaningful guideline for the corporate valuation approach from the angle of analyzing the firm’s business segment scope and emphasis in the context of the environment.

The idea about how many product markets a firm should enter is always one of the primary decisions that contain significant trade-offs. This makes the managers choice difficult during the decision-making processes. The authors suggest that managers should not only consider the scope of product markets but also think carefully about the resources allocated toward each segment. A matrix with dimensions of diversification and emphasis can be explicitly studied during the strategy formulation. The individual blocks within this matrix may have significant outcome differences.

Previous research focuses on either a firm’s internal assets or external competitive situations when researchers seek the drivers of risk-reduction. This research extends this horizon by adding the interplay between a set of fundamental firm decision areas, diversification and emphasis and the external conditions facing a firm (turbulence).

After completion of the case study, students will be able to appreciate the challenges in managing a pharma sales team by learning the nuances of business hygiene, learn how new managers taking over a pharma sales team analyze data of a sales territory by balancing both quantitative and qualitative factors, evaluate the challenges of performance management of sales teams and balancing the expectations of various stakeholders, understand the approach of sales and effort hygiene – correlating data points that may not be directly connected but have a dependency and learn to forecast and build a business projection

Innov-Health’s dermatology (skin and hair) division in West Bengal, an Eastern state of India, recently hired Pradeep Vir as the area business manager. Innov-Health, a leading 100-year-old global healthcare player, was headquartered in the USA, with categories spanning oncology, immunology, neurosciences, metabolic, dermatology and pain management. Its brand Acnend, an acne cream, the only product in the division, was a market leader in India. Acnend required doctors’ prescriptions to be bought and was sold by pharmacies via distributors. In India, Acnend was doing well at the end of the first quarter (January–March) of 2022 in a highly competitive product category. Vir had just joined the West Bengal territory with four major cities, each with a district manager (DM). The position had been vacant for the past three months, but the DMs had done well in their sales performance for Quarter 1. All of them had achieved their targets, so Quarter 2, when he joined, started on a high note. But Salil Govind, the regional sales manager, his boss, was very concerned that a territory that had no manager had been consistently doing so well. He was concerned that the territory had far greater potential than the Quarter 1 projections had laid out. Govind now wanted Vir to re-work the Quarter 2 projections of West Bengal on priority since April had already begun. As Vir started working on the data, he was perplexed. While at a very obvious level, all four DMs were outperforming, there were gaps in varying degrees in the effort levels of each. The cumulative key performance indicators such as inventory, call average and doctor coverage and the data essentials for business hygiene[1] were worrisome and needed to be addressed. In addition, the doctor coverage, resulting in conversion, left a lot to be desired. However, he was conscious that he was new to the organization and would have to tread carefully. He wanted to do well. Vir got down to analyzing and taking action.

This case study is suitable for use in graduate-level management programs. It can be useful in courses such as sales management, marketing strategy and marketing analytics. The case study is also well suited to introducing students to the basics of sales, sales productivity, territory management, managing a team and business forecasting. The case study provides students a step-by-step understanding of business hygiene, and how just looking at overall sales numbers may not be conclusive, but a deep dive into effort and productivity is far more useful for forecasting.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

This paper aims to examine the traditional business communities and family businesses of India, their emergence and sustained growth.

The authors analyze the role of business communities in family businesses of India and identify business communities that have still sustained and marked a global presence.

Business communities such as Marwaris have the knack for business activities and are leaders of family businesses in India today, who have sustained their past success and continue to create new histories. Other traditional business communities such as Parsis, Sindhis, Chettiars and Gujarati banias have not been able to sustain much. Possible reasons were switching to white-collar jobs, taking up diplomacy and other professions, inter caste marriages, international migration in search of business and Indian government policies.

This study provides a useful source of information for academics, policy-makers and economists.

Traditional business communities populate the list of family businesses that have marked their global presence. This paper identifies various factors that are responsible for the growth and sustainability of these business communities.

The study clarifies the role of business communities in domestic economic development.

The paper explored traditional business communities of India and assessed their role in family businesses of India that currently mark a global presence.