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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of retail chain size on a variety of relationship marketing performance measures in the Kuwait fast food industry. These include customer satisfaction, customer retention, penetration rate, preference ranking and share of customer.

A total of 49 fast food chains, operating a total of 508 restaurants, were included in the study. Interviews with the home office marketing managers of each chain were conducted. In addition, a quota sample of 650 consumers representative of the Kuwait population with respect to age and gender was selected for participation in the study.

Findings suggest that large enterprises (LE) exhibit superior outcomes than small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on many relationship marketing (RM) performance dimensions, including satisfaction, retention, penetration, preference and share of customer. In contrast, SMEs appear to have few advantages in achieving RM outcomes over LEs. Larger firms appear to use their superior resources to take actions to develop and manage customer relationships in ways that smaller firms cannot.

Kuwait is an important emerging market in the Middle East, and managers need to understand the dynamics of this specific market.

When managed poorly, e‐business initiatives may actually transform once promising opportunities into dangerous threats. In this article, the authors outline the environmental threats posed by the Internet and e‐business practices and present a series of propositions on the relationship between managerial perceptions of e‐business’s impact on industry structure and the prevalence of a formal e‐business strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to take a contingency theory approach to examine how performance is affected by the relationships between the Miles & Snow strategic groupings and a variety of marketing strategy concepts, including a firm's service focus, service growth, market coverage, marketing initiative, market growth, Porter strategy, and market orientation.

Data for the study were gathered from a statewide survey among 125 chief executives of credit unions belonging to the Florida Credit Union League (FCUL). ROA figures were derived from government-mandated accounting reports in the state of Florida. ANOVA and correlation analysis were employed to analyze data.

This study shows that firms that match an aggressive Miles and Snow profile with a more aggressive approach to seven other strategy dimensions often enjoy higher market share relative to credit unions characterized by a different alignment of the various aspects of marketing strategy. The results also suggest that achieving such a fit is not relevant to maximizing a firm's ROA.

The research sample was biased toward medium to larger firms that may possess strategic resources superior to those of the smaller firms in the industry. Also, credit unions may tend to have somewhat less aggressive profit objectives compared to other institutions in the banking industry.

The findings outline to financial services executives the benefits of considering all dimensions of corporate strategy simultaneously, rather than one at a time.

The paper illustrates how aligning certain aspects of marketing strategy can boost particular performance indicators and provides insight as to what the most appropriate alignments are depending on the circumstances.

As far back as 1947, Alfred Marshall proposed that the disparity in income between those individuals with moderate ability and those with greater ability is larger than the disparity in talent. Building on Marshall’s thesis, argues that marginal differences in firm capability may result not only in increased profitability, but also in lower susceptibility to macro‐economic risk factors for basic manufacturing firms in industrial markets. The results seem to suggest that the firms with greater ability have in fact managed to combine resources in such a way as to create inimitable advantages. Specifically, through a commitment to product and process innovation and modern manufacturing facilities, the most successful firms in the study have been able to acquire key resources, and gain extensive control over the value creation process. The outcome is high relative product quality, relative pricing power, and lower susceptibility to macro‐economic risk.

This study adopted interview methods and field visits to collect the data. An audio recording was done for the whole interview and presented as facts in this case. Field visits were done to see the packs and understand the consumers and their purchase habits of pickles.

Pandian Pickles is a pickle manufacturer located in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, a state in the southern part of India. Mr Kandasamy, one of the partner of the Pandian pickle, had been thinking of ways to grow the business. Pandian Pickles dominated the low-price unit (LPU) market with a unique packing of pickles done in “arecanut” leaf. This added a unique flavour to their pickles. Mr Kandasamy envisioned to grow the business by introducing higher stock-keeping units in the form of jars and tap the middle class and the upper-middle-class segments in the market. In this category, there were much more prominent and branded players. Being a small regional player, Govindan wondered how Pandian Pickles would take these more prominent players in the industry head-on.

The case is ideally suited for discussing the concept of product line stretching, particularly in the product mix strategies of a small and medium enterprise (SME). The case can best fit into the courses such as Entrepreneurship Development, Product and Brand Management, Marketing Management for the Undergraduate levels and in the courses such as Strategic Marketing, Bottom of the Pyramid Markets and Strategies Management of SMEs in the postgraduate levels.

Richard Nixon and his advisors were aware of the inherent economic problems of wage–price controls: suppressed inflation, shortages, biases, avoidance, cheating, etc. Nixon's secret White House tapes reveal that Nixon disliked controls, never expecting them to extinguish inflation but only agreed to them to deflect attention from devaluation of the dollar. The political popularity of his controls changed his view of them, even producing a second freeze on retail prices in 1973. Importantly, the tapes reveal that Nixon pushed for inflationary monetary policies long after his 1972 reelection. Federal Reserve Chair, Arthur Burns, seemingly capitulated to Nixon's pressures by restraining interest rate increases in Federal Open Market Committee meetings. Politics won out over economics. Nixon and his advisors avoided addressing the reason for increasing inflation – the monetary expansion that Nixon pressured Arthur Burns to pursue in support of his 1972 re-election – an expansion that continued long after the election. This tragic policy failure was avoidable had the administration focused on controlling the true cause of the inflation.