38.3 Channels and Customer Management

(Hadida, Heide, and Bell 2018) The temporary marketing organization

  • A temporary organization is defined as “temporally bounded group of interdependent actors formed to perform a complex task.” (C. M. Burke and Morley 2016, 1237)

    • “temporally bounded” = “institutionalized termination”

  • “Stand-Alone” Temporary Organization: Discrete time horizon (also known as stand-alone)

    • Different from Joint venture (no past), Start-up (no past), Permanent organization.

    • Absent of (1) history of interaction between members (might induce info asymmetry regarding task ability -> self-selection to send signals, and require more enforcement mechanisms, but also because of the discreteness nature, this can be hard) (2) future.

  • Hybrids and fully embedded temporary organizations: the role of context

    • Temporary can acquire a post or a future using

      • its members’ prior relationships

      • Being embedded within a permanent organization with organizational context (but have to be careful, because “strong” prior ties can have limited information access(Granovetter 1973), but can also serve as a good quality control - enforcement mechanisms, reducing principal-agent discrepancy)

  • Temporary organization drivers

    • Task: reason for being: “The greater the novelty of the task, the greater the need for organization-specific selection and enforcement mechanism, and the higher the likelihood of using a stand-alone temporary organization relative to hybrid and fully embedded forms.” (p. 7)

    • Time “The shorter the duration of the task, the lower the feasibility of crafting organization-specific selection and enforcement mechanisms and the higher the likelihood of using a hybrid temporary organization relative to standalone and fully embedded forms.” (p. 8)

    • Team (composition - heterogeneity of its members): “The greater the heterogeneity of the team, the greater the need for enforcement through low-powered incentives and the higher the likelihood of using a fully embedded temporary organization relative to hybrid and stand-alone forms

  • Portability and Exogenous Selection and Enforcement Effects

    • Portability: “selection and enforcement needs of a temporary organization may be portable or supplied exogenous, either from preexisting agent relationships (hybrid) or form the features of a permanent organization (fully embedded)” (p. 8).

    • “The greater the novelty of the task, the lower the portability of the selection benefits from a hybrid temporary organization and the greater the need for organization-specific selection mechanisms.” (p. 9)

    • “For a hybrid temporary organization, enforcement benefits are portable regardless of the nature of the task.” (p. 9)

    • “The portability of a fully embedded temporary organization’s selection and enforcement benefits is weaker than for those of a hybrid.” (p. 10)

  • Performance Outcomes of the Temporary Marketing Organization

    • Output Creativity (inherently linked to selection): “The closer the match between the novelty of a temporary marketing organization’s task and its selection efforts, the greater the creativity of its output.” (p. 10)

    • Decision-making speed (inherently linked to enforcement): ““The closer the match between the novelty of a temporary marketing organization’s task and its enforcement efforts, the greater its decision-making speed.” (p. 11)

      • The over-organization in term of enforcement can have adverse consequences on decision-making speed (due to reactance - lower instrinsic motivation).

  • Managerial Implications: Task novelty, time pressures, team heterogeneity, as temporary organization form’s inputs.

  • Future Research Directions

    • Different forms of temporary organizations: current study’s classification based on dyadic vs. organization-levels norms might not be sufficient for future fine-grained analysis.

    • Structural embeddedness: different from relational embeddedness (between a principal and an agent) where structural embeddedness is about connections among mutual contacts.

    • Multilevel relationships (e.g., upstream suppliers, producers, downstream customer).

    • Micro level proprieties and processes:

Figure 1 (p. 6)
Figure 1 (p. 6)

(Rindfleisch and Heide 1997)

  • TCA has many applications in marketing because

    • it focuses on exchange

    • survey-data

  • Problems to underutilized

    • Refinements to the theory are no well known

    • Empirical works are not well integrated

  • TCA is under the “New Insititutional Economics” paradigm (supplanted neoclassical economics)

  • TCA views firm as a governance structure

  • Assumptions

Behavioral Assumptions Transactional dimension
Bounded rationality Environmental uncertainty
Opportunism Asset specificity
Risk Neutraliity Transaction Frequency

  • Logic

    • If adaptability, performance evaluation, and safeguarding costs are absent or minimal, economic actors will choose market governance.

    • If internal organization expenses exceed market production cost benefits, enterprises will choose this.

  • Contexts to apply TCA

    • Vertical integration

    • Vertical inter-organizational relationships

    • Horizontal inter-organizational relationships

(Palmatier et al. 2013)

  • Commitment velocity: the rate and direction of change in commitment

  • Data

  • Study 1

    • Data: longitudinal (6 years)

    • Method: latent growth curve analysis

    • Commitment velocity is a predictor of performance

  • Study :

    • Data: Matched multiple-source data to see the antecedents of commitment velocity

    • Found customer trust and dynamic capabilities as antecedents, but less impactful as a relationship ages where as investment capabilities become more important.

  • Tenets

    • Exchange performance is influenced by both static and dynamic elements of relationship constructs, although dynamic elements are more important than static components for forecasting future behaviors and performance.

    • Depending on the relative contributions of a construct-specific collection of underlying time-varying processes, the growth trajectories of relational constructs (such as trust, commitment, and relational norms) are distinctive and path-dependent.

    • As relationships change, so do (a) the connections between relational constructs and (b) the relative weight of relational constructs in determining how trade outcomes are influenced.

Figure 2 (p. 21)
Figure 2 (p. 21)

(Harmeling et al. 2016)

  • Customer engagement marketing: “a firm’s deliberate effort to motivate, empower, and measure customer contributions to marketing functions” (p. 312)
Figure 1 (p. 314)
Figure 1 (p. 314)
Table 2 (p. 317)
Table 2 (p. 317)
Table 3 (p. 318)
Table 3 (p. 318)
Fig 2 (p. 323)
Fig 2 (p. 323)

References

Burke, Catriona M, and Michael J Morley. 2016. “On Temporary Organizations: A Review, Synthesis and Research Agenda.” Human Relations 69 (6): 1235–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726715610809.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–80. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469.
Hadida, Allègre L., Jan B. Heide, and Simon J. Bell. 2018. “The Temporary Marketing Organization.” Journal of Marketing 83 (2): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242918813119.
Harmeling, Colleen M., Jordan W. Moffett, Mark J. Arnold, and Brad D. Carlson. 2016. “Toward a Theory of Customer Engagement Marketing.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 45 (3): 312–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-016-0509-2.
Palmatier, Robert W., Mark B. Houston, Rajiv P. Dant, and Dhruv Grewal. 2013. “Relationship Velocity: Toward a Theory of Relationship Dynamics.” Journal of Marketing 77 (1): 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.11.0219.
Rindfleisch, Aric, and Jan B. Heide. 1997. “Transaction Cost Analysis: Past, Present, and Future Applications.” Journal of Marketing 61 (4): 30–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299706100403.