Completed PhD Projects
Dr. rer. pol. Dipl.-Oec. Christine Falkenreck: Reputation and Reputation Transfer in International Direct Marketing
An increasing number of companies are currently recognizing the value of owning a positive reputation in their business dealings with other companies or customers. Empirical studies confirm the power of a corporate brand and the relationship between corporate branding and corporate reputation. Although the valuation of any elements of reputation is clearly related to culture embedding the customers’ perceptions, the impacts of different cultures are widely neglected in recent research on reputation transfer. National culture moderates the link between buyer-seller relationship strength and purchase intentions. It also impacts on the use of direct marketing media and on general attitudes toward B-to-B Marketing. The deficite to address a national culture’s influence on relationship and knowledge resources has resulted in limited theoretical and managerial insights into how culture influences resources. Reputation is essentially embedded in customers’ cultural systems.
A company’s reputation is built on signaling information about past and future activities. Thus, customers unconsciously transfer their attitude toward the company and its products on the new product (or product range) and, by doing so, facilitate the market entry of the new product. Particularly in industrial markets, where function and importance of brands differ from those in consumer markets, the more general concept of transferring the company’s reputation is more appropriate than the special case brand transfer. Although the latter is widely discussed, and several models have been tested empirically, the determinants of reputation transfer in industrial markets appears to be a blind spot in contemporary research. The concept of reputation transfer also requires the transfer of the values and identity of a company to new products and/or services and the related brands when entering new markets.
This thesis focuses on the development and cross-cultural testing of the construct of reputation rooted in resource-based theories. Given the link between trust, commitment, knowledge resources and reputation, this work observes important determinants of reputation and reputation transfer, such as word of mouth, direct marketing media, perceived fit, innovativeness and relationship quality. Up to now, no study has ever challended the importance of a supplier’s positive reputation on the buying decision of organizational customers. Thus, this thesis is motivated by the research question of whether and how national culture influences the way organizational buyers of different countries perceive a company’s reputation and whether the impact factors on reputation and reputation transfer are identical to all stakeholders and countries.
Theoretically, this work increases our understanding of distinctions in impact factors on corporate reputation and reputation transfer among stakeholders of different countries in the B-to-B context. It also provides further empirical support to the idea that different cultures base their evaluations on different subsets of dimensions of a company’s reputation or, in other words, on different subsets of perceived corporate actions and features. In practical terms, the findings of this work provide communication managers and marketing managers with general indications about the drivers of corporate reputation, and information on the use of direct marketing media by organizational stakeholders. Direct marketing activities might fail to deploy their positive impact on reputation and reputation transfer if it is not aligned to the cultural embedding. This thesis improves our basic understanding of how differently the same company’s reputation is evaluated by its cross-cultural customers. Consistent with the findings of Hofstede (2001), this work confirms that the use of direct marketing media is influenced by national culture and varies significantly. This work proposes one cross-culturally valid construct of reputation, which can generally be applied in B-to-B contexts.
Dr. rer. pol. Dipl.-Kfm. Martin Klaus: Soziale und netnographische Netzwerkanalysen am Beispiel von Blog-Communities - Identifikation von Consumer Insights zur Etablierung von Direktmarketingaktivitäten
Die stetig zunehmende Digitalisierung nahezu aller Lebensbereiche und die damit einhergehende steigende Akzeptanz von online Kommunikation und Transaktion macht es zwingend nötig sich auch im Bereich des Direktmarketing mit diesem Umfeld zu befassen. Viele Möglichkeiten der schnellen und einfachen Kommunikation und dem gegenüber, eine zunehmendene Informationsüberüberflutung der Kunden verlangen nach einer sinnvollen Lösung für das moderne Marketing.
Speziell die sozialen Netzwerke bieten dabei eine interessante und vielversprechende Möglichkeit Informationen über Kunden zu erfahren und mit diesen in Kontakt zu treten. Aus diesem Grund hat sich der Autor im Rahmen seiner Dissertation mit der Verwendbarkeit von sozialen Netzwerken, am Beispiel von Weblogs, für das Direktmarketing befasst.
Grundlegend für die Arbeit ist das klassische Kommunikationsmodell zwischen Sender und Empfänger, das sich parallel zur technischen Entwicklung ebenfalls stark gewandelt hat. Die Besonderheiten des neuen Kommunikationsmodells lassen sich in der Blogosphäre wiederfinden und dienen als Ansatzpunkt für das strukturierte Vorgehen in der Arbeit, um Informationen über Kunden zu gewinnen.
In der Arbeit wird ein Verfahren entwickelt, mit dem es möglich ist Themen-Communities aus der Blogosphäre zu identifizieren und die Daten zu erfassen. Im Anschluss werden einflussreiche Akteure anhand der Social Network Analysis in der Community mit ihren umliegenden Netzwerken extrahiert. Abschließend können Handlungsalternativen des Direktmarketing auf diese Akteure angewendet werden.
Das Verfahren wird für ein Thema in zwei empirischen Studien, einer deutschsprachigen und einer englischsprachigen Studie, getestet. Darüber hinaus wurden die Ergebnisse der beiden Studien im internationalen Kontext miteinander verglichen.
