The determinants of the quality of Sales-Marketing Interface in a Multinational Customer Brand Focused Company: The Latin American Branches

Customer evolution and changes in consumers, determine the fact that the quality of the interface between marketing and sales may represent a true competitive advantage for the firm. Building on multidimensional theoretical and empirical models developed in Europe and on social network analysis, the organizational interface between the marketing and sales departments of a multinational high-growth company with operations in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay is studied. Both, attitudinal and social network measures of information exchange are used to make operational the nature and quality of the interface and its impact on performance. Results show the existence of a positive relationship of formalization, joint planning, teamwork, trust and information transfer on interface quality, as well as a positive relationship between interface quality and business performance. We conclude that efficient design and organizational management of the exchange network are essential for the successful performance of consumer goods companies that seek to develop distinctive capabilities to adapt to markets that experience vertiginous changes

Lealtad de la marca de la bebida "AQUARIUS" = "AQUARIUS" beverage brand loyalty

Desde la disciplina del marketing, esta monografía de investigación pretende estudiar cuál es el nivel de lealtad de la marca de la bebida “Aquarius”. Para ello, se ha aplicado la técnica de la encuesta a una muestra aleatoria de 100 estudiantes de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación del Campus de Fuenlabrada de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid. Los resultados encontrados en este trabajo indican que “Aquarius” se mantiene todavía relacionada con las bebidas reconstituyentes, con una percepción en torno a la salud, con un alto grado de recomendación, y con un nivel de lealtad relativamente medio. = From the discipline of marketing, this research tries to study which is the level of brand loyalty for the drink “Aquarius”. Thus, it has been applied the survey technique to a random sample of 100 students of the Faculty of Communication Sciences in the Fuenlabrada Campus of the University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid). The findings of this work indicate that “Aquarius” still stays related to drinks tonics, with a perception around the health, a high degree of recommendation, and with a relatively medium loyalty level.

A group decision-making methodology with incomplete individual beliefs applied to e-Democracy

We consider the situation where there are several alternatives for investing a quantity of money to achieve a set of objectives. The choice of which alternative to apply depends on how citizens and political representatives perceive that such objectives should be achieved. All citizens with the right to vote can express their preferences in the decision-making process. These preferences may be incomplete. Political representatives represent the citizens who have not taken part in the decision-making process. The weight corresponding to political representatives depends on the number of citizens that have intervened in the decision-making process. The methodology we propose needs the participants to specify for each alternative how they rate the different attributes and the relative importance of attributes. On the basis of this information an expected utility interval is output for each alternative. To do this, an evidential reasoning approach is applied. This approach improves the insightfulness and rationality of the decision-making process using a belief decision matrix for problem modeling and the Dempster?Shafer theory of evidence for attribute aggregation. Finally, we propose using the distances of each expected utility interval from the maximum and the minimum utilities to rank the alternative set. The basic idea is that an alternative is ranked first if its distance to the maximum utility is the smallest, and its distance to the minimum utility is the greatest. If only one of these conditions is satisfied, a distance ratio is then used.

Marketing and Sales organization in a “Brand-Focused Professional” multinational

This article tests a multidimensional model of the marketing and sales organizational interface, based on a previous one tested for European companies (Homburg et al., 2008), in a specific taxonomical configuration: a brand focused professional multinational, in three successful Latin American branches. Factor reliability and hypotheses were studied through a confirmatory factor analysis. Results show the existence of a positive relationship between formalization, joint planning, teamwork, information sharing, trust and interface quality. Interface quality and business performance show also a positive relationship. This empirical study contributes to the knowledge of the organizational enhancement of interactions in emerging markets