Date of Award

2021-05-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Business Administration

Advisor(s)

John Hadjimarcou

Second Advisor

Gary L. Frankwick

Abstract

The Dissertation topic that I have chosen to study places both a prominent topic currently making waves in marketing with the field of marketing that has quickly become my specialty and my focus of research going forward. I have chosen to study green and sustainable measures that organizations currently put into practice along with how those sustainable initiatives affect the sales and revenue of that organization. The context of the study is in business-to-business (B2B). Specifically, this current research takes place in a new context that has seldom seen research in the current decade, as most of the research on environmental sustainability and sustainability related to sales has taken place in the business-to-consumer sector. In addition to studying the effects of sustainability on sales, the last part of the current research focuses on a new form of sustainable innovation that can help organizations to create a seller/buyer dyad for new relationships that will help to increase sales revenue. The first paper concerns three different facets of sustainability and how selling organizations can use sustainability as a strength that would help the entire organization perform better relative to competitors, especially those that were not as committed to sustainability. The three facets, based on previous theoretical work, are the sustainability effort, reporting effort, and the compliance effort that the seller controls when marketing products to potential customers. Sustainability effort is an objective measure and has to do with the amount spent on sustainability initiatives from the organization as compared to the revenue generated by the organization as a whole. Compliance effort shows the range of sustainable initiatives that the seller is willing to undertake. Does the selling organization simply follow the law or does the organization go above and beyond what is required to be a truly responsible organization? Reporting effort takes a look at how information is disseminated to potential customers. This is a range of how vague or specific the results of sustainable initiatives are reported out to potential customers. The theoretical viewpoints of institutional theory and organizational theory lead us to believe that these three facets will lead to differences in overall company image. Furthermore, this company image would then lead to changes in the purchase intention for customers. Also, since I am studying the seller/buyer dyad, we also interject a level of trust that can form between the buyer and the seller as a relationship is formed. I take a look at how trustworthiness of the salesperson can moderate the effect between company image and final purchase intention for customers. The second paper is engrained in a branch of equity theory called the value pricing model and presents a new way of how sustainable innovation can lead to the perceive value of products and subsequently, the purchase intention from the customer. The perceived value pricing model has been widely studied but is also now placed in a novel context that can help to explain much of the changes in product preferences when it comes to environmentally sustainable buying in a B2B context. Specifically, I discuss the principles of frugal innovation and how sustainability in frugal innovation can lead to the perceived value of products for the customer. There are three facets of frugal innovation, including focusing on core functionalities, reduction of cost to both the seller and the customer, and creation of a frugal ecosystem that encompasses the entire selling organization that can all lead to changes in the perceived value of products that the seller is marketing to potential customers.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

121 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Justin Ruben Munoz

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