Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
5111053 Industrial Marketing Management 2017 12 Pages PDF
Abstract
Nowadays, to better serve their customers, many companies are using multiple channels with different levels of complexity. Although the literature agrees that it is a challenge to design and manage multiple channels for improved performance in today's circumstances, there are no empirically determined guidelines offered to achieve that goal. One contributing factor to this is the lack of a clear conceptualization of multiple channel complexity in the literature. With no such construct and measure, researchers are unable to conduct studies to understand variability in the complexity of multiple channels in practice and hence to draw normative conclusions for managers. In this work, drawing upon the vast organizational complexity literature, we provide a conceptual definition and a measure of multiple channel complexity. Our construct describes the structure of a multiple channel system with respect to three complexity dimensions: channel number; channel levels, and channel member variety. The data from 305 sales/marketing managers in the electronics industry support the validity of the construct as we observe that in highly uncertain environments having highly complex multiple channels in place improves company performance.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Business, Management and Accounting Marketing
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