Evaluating the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns for Malls Using a Novel Interpretable Machine Learning Model

We develop a novel interpretable machine learning model, GANNM, and use newly available data to evaluate how different types of marketing campaigns and budget allocations influence malls’ customer traffic. We observe that the response curves that measure the impact of campaign budget on customer traffic differ for different categories of campaigns, with sales incentives or experience incentives, during peak periods, off-peak periods, or online promotion periods. Based on such accurate response curves from GANNM, the optimized budget allocation is estimated to yield a 11.2% increase in customer traffic compared with the original allocation. Our findings provide novel insights on managing mall campaigns. Mall managers should increase marketing spending to areas that were likely overlooked before and avoid over-crowding budget to campaigns during times with high levels of competition and are likely already over-marketed. We provide empirical evidence showing that the recent trend of employing novel approaches for enhancing customer experience in physical stores can effectively encourage customers to visit malls. Furthermore, we show that online promotions could also create opportunities for offline businesses—investing in campaigns in the major online promotion periods could significantly increase customer traffic for malls, given sufficient investment in the campaigns to raise customer awareness.

The Peculiarities of Sales Management in Business Organizations of Various Industries

The article is aimed at distinguish the peculiarities of the process of management of sales activities of business organizations working in agriculture, processing industry, engineering, trade, light industry and service sector, and identifying specific aspects arising at the junction of sales management and other functional spheres of business organization management. A number of universal principles for any business organization that should be taken into account in the process of forming a general strategy and planning and implementing sales management is provided. Specific features of construction of channels for distribution of finished products in business organizations of different activities are analyzed. The main aspects of interaction of business organizations with other subjects of sales activity are considered and recommendations on its more effective organization are made. It is defined that the main methods of product promotion to achieve the goals of the sales subsystem in the process of sales management are: advertising, sales incentives and personal sales. The main differences in the work of the sales subsystem of business organizations of different industries are identified and the peculiarities of sales management are singled out. It is shown that a feature of sales activities of business organizations in the service sector is the use of a zero sales channel, but for the vast majority of engineering business organizations it is important to operate a «marketing center» organized on a functional principle, the purpose of which is to interact with all departments of the business organization, and for industrial business organizations in which the supply of products to the place of sale depends on the location of production, it is crucial to comply with such conditions as achieving maximum satisfaction of the consumers’ needs and optimizing the cost of supplying products.

Effect of Advertising Expenses and Sales Incentives on Financial Performance: Dissecting the Cases of Two Market Leaders

There has been much interest among academicians and practitioners to understand the role of marketing expenses in contributing to the financial performance of organizations. Especially, in times of recession, budget reduction, or market contraction, marketing budgets get the major cut. However, organizations continue to spend millions in the development and execution of marketing programs. This paper examines the effect of advertising and sales incentives on the revenue and profit of Grameenphone and bKash, who are the market leaders in their respective industries of Bangladesh. With the help of secondary data, it has been found that there is a negative relationship between advertising and financial performance (i.e. revenue and profit), but sales incentives on the other hand have a positive relationship with revenue and profit.

Self-Selected Sales Incentives: Evidence of their Effectiveness, Persistence, Durability, and Underlying Mechanisms

Drawing on goal-setting theory, this study develops a new self-selected incentive scheme. Within this scheme, a sales employee chooses an individualized goal–reward level combination from a menu the firm proposes given the employee's past performance. To test the effects of the self-selected incentive scheme, the authors conducted two field experiments at two Fortune 500 companies. Results of both experiments show that, compared with two equivalent quota systems, sales employees’ performance increased substantially under the self-selected incentive scheme. In addition, findings reveal that the performance increase induced by this scheme is substantially greater for sales employees with a high variation in past performance and for employees with a low past-performance level. Moreover, the authors find that the effects of the self-selected incentive scheme not only are durable when offered again but also persist after the scheme is discontinued. Through two additional online experiments, the authors extend the findings of the field studies, isolate the self-selected incentive scheme's three underlying mechanisms, and examine each mechanism's relative strength.