• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-19
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• 2016

This study tried to find out implementation factors of internal marketing for a cosmetic retailer, and to look into their effects on Salesperson's job satisfaction, organization commitment, customer orientation and sales performance. For this, this study inquired into the concepts and relationships of internal marketing, job satisfaction, organization commitment, customer orientation and sales performance through literature review; and tested the relationships between the variables by setting up a research model and hypotheses. The findings of this study may be summarized as follows: First, it was found that the better the education & training, the supervisor support and the compensation system among internal marketing factors of a cosmetic retailer were, the higher a door-to-door salesperson's job satisfaction was. Second, it was found that the better internal communication and the education & training among internal marketing factors of a cosmetic retailer were, the higher a door-to-door salesperson's organization commitment was. Third, the higher the job satisfaction of a door-to-door salesperson in a cosmetic retailer was, the higher the organization commitment was. Fourth, it was found that the higher the organization commitment of a door-to-door salesperson in a cosmetic retailer was, the higher the customer orientation was. Fifth, it was found that the higher the organization commitment and customer orientation of a door-to-door salesperson in a cosmetic retailer were, the higher the sales performance was. In conclusion, the internal marketing increases door-to-door Salesperson's job satisfaction, and enhances the sense of belonging to their cosmetic retailer. Further, they come to have a customer-oriented attitude in serving customers, which is directly connected to sales performance, and thus the retailer can create profits through internal marketing. Therefore, a cosmetic retailer will need to strengthen internal communication activities through diverse methods, expand and activate employees' professional education, and develop fair and just compensation system; and supervisors will need to give support to employees, trusting their judgment.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.131-145
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• 2006

The study used 24 clothing salespersons who had turnover experiences. It used a qualitative research method, through which the following turnover motives were found. The turnover motives can be classified into two: voluntary and non-voluntary. The voluntary turnover motives include marriage, career change, wages, human relationship, family moving, study abroad, health problems, and so forth. This study finds that some salespersons made a turnover because they did not like the products and brand or they preferred another products and brand. This kind of turnover is unique in the field of clothing sales and seldom found in the motives of salesperson turnover in other fields. The non-voluntary turnover motives are caused by non-personal, circumstantial factors which include the bankruptcy of companies due to economic depression, withdrawal of salesroom from department stores due to low sales, etc. This means that the creation, rise, and fall of fashion brands are closely related to frequent turnover of clothing sale associates. As there are various motives for the salesperson turnover, so it is necessary for the clothing industry to examine and investigate the trends of its salespersons and establish an appropriate policy to cope with the matter.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.41-60
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of salesperson's adaptive selling tactics on consumers who purchase Small and Medium Enterprises' product with the help of salespeople in the store. Specifically, we examine whether salesperson's adaptive selling tactics affect consumers hedonic shopping value and utilitarian shopping value. Furthermore, we try to figure out the effect of shopping value on the salesperson relationship commitment and consumer product satisfaction. The subjects of this study have surveyed the consumers with experience in purchasing SME's products through salespeople in the Gyeongnam area. As data process, SPSS 21.0 was used as the analysis tool and AMOS 21.0 was used to analyze the structural equation model. The implications of these findings are as follows. First, the salesperson's role has a positive effect on the consumer's product satisfaction. Second, it can be suggested that the salesperson's adaptive selling tactics are an important variable affecting the consumer's shopping value. Third, the results on the consumers who have hedonic shopping value have a strong positive influence rather than the consumers who have the utilitarian shopping value. The adaptive selling tactics of the salesperson should be encouraged to increase sales performance. In order to generate more performance in a competitive market environment, it is necessary to continuously strive to increase contact between the salesperson and the consumer in order to improve the quality of the relationship.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.179-222
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• 2011

This research investigates the influence of relational characteristics on 'co-defection', customer defection following salesperson turnover, in the context of salesperson-customer relationship. Based on the social exchange theory, it was hypothesized that perceived relational benefits and switching costs affect directly the customer's intentions to defect. Key constructs in relationship marketing such as customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty were hypothesized to affect the customer's intention to defect as well as perceived relational benefits and switching costs. The results of structural equation modeling using a survey sample of 503 insurance customers who purchased life insurance policies through salespersons unveiled that the customer satisfaction with salesperson and the customer trust in salesperson strongly influence the salesperson-owned customer loyalty. However, they did not have significant direct effects on co-defection intentions. All paths from salesperson-owned customer loyalty to perceived relational benefits and perceived switching costs were also significant. Salesperson-owned customer loyalty did not have significant direct effects on co-defection intentions, but it had significant indirect effects on co-defection intentions through relational benefits and switching costs. Three sub-dimensions of perceived relational benefits had significant positive effects on co-defection intentions while the perceived switching costs had significant negative effects on co-defection intentions. The significance of our research findings were verified by comparing the hypothesized model and the rival model in the past studies.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.195-202
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• 2017

Previous studies on salesperson's performance have concentrated on increasing job satisfaction through compensations and benefits or effective communication processes and have not sufficiently considered the emotional aspect of salesperson's selling behaviors. The purpose of this study is to investigate informal learning and positive psychological capital on the relationship between job satisfaction and customer orientation of IT salespeople. Data were collected from 159 IT salespeople and analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM). As a result, it was found that the informal learning of IT salesperson had a significantly positive impact on positive psychological capital. Positive psychological capital was significantly affect on job satisfaction and customer orientation. Positive psychological capital mediated the relationship between informal learning and job satisfaction/customer orientation. The results of this study suggest that there is a need to develop informal learning based on positive psychology and to strengthen the reflected job satisfaction and customer orientation.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.81-92
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• 2019

Purpose: The salesperson, the core of the operating activities, plays the role of connecting the inside and outside of the company, representing the company to the consumer and identifying and responding to the customer's needs. The department store industry is the most representative retail industry in South Korea, and competition among its peer group and industry is intensifying, requiring differentiated service sales activities and performance from its employees. This study divided the sales force system into activity control(process-oriented control) and output control(performance-oriented control) and verified the differential impact on the job attitude of the salesperson (e.g., job satisfaction and burn-out), respectively. In addition, the effect of job satisfaction and burn-out of the salesperson on the job performance were checked. Research design, data, and methodology: The survey was conducted on 200 sales people working at five branch stores of Hyundai department store in Seoul, and 194 of them were analyzed. The reliability and validity of the variables were analyzed and hypotheses were verified through the SEM. Results: Results have shown that activity control has a greater impact on burn-out compared to output control, and output control has a greater impact on job satisfaction compared to activity control. It has been shown that the salesperson's burn-out does not affect sales performance, but that job satisfaction has a positive effect on sales performance. Conclusions: This study examines the effect of sales force management system such as activity control and output control, on the job attitude and sales performance in department stores. According to the results of this research, each of two control systems have a discriminatory effect on the job attitude variables. For the sales managers of department store, it is recommended to increase the efficiency of sales management by increasing the use of outcome control compared to activity control.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.705-716
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to investigate salesperson's perception of fashion company in the middle management system of department store. This study was conducted by a qualitative research method. An in-depth interview was managed to 14 fashion shop managers and salesperson who have three or more years of work experience at the department store. Interview details were classified three categories: relations with fashion company and others, concern with products supply, concern with products sales. First, the positive factors on relations with fashion company are mutual trust, stability of fashion company, coordination and consideration for shop, communication with fashion company, methodical IT system, methodical education, and social gathering support. The negative factors are unilateral breach of contract from fashion company, communication problem, gap between sales status in shop and product design in fashion company, lack of professional education, difficulty of participating in education, and inadequate employee benefits. Second, the positive factor on products supply is priority of products supply. The negative factors are lack of main items, product procurement lacking rapidity, and problem of securing a supply. Third, the positive factors on products sales are brand pride, display and information support about products, and free gift support. The negative factors are unfair selling commission policy, sales pressure, and excessive responsibility.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.71-100
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• 2014

While the role of emotional antecedents of effective selling behavior would be important, the issue has not been fully addressed in the sales literature. To fill this gap, we conceptualize and empirically examine the relationships among salesperson's emotional regulation processes such as emotional intelligence (EI) and emotional labor (EL), effective selling behavior, and sales performance on the basis of educational, occupational, social psychology literature and marketing literature (e.g., Henning-Thurau, Groth, Paul, and Gremler 2006; Kidwell et al. 2011; Liu et al. 2008; Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso 2008). First, salesperson's EI is defined as his or her capability that enables correct perceptions about emotional situations in sales interactions. The EI is expected to work as psychological resources for different types of EL (i.e., deep acting and surface acting) to be performed by salesperson as emotional expression strategies (e.g., Lie et al. 2008). It is, then, expected that the features of EL selected by the salesperson would lead to different levels of adaptive selling behavior (ASB) and thereby sales performance (Monaghan 2006). Further, given that salesperson's customer orientation (CO) is found to be an important correlate of ASB (Franke and Park 2006), it is expected that CO would moderate the relationship between EL and ASB (Rozell, Pettijohn, and Parker 2004). Hence, this research attempts to shed additional light on emotionally-driven (EL) as well as cognitively-driven (CO) antecedents of ASB (Frank and Park 2006). The findings of the survey research, done with 336 salespersons in insurance and financial companies, are summarized as follows. First, salespersons with a high level of EI are found to use both deep acting (regulating the emotions themselves) and surface acting (controlling only emotional expressions) in a versatile way, when implementing EL. Second, the more the salesperson performs deep acting, the more he or she shows ASB. It is, then, important for salespersons to use deep acting more frequently in the EL process in order to enhance the quality of interacting with customers through ASB. On the other hand, the salesperson's surface acting did not have a significant relationship with ASB. Moreover, CO was found to moderate the relationship between the salesperson's deep acting and ASB. That is, the context of high CO culture and individual salesperson's deep acting would synergistically make the selling efforts adaptive to customer preferences. Conceptualizing and empirically verifying the antecedent roles of important emotional constructs such as EI and EL in salesperson's effective selling behavior (ASB) and sales performance is a major theoretical contribution in the sales literature. Managerially, this research provides a deeper understanding on the nature of tasks performed by salespersons in service industries and a few guidelines for managing the sales force. First, sales organizations had better consciously assess EI capacity in the selection and nurturing processes of salespersons, given that EI can efficiently drive EL and the resulting effective selling behavior and performance. Further, the concept of EL could provide a framework to understand the salespersons' emotional experiences in depth. Especially, sales organizations may well think over how to develop deep acting capabilities of their sales representatives. In this direction, the training on deep acting strategies would be an essential task for improving effective selling behavior and performance of salespersons. This kind of training had better incorporate the perspectives of customers such that many customers can actually discern whether salespersons are doing either surface acting or deep acting. Finally, based on the synergistic effects of deep acting and CO culture, how to build and sustain CO is always an ever-important task in sales organizations. While the prior sales literature has emphasized the process and structure of highly customer-oriented sales organization, our research not only corroborates the important aspects of customer-oriented sales organization, but also adds the important dimension of competent sales representatives who can resonate with customers by deep acting for sales excellence.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-31
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• 2008

Trust is central to human relationships, at all times and places. The importance of trust is fundamental in all areas of human life, not only in the area of business administration. 2,500 years ago in China, Confucius taught that the foundation of politics was the trust of the people, more important even than military strength or the supply of food. Shakespeare's play, "Much Ado about Nothing' is about trust and deception. These days, trust and transparency in a commercial organization's business culture form the basis of the 'social capital' by which that organization increases its productivity. A successful company raises productivity by the accumulation of social capital, derived from a trust relationship between business partners, and between the company and consumers. Trust is the crucial factor. At the national level, building trust determines a nation's competitiveness. For a company, long term trust relationships with customers are essential for its survival in a business environment of rapid change. Such relationships, based on trust, are important assets to ensure a company's competitive advantage, and need to be organic to that company's business culture. Because of this importance, trust relationships have been studied in diverse areas within business administration, and especially within marketing, where they form the basis of a successful relationship between producer and consumer. However, what has been lacking is a unified definition of trust. Research has been conducted on the basis of various definitions and models. The majority of researchers have not considered the multidimensional character of the concept of trust until now. Approaches based on a one dimensional model have undermined the value of research results. Furthermore, researchers have only considered trust and trustworthiness as a single component. The majority of research has explored the consequences of perceived trust for outcomes such as loyalty or cooperation, but has neglected the effects of trustworthiness upon the mechanisms of consumer trust. This study focuses on the dimension of trust from such a perspective. It seeks to verify the effect of trust on customer intentions by breaking it down into three separate components: 1) the salesperson, 2) the product/service, and 3) the company. The purposes of this paper are as follows: Firstly, we review the multidimensional nature of trust objects: the salesperson, the product/service, and the company. Secondly, we analyze the relationship between multidimensional trust and trustworthiness. Thirdly, we analyze the connection between trust and repeat purchase intentions for the maintenance of long term relationships. For these purposes the author has developed several hypotheses as follows: H1-1: The competence of a salesperson is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the salesperson. H1-2: The benevolence of a salesperson is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the salesperson. H2-1: The competence of product/service is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the product/service. H2-2: The benevolence of product/service is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the product/service. H3-1: The reputation of a company is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the company. H3-2: The physical environment of a company is positively associated with the trust given by the consumer to the company. H4-1: Trust in a salesperson is positively associated with repeat purchase intentions. H4-2: Trust in a product/service is positively associated with repeat purchase intentions. H4-3: Trust in a company is positively associated with repeat purchase intentions. The data was compiled from 366 questionnaires. 500 questionnaires were collected, but some of the data was considered unsuitable and inappropriate. The subjects of the survey were male and female customers purchasing products at department stores in Seoul, Daegu and Gyeongbuk. It was carried out between Oct. 25 and 29, 2007. The data was analyzed by frequency analysis using SPSS 12.0 and structural equation modeling using LISREL 8.7. The result of the overall model analysis is as follows: Chi-Square=445.497, d.f.=185, p-value=0.0, GFI=.901, RMSEA=.0617, NNFI=.986, NFI=.981, CFI=.989, AGFI=.864, RMR=.0872. The results of the overall model analysis were coherent. It was found that trust is a multi-dimensional construct, that each of the dimensions of trust are meaningful influences on customer's repurchase intention. Trust in a company may be the most relevant, while trust in a product/service and a salesperson may be less relevant to repurchase intentions. The effective factors in determining trust in a salesperson and a company's product/service were found to be competence and benevolence. Factors in determining trust in a company were its reputation and physical environment, and the relationship of each effective trust factor has been verified in this research. As a result, it was found that competence and benevolence have a meaningful influence on trust in a salesperson and in product/service. It was also found that a company's reputation influences the overall trust in the company significantly but a company's physical environment does not have much effect.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.105-114
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• 2017

Purpose - Recently, domestic pharmaceutical market is growing steadily, but top-tier companies are concentrating on sales growth. In this market, SMEs, which account for more than 80% of the entire market, suffer from the problem of lower margins and increasing inventory costs. According to the government's policy changes related to pharmaceuticals, it is pointed out that the management of existing customers and the control of salespeople are important issues for pharmaceutical companies. This study investigates the effect of the control system on the salesperson in domestic pharmaceutical distribution channel on customer-oriented selling behaviors and sales performance. Research design, data, and methodology - To verify the proposed research model and test hypotheses, the authors selected 244 MR(medical representatives)'s responses which have currently relationship with doctors or pharmacists. This study carefully investigated the reliability, content validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the proposed model. Results - The authors find out the following results: capacity control, activity control, and self control have positive effects on customer-oriented selling behaviors and customer-oriented selling behaviors have a positive effect on sales performance. In addition, we present alternative model to check the direct effect between the control systems and the sales performance, but control system factors except self control have no direct influence. Conclusions - First of all, competency control and activity control increases the customer-oriented selling behavior of the salesperson. This means that the salesperson's sales skill, negotiation skill, customer access skill, presentation ability, monitoring, direction and evaluation are important and it is also important to control activities to check the number of visits to customers, report preparation, and customer service etiquette. Second, the fact that self-control of salesperson affects the customer-oriented selling behavior suggests that self-control is not controlled by external factors but rather establishes short/long-term goals. Therefore, it is important for sales organization to create an environment in which members can induce persistent incentives for self-control. Finally, output control did not affect customer-oriented sales behavior, which is less likely to form confidence or motivation to MRs when output control is perceived as a means of monitoring, supervising, or controlling rather than providing information to salespeople.