Dissertations

Approximately eighty per cent of the value of most listed firms is driven by expectations of their future earning stream. Yet past and current period results are decreasingly relevant as indicators of future performance as the speed of change in business, technology, trends and markets increases. For many companies instability is the new norm, agility and preparing for future changes are essential capabilities.

This research, drawing on experiences of 30 global corporations, shows that far from being giants with slow reactions, several global corporations are able to leverage their extensive networks and their participation in a wide diversity of market contexts to increase their capacity to act dynamically. Today they are out-performing both local and global competitors; they are achieving Dynamic Advantage.

I present an integrated model that describes how a global corporation can build its capacity to compete dynamically, exploring the drivers of motivation and ability for the leadership of the firm as well as identifying key enabling mechanisms and processes that should be developed. I also discuss the key strategic choices for a firm that decides to compete dynamically and the hurdles that must be overcome to align the organization with this approach.

This dissertation comprises of two essays. The first essay seeks to examine the issue of 'slow' (i.e. gestation periods over hours, weeks and months) forms of intuition and their complex interactions with analytic thinking, especially in the context of breakthrough ideation/ complex problem solving. This exploratory study with qualitative observations with a small set of experienced practitioners supports the sparse academic literature in this area that managers do rely on long gestation forms of sub-conscious processing and that these forms of thinking manifest themselves in different forms with varying degrees of confidence and positive emotion/ affect (popularly referred to as 'hunches' and 'insights/ Flash/ Aha moment'). These slower intuition forms appear to play an important role in generating breakthrough strategic ideas/ help solve complex problems. A key observation from these exploratory inter-actions was that perhaps managers' ability to recognize and use these more complex/ slower intuition forms varies widely as do their attitudes and comfort levels with their intuition. This observation led to an interest in further testing the hypothesis that perhaps individual differences in managers thinking styles especially their comfort with their intuition may have interesting effects which come into play to help generate break-through ideas.

I tested this hypothesis further in the quantitative study described in the second essay, where I studied Strategic Option Generation, when more time and effort for deliberation and iteration as well as corresponding distractions are available. I compared the effect of some popular external stimuli Option Generation techniques and the effect of individual differences in preferences for analytic vs. intuitive thinking styles on the number of high quality options generated by a sample of experienced executives. The most interesting findings from this study are: firstly, that although the conventional view typically associates effective strategy formulation with conscious analytic thinking, however this study's findings support the view that perhaps we need to better appreciate the role of the intuition end of the cognitive continuum and participants' 'Cognitive Versatility' (i.e. their high engagement in both analytic and intuitive thinking styles) for strategic option generation. Secondly there is also some preliminary evidence of an interesting interaction effect where the external stimulus option generation technique that is opposite to the individual's preferred thinking style yields better results. Similar conclusions are also reported in selected published research regarding the above-mentioned first finding by Gilkey et al, based on very different methods using FMRI scans of participants (Gilkey, Caceda, & Kilts, 2010) and the second finding by Dane et al which used methods similar to my research (Dane E, 2011).

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

The words of John Wanamaker (1838-1922), a pioneer American marketer and advertiser, still hold true almost 100 years since they were spoken in the context of the ubiquitous banner advertising also termed as internet display advertising (IDA). Whilst IDA has become a major component of the internet advertising industry with an estimated size of US$ 56.5 billion (ZenithOptimedia, 2014) and a compounded annual growth rate of 21.5% (ZenithOptimedia, 2014), our understanding of how IDA works is fairly nascent. Despite thousands of advertisers utilising this platform to target billions of audiences worldwide, there is still a lack of clarity of how IDA really works. Specifically there is a gap in understanding the level of IDA impressions that are required to drive a specific goal. The blistering pace at which internet advertising has grown and evolved has contributed in a large part to a research gap that has stubbornly persisted. On one hand internet's constant evolution has spawned user journeys that are a complex tangle of advertising impressions, search clicks and website visits. On the other hand internet's exponential growth has led to constantly expanding data sets both in terms of volume and number of variables. This has led to an ongoing need to constantly update the findings and methods in order to understand how IDA works. Developments in clickstream technology that track complex user behaviour on the internet have provided an opportunity to further research in the area of determining optimal frequency level in IDA to drive marketing goals.

This research seeks to assist researchers and practitioners in their quest to improve their understanding of IDA and internet advertising as a whole by uncovering a deeper understanding of the impact IDA impression frequency plays in driving marketing goals, especially online purchases. Further, the study analyses the moderating influence of consumers' characteristics and spacing of IDA impressions after controlling for a comprehensive set of factors related to media and seasonality. Lastly, the study uniquely utilises an easy to use but effective method that overcomes issues that plague clickstream data characterised by very large volume and low conversion rates. The clickstream data for this study was obtained from the ad-server log files from a large advertising agency based in Singapore. The use of such a data-set for this study is a significant step towards linking the world of information systems and marketing by making effective use of big data in developing optimal IDA impression frequency guidelines that will ultimately contribute towards improving the ROI of internet display advertising (IDA).

In the hotel industry, the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty has always been ambiguous, as a satisfied hotel guest may not necessarily be loyal. Loyalty is of greater interest to the hotel industry as it translates to more business opportunities. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate how camaraderie and emotional customer satisfaction can predict potential service loyalty. Empirical tests of the relationship between camaraderie, emotional satisfaction and loyalty had never been conducted before in the hotel industry. The findings of this research suggest that camaraderie has a direct and significant relationship to the four phases of loyalty, cognitive, affective, conative and action loyalty. This research will contribute to the body of knowledge on customer satisfaction, camaraderie, and loyalty and provides theoretical and applied suggestions for the hotel industry.