Penn State Marketing Study Ranked As One Of The Most Influential

Penn State Marketing Study Ranked As One Of The Most Influential

A 1986 study co-authored by two Penn State marketing professors was named as one of the most influential sales articles of the century.

The study, Knowledge, Motivation and Adaptive Behavior: A Framework for Improving Selling Effectiveness , was co-authored by Harish Sujan and Mita Sujan of the Department of Marketing in Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration.

Harish and Mita's study was ranked fifth in a recent survey of other professors. The results appear in the study, The Top 10 Sales Articles of the 20th Century, which was co-authored by researchers from Ellen Pullins of the University of Toledo, Lucette Comer of Purdue University and Tom Leigh of the University of Georgia.

The researchers unveiled their "Top 10" at the annual meeting of the Society for Marketing Advances in Orlando, and the paper is now under review at the Journal for Personal Selling and Sales Management . In order to determine The Top 10 Sales Articles of the 20th Century , the researchers surveyed other professors and asked each professor to nominate and vote on the most influential studies on sales. The researchers then completed a citation analysis, and the results of that analysis were consistent with the survey.

The essence of Harish and Mita's paper-which was co-authored with Barton A. Weitz of the University of Florida in 1986-- was to suggest that motivation enhances knowledge, which in turn enhances adaptive behavior among salespeople. The paper appeared in the Journal of Marketing .

"Personal selling is the only marketing communication vehicle which presents marketers with the opportunity to develop a unique persuasive message for each customer," says Mita Sujan, the Charles and Lillian Binder Faculty Fellow in Smeal College.

Salespeople, Mita explains, can do "market research" on each of their customers and use this information to tailor their presentations. In contrast, when communicating through impersonal media such as advertising, marketing managers are forced to use a single message for all customers in a market segment.

"Thus, a key ingredient in successful personal selling is the ability of salespeople to exploit this unique opportunity to adapt their sales presentation," says Harish Sujan, associate professor of marketing in Smeal College.

To be an effective adaptor, Harish says that salespeople need to have an elaborate knowledge structure of sales situations and sales behaviors so that they can select different selling strategies to match different selling tasks.

The paper identified intrinsic motivation (an attraction to work for its inherent quality) and strategy attributions for failure (the use of a poor strategy) as two motivational characteristics that enhance salespeople's knowledge. It offered recommendations, based on their model, for salesperson training, compensation, motivational programs, field management and selection.