Tags:Business-to-government, Cross-selling performance, Customer acquisition performance and Government-to-contractor revolving door
Abstract:
The business-to-government (B2G) market has received increasing scholarly attention in marketing. While serving government customers, many firms engaged in revolving door appointments—a firm’s hiring of former public employees from government agencies as corporate executives and directors, to attain political connections and enhance the relationship with the government. Revolving door appointments reflect the firm’s strategic efforts in managing the relational dynamism in the customer-supplier relationships. Thus, this paper investigates the effects of revolving door appointments on customer relationship performance. Analyzing multisource secondary panel data of 102 publicly-traded U.S. firms in the B2G market over 14 years (2004-2017), the authors find that revolving door appointments enhance the firm’s performance of acquiring new customer relationships and cross-selling more items to customers. Besides, the benefits of revolving door appointments are contingent on the firm’s market knowledge and product scope. Specifically, revolving door appointments are more effective when firms have abundant market knowledge but are less effective when firms have narrow product scope. These results also provide unique contributions to marketing theories and implications for policymakers.
Effects of Government-to-Contractor Revolving Door Appointments on Customer-Based Performance