BUS631: Brand Management

Big data analytics (BDA) has received special attention due to its dynamic decision-making capabilities. Today's technology-oriented world brings numerous unprecedented opportunities and novel complexities that contribute to improving decision-making capabilities and obtaining competitive advantages. BDA refers to the complex process of obtaining information like the hidden patterns, unidentified correlations, users' preferences, and market trends from the massive amount of structured and unstructured data that assist organizations for efficient decision-making. In simple words, BDA is defined as "the strategy of analyzing large volumes of data, or big data," which is collected through a variety of sources, such as images, sensors, videos, social media contents, sales transaction entries, and many others. Researchers and practitioners have related BDA with the subsequent frontier for competition, innovation, and productivity, whereas others have claimed that BDA is a revolution that will change the way we work, think, and live. However, the research on the potential of BDA is still at the fundamental stage and generally fails to consider the mechanisms through which the investments in BDA are converted into competitive performance. The literature provides vital knowledge on the challenges, benefits, and outcomes of BDA, but little is known about how the practice of BDA in organizations creates value for organizations, becomes the competitive edge of organizations, and enhances organizational or sales performance. The proponents of BDA application in the USA claim that the proper application of BDA in healthcare organizations, including pharmaceutical organizations, reduces costs by $300 million per annum, improves decision-making capabilities, reduces managerial complexities, and improves organization–customer interactions.

As for pharmaceutical organizations, they face the perennial challenge of ensuring organizational sales performance. Most pharmaceutical organizations use different sales force automation (SFA) systems to manage sales-related activities. SFA systems are supposed to make analyzed information about sales forecasting, inventory control, and customer needs available, and the customer wants to help build profitable relationships with customers, maximize pipeline opportunities, and establish good sales communication history to achieve efficiency in decision-making. Organizations around the world invest millions of dollars annually on SFA systems to achieve decision-making efficacy and thereby boost sales performance and to build and maintain profitable relations with customers; unfortunately, sales forces have generally been dissatisfied with SFA systems. The literature reports that 61% of SFA systems fail to fulfill the needs of sales forces in terms of analyzed information for enhancing sales performance. Several causes of SFA failure have been highlighted. One is the lack of storage and analysis capabilities of SFA. Another is insufficient input data from organizations, with the primary source of input data in the SFA system being boundary spanners. In the present era of big data, input data from all available sources, such as social media (e.g., social, electronic, and mobile commerce websites), sales forums, competitor data, and other stakeholder data, are mandatory for ensuring the efficient output of analyzed information. In the management of organizational sales performance, BDA can store and analyze big data of massive amounts, variety, and velocity from all possible resources, including social commerce sites, electronic commerce sites, mobile commerce sites, competitors, substitute products or service organizations, and decision-making. Therefore, BDA may solve the existing sales force problems, especially in pharmaceutical organizations. However, studies on this particular concern are limited. Therefore, to fulfill this research gap, the current study aims to investigate the impact of BDA on perceived sales performance (PSP), especially in pharmaceutical organizations.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the primary and most crucial responsibility of any marketing department, and it is aimed at creating and maintaining strong customer relationships to improve sales performance. The literature on sales performance considers CRM capabilities as mandatory for better sales performance, and many prior studies concluded the essential role of CRM capabilities in sales performance but less focusing on this important variable in the context of BDA. One of the functions of SFA systems is to provide information related to customers to increase CRM capabilities that ultimately improve organizational sales performance. BDA is also the latest form of information technology (IT), and prior studies conceptually concluded that BDA outcomes can influence organizational performance and CRM capabilities. Furthermore, CRM capabilities are considered as dynamic capabilities that can increase PSP. Previous studies mostly emphasized the impact of BDA capabilities on organizational performance or sales performance and ignored the impact of CRM capabilities, which is the primary predictor of the sales performance. The lack of previous scholars' intention to examine employee's perception about the impact of BDA on sales performance through CRM capabilities motivates the authors to perform an in-depth investigation. To bridge this gap, the current study considers that BDA has an impact on CRM capabilities and CRM capabilities will enhance the PSP, especially in pharmaceutical organizations. This study has investigated the following key research question: What is the impact of BDA on PSP through CRM capabilities in pharmaceutical organizations?

This study aims to investigate the impact of BDA on PSP based on users' perception and propose a comprehensive research model. This study considers the resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capabilities theory as the theoretical lens for constructing the proposed research model. The RBV describes organizations as possessing resources that help achieve a competitive edge, and dynamic capabilities theory determines how resources are developed and how IT resources can build or create dynamic capabilities in organizations to improve organizational performance. Therefore, under the theoretical lens, this study proposes a number of prominent BDA benefits (that organizations automatically generate after practicing BDA) as measuring variables of BDA and considers these BDA benefits as resources for organizations in creating dynamic capabilities, such as CRM capabilities. This study also considers the most used and influential CRM capabilities, such as customer interaction management capabilities (CIMCs), customer relationship upgrading capabilities (CRUCs), and customer win-back capabilities (CWBCs), as used by many prior studies. These BDA benefits (better customer service [BCS], personalization, advanced analytics [AA], and improved relational knowledge [IRK]), along with CRM capabilities, influence the PSP of pharmaceutical organizations. The novel concept of the mediating role of CRM capabilities in the relationship of BDA and PSP is proposed in the present study's context.

Additionally, the paper is further divided into the following sections: Section 2 presented the theoretical framework and hypotheses. Section 3 of the paper contained the material and methods used. Results and discussion are elaborated in Section 4 and Section 5. Section 6 provided the conclusion of the study and Section 7 contained practical and theoretical implications, limitations, and future work.