The performance impact of marketing dualities: a response surface approach to resolving empirical challenges

We examine issues associated with various operational measures and model specifications in marketing-duality research that focuses on either a balancing or a combining perspective. In Study 1, we use archival data to demonstrate various operationalizations and models that subscribe to either perspective to test the impact of the exploration::exploitation duality, which produce mixed results. We then show that the multidimensional response surface approach constitutes a superior omnibus test that coalesces the two perspectives. Study 2, a simulation-based study, affirms the severity of biases in the existing approaches and the comprehensiveness and precision of the response surface approach. The cumulative evidence shows that the existing perspectives employ transformed measures that fail to distinguish firms with different approaches to the two activities underlying a duality. Thus, they suffer from many conceptual blind spots, produce mixed statistical conclusions, and are sensitive to changes in mean values. Our findings provide guidelines for the study of marketing dualities.