Research — Nadia Pomirleanu, Ph.D.

"Why do customers who buy from us equally often respond so differently to the same site, the same offers, the same emails?"

Online shopper motivations and e-store attributes: An examination of online patronage behavior and shopper typologies.
Ganesh, Reynolds, Luckett & Pomirleanu — Journal of Retailing, 2010. My most-cited work.

Two customers with identical purchase frequency can be entirely different shoppers. This study identified distinct online shopper types based on what motivates them — and showed that the store attributes each type values diverge sharply.

For practitioners

Stop segmenting by behavior alone. A "loyal" customer may be enthusiastic — or simply locked in by convenience and ready to defect. Map your customer base by motivation, then match e-store investments (assortment, navigation, promotions, service) to the segments you actually serve. The retailer question this answers is the one every e-commerce manager asks after a redesign underperforms: we improved the site — for whom?

"Digital channels change every year. What actually stays true long enough to build a strategy on?"

A review of internet marketing research over the past 20 years.
Pomirleanu, Schibrowsky, Peltier & Nill — Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 2013.

A structural map of two decades of internet marketing scholarship: what the field has established, where the evidence is thin, and which questions persist across every platform shift.

For practitioners

Platforms are perishable; mechanisms are not. Trust, perceived risk, information processing, and relationship value drive online behavior regardless of which channel is fashionable. Before reallocating budget to the newest platform, ask whether the underlying mechanism has changed — usually it has not. This is the antidote to the webinar-circuit panic of "everything is different now."

"Our service quality playbook works at home and underperforms abroad. Same people, same process — why?"

Managing service quality in high customer contact B2B services across domestic and international markets.
Pomirleanu, Mariadoss & Chennamaneni — Industrial Marketing Management, 2016.

In high-contact B2B services, what counts as quality is not portable. The drivers of perceived service quality shift between domestic and international markets, particularly in the relational, people-intensive elements of delivery.

For practitioners

Do not export your service model wholesale. Audit which quality drivers matter in each market before standardizing — the contact-heavy elements (responsiveness, relationship management, frontline judgment) are where adaptation pays, while back-office process can stay uniform. This speaks directly to the question global account managers raise in every expansion review: which parts of "how we serve" are universal?

"We redesigned the comp plan and nothing on the sales floor changed. What are we missing?"

A review of climate and culture research in selling and sales management.
Gustafson, Pomirleanu & John-Mariadoss — Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2018.

A synthesis of how organizational climate and culture shape salesperson behavior and performance — the ambient conditions that incentive design alone cannot override.

For practitioners

Compensation moves behavior at the margin; climate sets the baseline. If sellers perceive that service, ethics, or collaboration are not genuinely valued, no commission structure will produce them. Diagnose the sales climate — what the floor believes is actually rewarded — before redesigning the plan. This is the answer to the perennial sales-leadership webinar question: why do incentives keep failing to change behavior?

"Should a consultant, advisor, or creator be afraid of critical reviews?"

Building human brands: The role of critical reviews.
Pomirleanu & Schibrowsky — Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 2023.

People are brands too — and reviews of people work differently than reviews of products. This study examines what, when, and how critical reviews help a human brand position and differentiate itself.

For practitioners

For professionals whose name is the product — consultants, agents, professors, creators — critical reviews are positioning material, not just reputation risk. The right critical signal sharpens differentiation and credibility in ways uniform praise cannot. Manage your review profile the way you would manage brand architecture: curate for distinctiveness, not for a flawless average. This answers the question every personal-brand workshop dodges: what do I do about the negative review I cannot remove?

"When a disruption hits one of our partners, how far will the damage travel through our network?"

Not the way it used to be: B2B interactions in the era of ecosystems.
Gustafson, Pomirleanu, John-Mariadoss & Peltier — Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 2024.

Prompted by the pandemic's shock to B2B markets, this framework classifies interactions among ecosystem actors at micro, meso, and macro levels, showing how value cocreation and knowledge flows transmit both value and disruption across business networks.

For practitioners

Your exposure is not your supplier list — it is your ecosystem map. Disruptions propagate through the same channels that create value: shared knowledge, joint processes, interdependent customers. Map the interactions, not just the contracts, and you can locate where a shock two relationships away will surface in your own performance. This is the supply-chain-resilience question reframed for relationship managers rather than logisticians.

"We committed to sustainability at the strategy level. Why isn't it showing up in our products?"

Interactive effects of organizational resources on sustainable product design practices: A resource orchestration perspective.
John Mariadoss, Pomirleanu, Chennamaneni & Zailani — 2023.

A firm's sustainability orientation, on its own, does not reliably translate into sustainable product design. The effect depends on how it interacts with customer relationship capital — resources work in combination, not in isolation.

For practitioners

Sustainability commitments fail in the gap between strategy and design practice. The bridge is your customer relationships: firms that know their customers deeply can convert sustainability intent into design choices the market will reward. If your sustainability program lives only in the strategy office, pair it with the teams holding customer knowledge before expecting it in the product roadmap.

Every study answers a question a manager has actually asked.

If your question deserves a rigorous answer, let's talk.