Understanding disruption through the marketing lens: foundations, frameworks and future directions

The digitalization paradox: entry timing and firm performance

ABSTRACT While digital transformation has attracted widespread attention, consensus on its firm performance impact remains elusive, reflecting a persistent ‘Digitalization Paradox’. This study examines how entry timing serves as a critical boundary condition shaping these divergent outcomes. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2019, we measure digital transformation via TF-IDF text mining of annual reports and classify early adopters versus followers through a novel industry-specific ‘Peak Year’ strategy grounded in Diffusion of Innovations Theory. Our firm fixed-effects estimates, reinforced by instrumental variable analysis, reveal that digital transformation significantly reduces the financial performance (ROA/ROE) of early adopters: legacy inertia and organisational rigidity outweigh initial market signalling benefits, while followers experience no significant performance decline, consistent with technological leapfrogging within a mature ecosystem. Mechanism analyses further show a fundamental tension: early adopters gain consumer recognition and reduce selling expenses, but these revenue-side advantages are overwhelmed by sharply higher administrative costs stemming from organisational friction between legacy and new digital structures. These findings clarify the micro-mechanisms of the Digitalization Paradox and underscore entry timing as a pivotal strategic contingency for realising value from digital transformation.

Rebound Differentiation: A Reflexive Positioning Effect in Strategic Portfolios

This paper introduces Rebound Differentiation, a systemic, reflexive positioning phenomenon observed within multi-offering organizational portfolios. Traditional strategic frameworks—including structural brand architecture, product differentiation, market segmentation, and cannibalization—treat positioning as a linear, localized projection from the firm to an isolated target market. Consequently, they fail to capture the recursive cognitive feedback loops that occur within an interconnected portfolio ecosystem. We argue that the deliberate introduction of a highly differentiated or specialized offering ($O_x$) alters the underlying market schema, triggering Automatic Segmentation Restructuring. This cognitive shift forces market evaluators to mentally migrate toward the newly carved segment, recursively driving a Reflexive Resemantization of the un-modified flagship offering ($O_f$). Through contrast-driven comparative cognition, the flagship is automatically reclassified (e.g., from "cutting-edge" to "conventional baseline") without any material alteration to its structure, pricing, or core marketing. This paper integrates cognitive categorization theory, structural sociology, and systems thinking to formalize a multi-stage process model, offering actionable strategic implications for portfolio equilibrium management and a robust agenda for empirical testing.

Unleashing the Potential of Engaging Customers in Circular Economy Ecosystems: A Managerial Sensemaking Perspective

The circular economy has gained prominence among academics, practitioners, and policymakers, yet existing research largely adopts a firm-centric view, emphasizing business models and strategies, with limited attention to ecosystem-level dynamics. In particular, the role of customers within circular economy ecosystems (CEEs) remains underexplored; while many studies have considered CEEs’ structural aspects, few have examined underlying cognitive processes. Our study focuses on the managerial construction of ecosystems, and specifically on how managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) interpret customer engagement signals. While existing literature recommends an ecosystem-level approach, we propose that ecosystem dynamics initially emerge through individual sensemaking. Through interviewing several SME managers in Finland, we suggest a typology comprising four approaches: co-creative sensemaking, opportunity-harvesting, engagement-delegating, and linear legacy firms. By applying the theoretical lens of the supply-side interpretation of demand-side signals, our findings show why firms exhibiting the same ecosystem context tend to diverge in terms of circularity.

Advancing the hierarchy of sustainable marketing strategy: The signaling gap, the alignment gap, and emergent stakeholder tensions

The concept of market resilience: Towards a performative perspective

This paper reconsiders the concept of market resilience from a performative and practice-based perspective. We deliberate how dominant conceptions of market resilience are problematic as they overlook the open-ended, dynamic, and often messy ways in which markets evolve. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and market studies, we develop a novel conceptualization of market resilience as dynamically enacted through three interlinked practices: instigation , incorporation , and insistence . We review how resilience has been framed in existing literatures, tracing its multifaceted origins rooted in desires to address uncertainty, withstand external threats, and achieve lasting recovery, to its current popularity in an anxiety-ridden age. We then draw on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to identify three critical limitations of these dominant perspectives: (i) the presumption of resilience as an inherent capability, (ii) the obsession with failure prevention, and (iii) the tendency to encourage asymmetric rearview mirror accounts. Mobilizing examples from financial, housing, food, and healthcare markets, we sketch out how we might think differently of market resilience if we think of markets as in-the-making. By reconceptualizing resilience performatively – that is, as something that markets and entangled actors continuously enact , rather than have – we seek to move beyond narrow notions of failure prevention and recovery. Our research agenda highlights how this perspective opens up new avenues for examining resilience in markets as varied, contested, and always in the making.

An interdependency perspective on disruption: crossfield discussion and literature extension

This paper departs from how the literature is filled with partly contradictory notions on disruption, while lacking a perspective that interlinks disruption causes of technology, business model and mindset with disruption effects beyond focal firms and industries. The purpose of this paper is to approach the notion of disruption from the perspective of interdependencies to discuss its different meanings, time-limitations and magnitude of effects. The paper is based on an integrative literature review to develop a typology. Empirical examples illustrate interdependency effects of disruption as a missing perspective in past research. A typology is developed, indicating a gap related to magnitude as spread and transformative disruption. The interdependency lens helps to capture this configuration. It thereby addresses the lacking perspective that interlinks disruption causes of technology, business model and mindset with disruption effects beyond focal firms and industries. The examples indicate how the parties being disrupted are determined by imbalances in interdependencies as disruption spreads, and how safeguarding and internalisation reshape these interdependencies. The paper contributes to past research through critically discussing the past partly contradictory notions of disruption in the literature, while creating an understanding for disruption effects as spread of disruption. It helps to structure past disruption research through developing a typology while extending such research through discussing it from an interdependency perspective.