Search results

The purpose of the study is to investigate loyalty building and the creation of affectionate bonds in the consumer‐firm dyad.

The study relies on face‐to‐face personal interviews in the context of grocery store retailing.

The results identify the significant predictors of consumer‐firm emotional attachment to be firm trust, trust in employees, likeability of service personnel and likeability of co‐consumers, shopping enjoyment, self‐expressiveness, place dependence, and place identity. Consumers' self‐enrichment, self‐gratification and self‐enablement likely influence emotional attachment, which in turn is a strong predictor of behavioral loyalty and word of mouth. Attachment anxiety appears to multiply the effects of emotional attachment on behavioral loyalty and word of mouth.

The cross‐sectional nature of the study precludes definitive conclusions concerning causality between the constructs utilized. The data come from the supermarket retail channel, limiting the generalizibility of the results.

As the results suggest that the consumer's self‐enrichment seems to be the most important factor in determining emotional attachment, managers should incorporate the notion of emotional attachment into strategic performance management systems.

The study incorporates the notion of consumer heterogeneity into the relationship anxiety construct, arguing in favor of a non‐additive consumer‐firm emotional attachment nomological network.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the design of characteristics and use of practices incorporated in customer relationship management information systems (CRM‐IS) impact on the expression and realisation of moral agency within organisations.

The paper draws on the findings from an in‐depth UK case study of a CRM‐IS implementation.

The paper finds that some characteristics and practices within CRM‐IS can restrict the expression and realisation of moral agency in organisational life, resulting in a number of problems. For a greater consideration of MacIntyre's virtue ethics approach in order to respond to such challenges is argued.

The paper offers a relatively rare insight into the significance of the ethical issues arising from the organisational use of CRM‐IS and strategies. The paper should be of interest to managers, computer professionals and academics.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the effects of place attachment on brand loyalty. This study further ascertains whether the effects of emotion-based attachment on brand loyalty are stronger for customers who have a positive experience with a restaurant brand. Additionally, the authors investigate whether emotion-based attachment mediates the relationships between identity-based attachments, place dependence and brand loyalty in the restaurant setting.

The authors administered the questionnaire to customers (diners) of restaurants in Ghana, and they were completed via a paper and pencil/pen approach. The authors tested their hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

The findings show that identity-based and emotion-based attachment enhances brand loyalty within a restaurant setting. The results also show that place dependence attachment promotes emotional bonding with restaurant brands. The study's findings also show that place dependence attachment does not have a direct and positive significant effect on brand loyalty except when an emotional response is produced.

Place attachment studies in a restaurant setting are rare. This study thus contributes to the place attachment literature in restaurants setting.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated information systems–consumer behavior (IS-CB) model for e-shopping to examine the antecedents and consequences of e-shopping and usage behavior.

The study tests 320 usable responses collected from e-shoppers against the integrated model using structural equation modeling.

The main research results support the use of antecedents of e-shopping acceptance and usage by drawing from unified knowledge of IS and CB underpinnings. The findings show the significance of perceived value, social factors, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, entertainment gratification (EG), web irritation (WI), emotional state, and web atmospherics (WA) in the process of e-shopping.

The results suggest that e-retailers should establish positive perceived value in consumers’ minds and uphold trust to foster favorable attitudes and intentions toward e-shopping and actual e-shopping purchase. Proper and good construction of WA can lead to useful and easy-to-use e-shopping sites, EG, and minimization of WI. Capitalizing on online social influences also would be an advantage.

This paper bridges a gap in the studies of IS and CB, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of IS and CB antecedents on acceptance and usage of e-shopping.

This study aims to understand how brand personality affects purchase intention through brand love and perceived quality in e-commerce.

Three hundred forty-eight users of e-commerce sites in New Delhi, India, were surveyed for the study. The data set was examined using confirmatory factor analysis, and the research hypotheses were assessed using structural equation modeling.

Two important conclusions emerged from the study. First, brand love and perceived quality have been considerably and favorably influenced by all six dimensions of brand personality of e-commerce brands. Second, the purchase intention toward the e-commerce sites is significantly and positively impacted by brand love and perceived quality.

This study by exploring various dimensions of brand personality, will assist e-commerce executives in increasing purchase intention toward the e-retailing sites.

This research is supposed to be the foremost to look at how brand personality, through brand love and perceived quality affects purchase intention toward e-commerce websites. The attachment theory is used in this study as a theoretical foundation for linking e-commerce brand personality to customers’ purchase intentions via brand love and perceived quality.

In today’s ever-changing global business environment, successful survival of manufacturing firms/production units depends on the extent of fulfillment of dynamic customers’ demands. Appropriate supply chain strategy is of vital concern in this context. Lean principles correspond to zero inventory level; whereas, agile concepts motivate safety inventory to face and withstand in turbulent market conditions. The leagile paradigm is gaining prime importance in the contemporary scenario which includes salient features of both leanness and agility. While lean strategy affords markets with predictable demand, low variety and long product life cycle; agility performs best in a volatile environment with high variety, mass-customization and short product life cycle. Successful implementation of leagile concept requires evaluation of the total performance metric and development of a route map for integrating lean production and agile supply in the total supply chain. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to propose a leagility evaluation framework using fuzzy logic.

A structured framework consisting of leagile capabilities/attributes as well as criterions has been explored to assess an overall leagility index, for a case enterprise and the data, obtained thereof, has been analyzed. Future opportunities toward improving leagility degree have been identified as well. This paper proposes a Fuzzy Overall Performance Index to assess the combined agility and leanness measure (leagility) of the organizational supply chain.

The proposed method has been found fruitful from managerial implication viewpoint.

This paper aimed to present an integrated fuzzy-based performance appraisement module in an organizational leagile supply chain. This evaluation module helps to assess existing organizational leagility degree; it can be considered as a ready reference to compare performance of different leagile organization (running under similar supply chain architecture) and to benchmark candidate leagile enterprises; so that best practices can be transmitted to the less-performing organizations. Moreover, there is scope to identify ill-performing areas (barriers of leagility) which require special managerial attention for future improvement.

Previous research has yielded mixed results on the relationship between consumer perception and purchase intention towards organic food products. Although the prior literature has widely applied planned behaviour theory, using a single theoretical approach often provides limited understanding of organic food consumption. This study builds upon consumer perception and social cognitive theories to examine the effects of perceived food healthiness and environmental consciousness on the purchase intention of organic drinking products. The current research also assesses the mediating role of consumer extrinsic motivation and moderating role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) beliefs in these effects.

A survey method was applied to collect data from 606 consumers from different food retailers in Vietnam. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis techniques, such as structural equation modelling and bootstrap analysis.

Results of hypothesis testing support the predictive ability of perception and social cognitive theories in explaining consumers' perceptions, motivation and behavioural intention towards organic drinking products. Furthermore, results provide evidence for the moderating effect of CSR beliefs on the relationship between consumer extrinsic motivation and purchase intention.

This study may be amongst the first that explains consumption of organic drinking products from the perspectives of consumer perception and social cognitive theories. It provides a unique research model that explains the influence of perceived food healthiness and environmental consciousness on purchase intention of organic drinking products with the mediating role of consumer extrinsic motivation and moderating role of CSR beliefs. The current research provides fresh insights into the consumption of organic drinking products in an emerging market based on a mediated moderation mechanism, which has been limited in the prior literature.

The concept of trust suffers from conceptual confusion. The current perspectives on trust within the B2B marketing domain could be visualised as a big box of which the borders are defined by the disciplines marketing, economics, psychology and sociology. The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the box by introducing neuroscientific insights on trust to the B2B marketing domain.

By a literature study on neuroscientific insights on trust, this paper examines how neuroscience can help to solve existing problems within trust research and how it can address problems that otherwise might not be considered.

The neural coordinates of trust not only show that trust entails cognitive and affective elements, but also that these elements are so intertwined that they cannot be completely separated. What can and should be separated are the concepts of trust and distrust: the neural coordinates of trust are clearly different from the neural coordinates of distrust. Furthermore, there are personal differences in the ease of trusting others, which are not only caused by previous experiences but also by differences in resting patterns of frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and by differences in hormonal state.

Specifically, the neural difference between trust and distrust might shape the future research agenda for trust research within industrial marketing. It is likely that the process of distrust goes quick, whereas trust comes more slow. This is reflected in the dual processing theory, which is seen as a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning.

New perspectives and directions for trust research are presented. The distinction between trust and distrust is connected to approach- and avoidance-motivated behaviour, which is highly relevant for deepening the studies on trust within industrial marketing.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to provide an overview of related studies and to highlight research gaps and questions that need to be addressed. Research conducted in three-dimensional (3D) online environments constitutes a different research context, not least because it involves the recruitment of avatars in the research process. Researchers need to appreciate better the ethical concerns that arise in this novel, fast-evolving context and how these concern different stakeholders.

The paper employs an interdisciplinary desk-research approach. It critically reviews related literature, highlights the involved stakeholders, discusses ethical issues from a marketing research perspective and concludes with a discussion of related studies and research gaps, providing direct future research avenues.

The characteristics of the 3D online environments and the behaviour and experiences of their users set the boundaries and guide the way regarding the ethical research in this context.

The paper does not present primary empirical results, instead it reviews and critiques related literature in 3D online environments and sets the agenda for future research.

The paper provides ethical guidelines and identifies blurred areas in conducting or participating in research in 3D online environments.

Based on earlier studies and examples of ethical concerns when studying 3D online environments, this paper emphasises the parameters that should be taken into consideration in current and future research studies.