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Automobile industry has been the backbone of manufacturing sector in any country. During the past decade, passenger car industry has emerged as the one of the growing sectors in the Indian economy. Technological features in the passenger cars industry has been evolving in the global market, and customers have been the most important stakeholders to judge the requirement of these features. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the customers’ need for these emerging technologies using Kano model of customer satisfaction.

This paper has used the Kano model to assess the customer satisfaction for Indian passenger car companies. Overall, 250 customers of passenger cars from Northern India have been surveyed using well-structured questionnaire designed as per the Kano model. On the basis of responses, this study has categorized the technological attributes of passenger cars as attractive, must be, one-dimensional and indifferent.

“Auto Gear Shift” system has emerged as a must be attribute. “Premium surround system” has been categorized under one-dimensional attribute. “Communication between vehicles,” “integration with smart phone,” “connecting applications,” “dual-stage airbags,” “in-dash navigation system,” “rearview camera,” “heated and cooled seats,” “built-in fourth generation long term evolution,” “Wi-Fi system” and “automated window cleaning system” have emerged as attractive features. The customers have been indifferent about “gesture control,” “reality display on car wind screen” and “run-on-flat tyre.” In contradiction to the popular belief, this study has found that customers have shown Indifferent attitude toward “hydrogen fuel-operated cars” and “battery cars.”

This present study gives insight about the acceptability of various emerging technological features in Indian car market. This study has fulfilled the existing dearth in assessing the customers’ insight about the implementation of these emerging technologies in Indian cars. This paper will be helpful to the manufacturers to inculcate the voice of the customers in designing the new technologies for the passenger cars.

Previous studies across the globe have applied Kano model for assessing customers’ satisfaction in various industries, but according to the authors’ knowledge, hardly any study was conducted in context of technological attributes for Indian passenger car companies.

Existing brand literature on assemblage practices has focused on providing a map or geography of brand assemblages, suggesting that an artist brand’s ability to evolve and achieve brand longevity remains constant. Using geology of assemblage, this study aims to explore the types and mechanisms of change in brand evolutions to address the problem of identifying when and how a brand can transform in an evolving marketplace.

The authors apply an interpretive process data approach using secondary archival data and in-depth interviews with 31 self-identified fans to explore the artist brand David Bowie over his 50-year career.

As an artist brand, Bowie’s ability to evolve his brand was constrained by his assemblage. Despite efforts to defy ageing and retain a youth audience appeal, both the media and his fans interpreted and judged Bowie’s current efforts from a historical perspective and continuously reevaluated his brand limiting his ability to change to remain relevant.

Brand managers, particularly artist brands and human brands, may find that their ability to change is constrained by meanings in past strata over time. Withdrawal from the marketplace and the use of silence as a communicative practice enabling brand transformations.

The geology of assemblage perspective offers a more nuanced understanding of brand changes over time beyond the possibilities of incremental or disruptive change. We identify the mechanisms of change that result in minor sedimentation, moderate cracks and major ruptures in a brand’s evolution.

The country-of-origin effect (COO) has, as a research domain, suffered from several theoretical and methodological problems and tendencies including an incomplete conceptualization of its constituent components. The purpose of this study is to first problematize the concept in extant literature and to consequently propose a reconceptualization of the concept.

As part of lateral promulgation, the authors use theoretical and methodological ideas from other disciplines such as psychology, ethnography and geography to problematize the present conceptualization of COO in extant literature to reveal research possibilities relevant to, but underrepresented or absent in, COO research.

This study identifies several central theoretical and methodological problems and reveals that (1) COO is not necessarily linear and alternative modes of engagement with consumption need to be considered; (2) many of these problems can be addressed by alternative methodologies; and (3) COO operates at the level of symbolic orders that require a further engagement with the role of place in human experience.

The findings suggest that in future research, field experiments be considered to resolve some of the methodological artefacts that have hampered past research; qualitative methods be applied to uncover unexpected uses of place association beyond being mere quality proxies; and alternative areas of relevance, such as macro-level trade and exports from emerging economies, be entertained.

The study’s approach to problematizing and refining extant knowledge enable it to promulgate new knowledge and research directions for a research area that has historically suffered from a tendency to be self-referential.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

Drawing on social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test an integrative model of internal and external factors determining employee perceptions of their organizational service climate.

Data are collected from a sample of 549 service employees in local and foreign-owned service firms in the emerging market of Vietnam. Structural equation modeling is used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Leadership commitment to service quality, internal processes and service standards, work facilitation resources and service-oriented human resource practices are positively associated with service climate. Internal customer service mediates the effects of these variables on service climate, with the exception of work facilitation resources. Furthermore, competitive intensity negatively moderates the impact of the internal drivers on service climate. The results also suggest that, depending on the ownership types (local vs foreign firms), the influences of the internal drivers of service climate might differ.

Despite the recognition of the role of organizational resources in fostering service climate, the integration and processes by which such resources influence service climate have not been fully examined. In particular, little is known about the external factors facilitating or hindering service climate, especially from an emerging market perspective. By examining both internal and external drivers of service climate under different ownership types, this paper enriches the existing knowledge on service climate and provides important implications for service firms operating in emerging markets.

The purpose of this meta-analysis is to encapsulate the outcomes and generate meaningful conclusions by examining the factors that influence consumers' purchase and non-purchase behaviour intention in a virtual reality retailing context.

This study integrates the outcomes from 52 studies, including 403 relationships involving 19,188 samples. The analysis was conducted using R-metafor and AMOS software.

The findings indicate that key factors that influence purchase and non-purchase behavioural intentions are virtual reality (VR)characteristics, virtual reality experience and consumer attitudes. VR experience is the strongest predictor for purchase decisions in virtual environment ,while consumer attitude towards VR most strongly influences the non-purchase behaviour of the consumers. Furthermore, the age of the respondents, cultural backgrounds (high vs low power distance) and gender moderate the relationship between consumers' attitudes and purchase and behaviour intentions.

Marketers can positively influence consumer attitudes and behavioural intentions by prioritizing the design of the virtual environment and facilitating unique experiences (by manipulating different sensory stimuli) in virtual retailing.

The current meta-analysis reconciles and reinforces the findings in the extant literature and provides a robust empirical generalization of the critical factors that influence consumers' purchase or behavioural intentions in a virtual retailing context.

The aim of this study is to understand why some New Zealand firms in the professional services industries have been slow to embrace e‐business technologies.

The authors employ a postal survey approach and involve a sample of 500 professional service small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand.

The main conclusion derived from this study is that a combination of factors influences a firm's current and future level of e‐business adoption. These factors include: being able to understand potential e‐business benefits; being able to respond to customer and competitor practices; being prepared to develop staff skills and knowledge of internet‐based technologies (IBTs); and having a well justified and strategic orientation towards e‐business.

The research was restricted in scope to professional service sector SMEs in New Zealand. Further research is planned to provide valuable benchmarks of other country and sectoral adoption and diffusion behaviours.

Adopting firms must continue to extend their e‐business capabilities and levels of sophistication. The biggest challenge that lies ahead is how to change the mindset of non‐adopters and make them realise the benefits that e‐business can deliver. In the final analysis choices about new technology and the exploitation of e‐business opportunities must be owner‐manager led.

The contribution of this research is that the relationship between technology adoption and professional service‐sector firms in New Zealand has become better understood. Implicitly the study has revealed the factors that impact on the decision‐making processes of owner‐managers in relation to the adoption (or otherwise) of IBTs for business purposes.

The paper aims to explain why the customer value construct is important to resource‐based view (RBV) scholars and how one might define it to study it.

By a summary of the ideas behind the RBV and previously applied definitions of customer value, the paper explains why Woodruff's multidimensional definition of customer value is suited to studying customer value from a managerial perspective. To this end, it develops a framework and derives three research questions for studying how managers use the firm's resources to create customer value.

It was found that to understand how managers invest in dynamic capabilities to create customer value one must identify how a firm's managers develop a shared understanding of their customers' values and the firm's capacity to deliver on them. This shared understanding will need to reflect customers' multidimensional values and what is most important to the firm.

These phenomena are best studied qualitatively because the focus is on understanding how managers work together and use the resources at their disposal to create customer value. The performance effects of different resource investment decisions can be examined by including high and low performing firms in the study dataset.

The paper describes a framework that can explain how managers map customer value and its different dimensions against the resources at the firm which they believe can deliver an optimal product and service mix to the firm's customers.