Search results

This paper aims to show the impact of service failure and to shed light on the vengeance of consumer in the health-care service.

A qualitative research through a retrospective study based on individual interviews was conducted. As this study is a sensitive topic, projective techniques were used to complement individual interviews, especially with care consumers who are reluctant subjects who prefer methods which preserve confidentiality. Practically, drawing interpretations method was used. The use of these drawings is to encourage reluctant interviewee to discuss on the study’s sensitive theme.

Empirical findings allowed first to approach care service failure in Tunisia that is an emerging post-revolutionary country-owned MENA. In this context, a comparison between the public and private sectors was proposed. Moreover, the results helped to understand service failure’s consequences related to patient’s reaction.

The Ministry of Health in collaboration with managers of public and private medical institutions will have to work on capitalization of knowledge, especially those learned from unsuccessful experiences.

Medical service failure can have multiple sources. The care consumer’s reaction to these failures can sometimes be extreme in form of revenge.

In this article we analyze price discounts and fixed price offers in terms of their comparative impact on consumer valuation of products. Using a model of consumer valuation, we explore the interaction between the negative quality effect and the positive monetary sacrifice effect associated with price discounts. This model suggests that intermediate levels of price discounts will be more desirable than a fixed price offer. However, a fixed price offer may be more desirable than both high and low levels of price discounts. The results from an experiment conducted to test this model showed support for the predictions from the model.

The purpose of this paper is to appraise the impact of mobile shopping platform characteristics on consumer’s emotions, the relationship between emotions and their impact on impulsive buying.

Mobile shopping platform characteristics were grouped into five dimensions: information, entertainment, personalization, visuality and economic benefits, and integrated in a model built on the Stimulus-organism-response theory to evaluate the influence on arousal (excitement) and pleasure, the relationship between arousal and pleasure and their impact on impulsive buying. In total, 303 valid questionnaires were collected from Chinese mobile shoppers. The research hypotheses were tested through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

Entertainment and personalization had significant positive influences on consumer’s arousal and pleasure. Information, visuality and economic benefits had significant positive influences on consumer’s arousal. Arousal had a significant positive impact on consumer’s pleasure. Arousal and pleasure had significant positive influences on impulsive buying.

New insights can be obtained by investigating other consumer’s profiles. The model can be improved by including other mobile platform characteristics (product availability, platform ease-of-use and interactivity) and broadening the impulsive buying perspective through assessing flow experience and virtual atmosphere.

Marketing strategies are proposed based on the mobile platform characteristics and considering Chinese customer values, for generating positive emotions and impulsive buying.

This study enriches the literature by recommending a classification for mobile shopping platform characteristics and proposing a model to investigate the characteristics, emotions and impulsive buying nexus.

This study aims to understand how digital storytelling advertising impacts online consumers’ responses towards advertisements on Facebook considering the different story features and the different consumers’ cultural backgrounds.

The grounded theory approach guided the development of this study that adopts an interpretivist positioning with an abductive approach that links the already existing knowledge on how storytelling affects consumer behaviour to the empirically retrieved data from two qualitative studies between France and Tunisia using a netnographic method to collect consumers’ responses to culturally adapted storytelling advertising.

The results reveal similarities and differences between Tunisian and French consumers regarding the effectiveness of digital storytelling advertising in influencing their cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses. Specifically, Tunisian consumers tended to hold more cognitive reactions originating from story plot and characters features as compared to French consumers who performed more affective responses towards the story plot feature. Interestingly, only French consumers performed behavioural reactions aligned with a cognitive and behavioural engagement with the storytelling advertising generated by story plot and verisimilitude elements. Findings also highlight the impact of some cultural influences on consumers’ reactions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known study to explore and compare the effects of digital storytelling advertising between Tunisia and France. The major contribution of this study lies in investigating and comparing consumers’ reactions to digital storytelling advertising across countries. This study adds to the body of literature on international marketing communication by offering two frameworks associating story’s elements with their outcomes in their relevant context and providing fruitful insights for future research and for brand managers to design effective storytelling content.

The objective of this study is to examine the relationships that exist among the attributions, the affect and behavioural intentions of consumers who suffer delays in services. As a new element, we propose to consider two different affective dimensions: anger (emotional reaction) and satisfaction with the service (cognitive and emotional evaluation). The methodology employed is based on structural equation modeling and the empirical application in the airline industry, which was carried out in Spain, demonstrates the existence of the sequence “attribution‐affect‐behavioural intention”, with anger being the mediator in the relationship between the attribution of control on behavioural intention (propensity to complain and repurchase intentions).

To make a theoretical comparison between two scale‐inspection and warranty policies for weight‐quality, one practical and the other theoretically grounded.

Comparison is made in a Stackelberg game framework considering the consumer's as well as the manufacturer's viewpoint.

The practical policy is more profitable for the manufacturer than the theoretical policy in many cases.

The study confines itself to scale‐inspection and warranty policies, but the underlying approach used in this paper can also be applied to other topics.

The proposed model can also provide a lower bound for the warranty.

The study compares a practical policy with a theoretical one from both the consumer's and manufacturer's point of view.

Emphasizing the increasing need for social presence in interpersonal interactions and the irreplaceable aspects of face-to-face communications, this study aims to explore the emotional impact of interpersonal influence on consumers after purchase. As individuals respond differently to others’ feedback (positive and negative/verbal and nonverbal), the author investigates potential moderating factors of the impact of feedback on consumer’s emotions in a postpurchase context.

A qualitative study was conducted using the method of semistructured individual interviews to collect data. The author selected a heterogeneous group of 30 consumers belonging to two categories: 13 adults (including seven women and six men) and 17 adolescents (including eight girls and nine boys). The author took into account this type of sampling in the selection of respondents, as investigating the influence of the respondent’s gender is one of the research objectives.

The thematic content analysis method released a set of propositions the author suggests for future validation: five moderating factors the author established from the literature review (strength of social ties, level of expertise, type of the product and consumer’s age and gender), while four factors sprang from the collected data (consumer’s level of conviction, repetition of the feedback, the feedback’s argumentation and its level of discretion).

The subjectivity of the interviewees’ personal descriptions of their felt internal states affects the accuracy of their responses. In addition, the psychological aspect of the study provoked reluctance and discretion from some respondents. Further research studies could target these limitations to study each identified moderating factor separately and search for the secondary variables that tend to be linked to these factors (e.g. the expertise level is linked to personality variables, such as the perceived level of self-confidence). Furthermore, subsequent studies can go beyond the affective impact of feedback and investigate the behavioral aspect (repurchase intentions).

This study is of great importance in providing more explanations for the reasons why consumers repurchase or abandon a product. The importance of the emotional power of others’ feedback suggests that, when positioning their offers, marketers must ensure that their product has a strong chance of acceptance by consumer’s significant other. In addition, companies must argue their offers, allowing consumers to increase their knowledge about the product. Moreover, interpersonal cues and expertise level are more important competences to find in employees. Who is more than a vendor, for example, to be perceived as having a high level of expertise in his field?

This study stresses the importance of face-to-face interpersonal interaction in a time when social lives are submerged by social media and virtual communications. The findings suggest that offline social power still matters, and its impact is relative to multiple factors that count for consumers. Face-to-face interaction has been viewed as the most efficient way to satisfy individuals’ social needs for connectedness.

This paper provides new insights into the impact of offline interpersonal verbal and nonverbal feedbacks. The feedback-affect process within consumers was explored, and the postpurchase context was precisely emphasized.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on consumers’ reactions to cross-border acquisitions (CBA) by exploring the role of consumer perceptions of the psychic distance between the country of the acquirer and that of the target firm when the acquiring corporation has a good or poor reputation.

A 2×2 experimental design which manipulated psychic distance and acquirer’s corporate reputation was conducted in Italy. The study considers an Italian food target firm and compares four foreign acquiring firms with different combinations of corporate reputation (good/poor) and psychic distance to Italy (small/large).

The authors found that the degree of psychic distance between the countries of the acquiring and targeted firms was inversely related to Italian consumers’ intentions to repurchase the products of the post-acquisition target, and unrelated to the acquirer’s corporate reputation.

This is the first study focusing on psychic distance in the context of CBA, especially from the perspective of consumer behavior, which can help to better understand certain negative reactions toward the acquisition of a business.

This paper aims to better understand the effect of store atmospherics on the employees' cognitive, affective and physiological responses. It tries to build on store atmospherics literature to gain more insights on how these store atmospherics – often handled to produce positive outcomes among consumers – affect employees' attitudinal and behavioural reactions.

This study adopted an explanatory approach. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 13 employees working in internationally reputed clothing stores. A content analysis was carried out.

The study reveals that employees could adopt avoidance behaviours because of the environmental factors. Specifically, it suggests that the lack of variation in the musical program, incongruence of music genre – salespersons musical preferences, long exposure to the same rhythms, task complexity, crowding, might affect the employees' attitudinal and behavioural responses. In addition, the relationships between the sales force team are found to influence employees' reactions.

Because of the complexity of the subject matter and the research approach adopted, the study findings may lack generalisability. Further studies are required to test the suggested framework in different service settings.

The study finding stresses the need that in an attempt to produce positive reactions from consumer, clothing stores managers should also devote attention to employees' responses to store atmospherics as they might inhibit the quality of the service delivery process.

This paper fulfils a recognized call to thoroughly understand the impact of store atmospherics on employees' reactions in services marketing. The study enlarges the scope of store atmospherics research in marketing to encompass not only the consumer's reactions but also the employee's ones.

This paper aims to study the cross-modal correspondence between a visual stimulus (i.e. glossiness), haptic perception and consumers’ reactions (internal responses and behavioral intentions).

Using an experimental design, three experimental studies have been conducted to test the effect of a glossy (versus matte) packaging upon the perception of haptic features of a packaging (roughness, thickness and lightness), internal reactions (perceived product quality and product attractiveness) and behavioral intentions (purchase intention and willingness to pay).

This paper evidences the significant impact that glossiness bears on the haptic perception of a packaging material as well as upon internal reactions and behavioral intentions. A new conceptual framework combining the SOR model and the cross-modal correspondences is validated.

The results encourage further research to explore the wide range of potential cross-modal correspondences between visual stimuli and haptic perception.

The results highlight the critical influence of visual cues for managers, especially for online shopping or advertising. Even if consumers cannot touch the product, it is possible to induce haptic perception through visual cues and to influence the internal reactions and behavioral intentions.

This research demonstrates that the packaging texture and weight can be visually induced through glossiness.