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Marketers have begun to investigate the potential of gamification for influencing consumer behavior by using game design elements in realms varying from branding, retail, sales and health services. Marketers have also begun to explore consumer behavior in sustainability. This paper aims to provide contributions to build on both literatures.

This research tests gamification principles in a large field study on real consumers that includes data from pre-post surveys, gamified app analytics and household energy meters. The data are analyzed using ANOVA’s and structural equation modeling.

The findings demonstrate: gamification significantly enhanced consumers’ knowledge, attitudes, behavioral intentions and realized bill savings compared to a control group; reward-based game design elements including points, badges and other rewards contribute to enhancing sustainable behavior outcomes.

Future research in settings outside of sustainability may extend upon the findings of the current research to further understanding the impact of reward-based game design elements in marketing.

The findings have important practical implications for how organizations might use serious games to promote sustainable and other desirable behavior. In particular, how reward-based game design elements, points, trophies and badges, can be used to create a chain of relationships that leads to reduced electricity consumption.

This paper fulfills the need to understand if the impact of gamification extends outside of controlled environments and into the field. Further, it demonstrates how reward-based game design elements contribute to consumers changing their behavior, a relationship that is not yet thoroughly understood in the marketing literature.

This paper aims to examine the status of service guarantees specifically, and cues to quality more generally.

Reflection on the 1998 Journal of Services Marketing article with views both to the academic literature and the presence of guarantees in industry.

Service guarantees still exist, sometimes in their original form (e.g. “100 per cent satisfaction guaranteed!”) and sometimes in a morphed form (e.g. retailers’ promises of price-matching). Research has continued to focus on understanding service guarantees yet there are additional questions left to be addressed. There are also numerous other types of information, in addition to service guarantees, consumers may use as cues to quality.

Service guarantees remain an important and useful tool for services marketers to signal their quality to their customers and to reduce the uncertainty surrounding many services purchases. Other information such as online ratings and reviews through social media can also serve as strong informational cues.

In providing cues to customers about quality, while marketers have long considered the value of price and brand names, the usefulness of service guarantees is still under-studied.

This chapter reviews marketing scholarship on environmental sustainability. The literature covers several themes of both consumer behavior and firm-level topics. Consumer issues include their assessment of efficacy and the extent to which they are aware and sensitive to environmental issues. Numerous interventions and marketing appeals for modifying attitudes and behaviors have been tested and are reported. Consumers and business managers have both been queried regarding attitudes of recycling and waste. Firm-level phenomena are reflected, including how brand managers can signal their green efforts to their customers, whether doing so is beneficial, all in conjunction with macro pressures or constraints from industry or governmental agencies. This chapter closes with a reflection on the research.

Recently, several service firms (e.g. Hampton Inn, Delta Dental Plan of Massachusetts) have successfully implemented service guarantees. Little research, however, has been done examining the conditions under which service guarantees are the most effective. The current research examines how the presence of a guarantee affects consumers’ pre‐purchase evaluations. It also investigates interactions between multiple extrinsic cues such as the presence of a guarantee and information about the quality level of firm offering the guarantee. The results suggest that while guarantees can enhance consumers’ perceptions of quality, especially in situations characterized by greater service quality variability, they are less effective in the presence of other quality cues.

In this chapter, we introduce a new construct we call “Perceived Deception in Online Consumer Reviews” (PDOCR). Online reviews of products are very important to companies and customers, yet they are vulnerable to unethical representations. Even regardless of whether a deceptive review has been posted or not, we take the position that it is important to understand consumers’ perceptions of deception because it is a consumer’s perception that leads him or her to experience subsequent feelings and opinions and to consider follow-up actions. We draw on the literature and build on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Cognitive Dissonance Theory to create an overarching framework of antecedents of PDOCR, consequences, and moderators. We also report findings from a sample of in-depth interviews with real consumers about their thoughts on these phenomena and related constructs. We use our framework and theories and the qualitative data to derive Research Questions that we hope will spur future research on these important issues.

Often when we think about the need for democracy and democratic values we look externally to other countries like China, Russia, the former Soviet Union, and various banana republics. Today, the role of democracy is even challenged in the United States. Some candidates are even calling for more socialism.

But, are we even living up to democratic values today? About 98 million eligible voters did not vote in the 2016 election. Increasing number of surveys highlights the loss of democratic values. The continuous attacks by our president on free press and other democratic values, truth, and science are a fundamental threat to our most treasured values.

We believe that marketing, if practiced in an enlightened, positive, and ethical way, can help restore our democracy and democratic values. We elaborate on these values and how marketing can play a role in restoring democracy.

We hope that after reading our chapter you will join our movement to restore democracy and democratic values in America.

Market response models or marketing mix models quantify the effects of marketing actions on consumption-based outcomes such as sales and market share. They are frequently used in the business sector to help managers make effective resource allocation decisions, especially in the digital age. However, these models can also be used on social causes, in particular to gauge the efficacy of regulations on consumption levels that have social consequences. This chapter explores these principles in two major areas of social concern, alcohol consumption and narcotics abuse. We review the empirical findings in these two areas, based on published research in major marketing journals, and we formulate various recommendations for the effective regulation of alcohol and narcotics consumption.