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1 – 10 of 144This article presents an approach for measuring consumer preferences in developing countries. The role of marketing research in developing countries and the salient factors which…
Abstract
This article presents an approach for measuring consumer preferences in developing countries. The role of marketing research in developing countries and the salient factors which have an impact on how marketing research should be conducted in these countries are briefly discussed. The popular preference measurement procedures developed in the advanced nations are briefly reviewed and found to be unsuitable for use in developing countries. Hence, an alternative approach is proposed which reduces the data collection demands imposed on the respondents. It makes use of pictorial or visual stimuli and requires input from the respondents using a simple binary scale. An empirical investigation illustrating the proposed approach is reported. The convergent validity of the proposed procedure is assessed and found to be highly satisfactory.
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Doris Warneke and Martin Schneider
Heterogeneous employee preferences may encumber employers' attempts to standardize expatriate compensation packages. The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical approach…
Abstract
Purpose
Heterogeneous employee preferences may encumber employers' attempts to standardize expatriate compensation packages. The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical approach that informs employers about their employees' preferences concerning an international assignment.
Design/methodology/approach
Utility theory and conjoint measurement techniques are applied. Employees, it is argued, derive utility from the multiple characteristics of the assignment in terms of working conditions, career prospects, and living conditions. Employees perceive that utility relative to their country‐specific status quo. Such preferences may be measured with conjoint analysis.
Findings
To illustrate the methodology, German and Spanish employees in one company were given the scenario of an assignment in the USA. Measured preferences, though partly heterogeneous, were systematically related to the home country's institutional and cultural environment (societal effect).
Research limitations/implications
More countries should be included in future studies. Studies of this kind may be related to the concepts of institutional and cultural distance.
Practical implications
Based on these findings, worldwide policies and procedures on expatriate compensation packages may be formulated to strike a better balance between standardization and the needs of a heterogeneous global workforce.
Originality/value
The paper presents a first systematic model of the preferences that guide the employee decision to accept or decline an international assignment, and it illustrates how these preferences can be measured.
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Benedikt M. Brand and Daniel Baier
To examine whether the country of origin (COO) effect actually exists in an e-commerce context, the authors intend to contribute to the ongoing debate by measuring the COO effect…
Abstract
Purpose
To examine whether the country of origin (COO) effect actually exists in an e-commerce context, the authors intend to contribute to the ongoing debate by measuring the COO effect through a series of connected studies.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on cue utilization theory, the authors emphasize the urge to investigate the COO effect in multiple cue settings in order to reveal a more realistic picture of its actual effect size. In contrast to most prior research, which often does not analyze COO using methodological plurality and neglects important contextual factors, the authors employed a four-staged research design in an attempt to trigger and measure the COO’s implicit effect size in today’s pervasive context of online shopping. The importance of brands (inhering the COO) is decompositionally calculated relative to other extrinsic cues by applying a Hierarchical Bayes estimation, with the COO impact being extracted subsequently.
Findings
The results deepen concerns that the COO effect actually does not exist, particularly in the more contemporary context of online shopping. Specifically, preferences for previously favored German products faded when controlling for brand attitude for both high-involvement (p = 0.003) and low-involvement products (p = 0.024).
Research limitations/implications
The study focused on consumers of Generation Y, as they represent one of the most important segments in online shopping. Findings might be replicated for other consumer generations. The study focused on Chinese consumers, as the Chinese e-commerce market represents the world’s largest one. Future studies might investigate other markets.
Practical implications
As brands, rather than a COO effect, impacted consumer preferences, companies selling their products to Chinese consumers online need to establish a reputation for quality early on. Chinese companies should emphasize their COO to make use of the ethnocentrism detected. Companies profit from the Best-Worst Scaling investigation revealing which product categories Chinese consumers most preferably buy online from German companies.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to capture the importance of COO in the contemporary context of ubiquitous online shopping. Moreover, a more realistic and less biased way of measuring the importance of COO is enabled by building upon three pre-connected studies. The findings allow to develop a generalization for both high- and low-involvement products.
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Frank Huber, Andreas Herrmann and Martin Wricke
The goal of this current study is to extend customer satisfaction research in two important ways. First, it attempts to demonstrate the relationship between customer satisfaction…
Abstract
The goal of this current study is to extend customer satisfaction research in two important ways. First, it attempts to demonstrate the relationship between customer satisfaction and price acceptance. Second, as Voss, Parasuraman and Grewal claim that only a small proportion of the existant satisfaction research focuses on services, we empirically analyze the relationship between customer satisfaction and price acceptance in the hotel industry. Finally, the implications of the study’s findings for research into purchasing patterns and pricing policy are discussed.
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Hendrik Slabbinck and Adriaan Spruyt
The idea that a significant portion of what consumers do, feel, and think is driven by automatic (or “implicit”) cognitive processes has sparked a wave of interest in the…
Abstract
The idea that a significant portion of what consumers do, feel, and think is driven by automatic (or “implicit”) cognitive processes has sparked a wave of interest in the development of assessment tools that (attempt to) capture cognitive processes under automaticity conditions (also known as “implicit measures”). However, as more and more implicit measures are developed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumer scientists and marketing professionals to select the most appropriate tool for a specific research question. We therefore present a systematic overview of the criteria that can be used to evaluate and compare different implicit measures, including their structural characteristics, the extent to which (and the way in which) they qualify as “implicit,” as well as more practical considerations such as ease of implementation and the user experience of the respondents. As an example, we apply these criteria to four implicit measures that are (or have the potential to become) popular in marketing research (i.e., the implicit association test, the evaluative priming task, the affect misattribution procedure, and the propositional evaluation paradigm).
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Markus Eberl and Manfred Schwaiger
Theory has made many assumptions about the consequences of a “good” corporate reputation. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the effect of a positive corporate…
Abstract
Purpose
Theory has made many assumptions about the consequences of a “good” corporate reputation. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the effect of a positive corporate reputation on the firm's future financial performance by means of a more differentiated concept of reputation than the one commonly used in literature.
Design/methodology/approach
In contrast to prior research, reputation is conceptualised by means of a two‐dimensional approach. Therefore, two distinct reputational components are hypothesised as affecting financial performance differently. A large‐scale representative survey of 30 of the largest German firms is conducted to gain reputational evaluations of these firms. The overall assessment of reputation is differentiated into a part that is explained by past financial performance and an idiosyncratic part to control for the effect of past performance on today's reputation. Finally, the idiosyncratic effect of reputation on future performance is assessed with an econometric model.
Findings
Both the cognitive and the affective reputational dimension significantly influence future financial performance after controlling for past performance. Furthermore, the results suggest that the decompositional model outperforms a non‐decompositional approach in terms of goodness of fit.
Research limitations/implications
There is only a limited possibility to generalise the results to all firms.
Practical implications
The results imply a need for differentiated reputation management, since the cognitive and affective components of corporate reputation drive financial performance differently.
Originality/value
The two‐dimensional reputational approach broadens prior research with a focus on the differences in performance – the effects of both the reputational components.
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We describe two new methods: the global optimization method ALIENOR and the decompositional method of Adomian. Then we show how they can be applied to models identification and to…
Abstract
We describe two new methods: the global optimization method ALIENOR and the decompositional method of Adomian. Then we show how they can be applied to models identification and to optimal control of biological processes.
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Lorena Ronda, Carmen Abril and Carmen Valor
This research draws upon decision-making theory to study job choice decisions. Past studies measured job choice as a single-stage, compositional process addressing the weights and…
Abstract
Purpose
This research draws upon decision-making theory to study job choice decisions. Past studies measured job choice as a single-stage, compositional process addressing the weights and part-worth utilities of a selected number of job and organizational attributes. However, the presence of noncompensatory attributes and whether the utilities and weights attached to the attributes vary among applicants have not been addressed. The authors posit that a conjoint analysis is an accurate methodological technique to explain job choice and overcome these limitations.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a random sample of 571 participants, we conducted an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis to estimate the weighted utilities of eight employer attributes and a cluster analysis to identify differences in preferences among employee profiles.
Findings
The results reveal that the use of the conjoint technique contributes to the literature in two ways. First, the results demonstrate the relevance of nonnegotiable attributes in the design of job offers. The results show that Salary, Flexibility and Ethics serve as cutoff points. Second, the results highlight the importance of considering the latent preferences of applicants in crafting effective job offers and adequately segmenting job applicants. More specifically, the following three groups are identified: Career-seeking applicants, Sustainability-oriented applicants and Pragmatic applicants.
Practical implications
The managerial implications of this study are relevant for HR and employer brand managers since a better understanding of the job-choice process and implementing a decompositional method to understand applicants' preferences could allow firms to provide more customized and relevant job offers to employees of interest.
Originality/value
This study concludes that to implement efficient employer-attraction branding strategies, employers should understand the attributes considered noncompensatory by their employee target audience, promote the most valued/important attributes to ensure that job offers are customized to fit employees' underlying preferences, and devise trade-off strategies among compensatory attributes.
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The set of compositional approaches to product space development is expanded to include confirmatory methods. Specifically, describes and compares product space development…
Abstract
The set of compositional approaches to product space development is expanded to include confirmatory methods. Specifically, describes and compares product space development (perceptual mapping) via confirmatory factor analysis and partial least squares with the aid of an empirical example. Both of these procedures are widely used in causal or structural equation modelling. Since they tend to be confirmatory extensions to factor analysis and principal components analysis, the approaches are also well suited to the development of product spaces. Confirmatory approaches have several advantages over exploratory approaches including the incorporation of prior knowledge, the elimination of rotational indeterminacy, and the use of a wide variety of measurement tools to assess the reliability and validity of model results.
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