Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address consumers’ post-purchase perceptions toward the brand when it adopts price reduction strategy. The study specifically conceptualizes the effect of consumers’ price unfairness perceptions of past purchase (PUPoPP) on customer-based brand equity (CBBE) with a moderating effects of elapsed time since purchase (ETSP) and magnitude of price reduction (MPR) in situations where consumers were aware of the reduction in price of the product that they had purchased earlier.

A survey was conducted among consumers who were aware of the reduction in the price of the computer laptop which they had purchased earlier. A sample size of 214 respondents was utilized for the study. The hypotheses were tested by using partial least squares-structural equations modeling.

The results of the study show that there is a significant negative impact of PUPoPP on CBBE and the ETSP was found to enhance CBBE and also weaken the negative effect of PUPoPP on CBBE. Furthermore, the MPR was found to strengthen the negative effect of PUPoPP on CBBE.

The findings of this study are unique and contribute to both pricing and branding areas of research. While extant research in these areas has focused on price fairness perceptions in situations where the price of future purchase increases, particularly for frequently purchased non-durable goods, this study explored PUPoPP in situations where the firm reduces the price of a durable good such as a computer laptop.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what affects the liquidity of individual commercial real estate assets over the course of the economic cycle by exploring a range of variables and a number of time periods to identify key determinants of sale probability.

Analyzing 12,000 UK commercial real estate transactions (2003 to 2013) the authors use an innovative sampling technique akin to a perpetual inventory approach to generate a sample of held assets for each 12 month interval. Next, the authors use probit models to test how market, owner and property factors affect sale probability in different market environments.

The types of properties that are most likely to sell changes between strong and weak markets. Office and retail assets were more likely to sell than industrial both overall and in better market conditions, but were less likely to sell than industrial properties during the downturn from mid-2007 to mid-2009. Assets located in the City of London more likely to sell in both strong and weak markets. The behavior of different groups of owners changed over time, and this indicates that the type of owner might have implications for the liquidity of individual assets over and above their physical and locational attributes.

Variation in sale probability over time and across assets has implications for real estate investment management both in terms of asset selection and the ability to rebalance portfolios over the course of the cycle. Results also suggest that sample selection may be an issue for commercial real estate price indices around the globe and imply that indices based on a limited group of owners/sellers might be susceptible to further biases when tracking market performance through time.

The study differs from the existing literature on sale probability as the authors analyzed samples of transactions drawn from all investor types, a significant advantage over studies based on data restricted to samples of domestic institutional investors. As well, information on country of origin for buyers and sellers allows us to explore the influence of foreign ownership on the probability of sale. Finally, the authors not only analyze all transactions together, but the authors also look at transactions in five distinct periods that correspond with different phases of the UK commercial real estate cycle. This paper considers the UK real estate market, but it is likely that many of the findings hold for other major commercial real estate markets.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

This paper aims to explore multiple reference effects with regard to customers’ post-consumption evaluations in a cross-cultural context. The authors propose to test an integrative model of three types of reference effects (disconfirmation, attractiveness of alternatives and self-image congruity) and their relationship to customers’ evaluations associated with satisfaction and loyalty. Additional insight into the link between reference points and customer satisfaction is provided by examining the moderating influence of the cultural orientation of customers: South Korean (an Eastern, collectivist and high uncertainty avoidance culture) versus American (a Western, individualistic and low uncertainty avoidance culture).

The data for this study were collected through a Web-based survey. Based on a sample of 723 Korean and American consumers, multi-group analysis of structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed model and the moderating effect of culture.

Overall, the results indicated that American customers’ use of reference points in their post-consumption evaluations is significantly different from that of Korean customers. Specifically, disconfirmation had a stronger effect on Korean customers than on their American counterparts, whereas the attractiveness of alternatives had a stronger effect on American customers than on those from Korea. Moreover, self-image congruity was found to be equally important in both cultures.

Owing to the comparison of American and Korean participants in this study, these results may not be applied to customers from other countries. Moreover, the study is limited to post-consumption evaluations in restaurants and generalization of the results to other industries may be ill advised. Thus, further research is required to replicate the results and include customers from different countries in more diverse consumption settings.

The findings provide useful guidance for efficient marketing strategies to generate positive consumer outcomes across borders. Marketers must consider the interaction of cultures and customers to better understand customer perceptions and evaluations about their experiences. This understanding will enable the marketers to more effectively communicate with their target markets and allow them to tailor advertising to different segments of their customer base contingent upon their cultural orientations.

Although the role of reference effects has begun to attract considerable interest among consumer behavior researchers, much of this research has been conducted in a single cultural context. Because the global economy is becoming increasingly cross-cultural, it is valuable to conduct international consumer research to further the understanding of consumers’ post-consumption evaluation processes using multiple reference points from a global perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to help firms assess lifetime profitability of customers whose buying behaviors are characterized by purchasing cycles, which are determined by both intrinsic purchasing cycles and cumulative effects of firms’ marketing solicitations.

This paper first proposes a probability model to predict customers’ responses to firms’ marketing solicitations in which a customer’s inter-purchase times are assumed to follow a Poisson distribution, whose parameters vary across customers and follow a gamma distribution. The paper then proposes a customer profitability scoring model that uses customers’ responses as an input to assess their lifetime profitability at a given point of time.

The paper illustrates the proposed method using individual-level purchasing data of 529 customers from a catalog firm. The paper shows that the proposed model outperforms the benchmark model in terms of both explaining and predicting customers’ purchases. The paper also demonstrates significant profit consequences to the firm if incorrect methods are used instead of the proposed method.

The proposed method can help firms select or eliminate customers based on their lifetime profitability so that firms can focus their marketing efforts in a more targeted manner to increase total profits.

The proposed Gamma-Poisson probability model and the profitability scoring method are easy to implement due to the attractive conjugacy property. It is valuable for firms’ customer relationship management applications from the standpoint of making customer selection and inventory management decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the best approach to customer segmentation and to extrapolate associated rules for this based on recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) considerations as well as demographic factors. In this study, the impacts of RFM and demographic attributes have been challenged in order to enrich factors that lend comprehension to customer segmentation. Different types of scenario were designed, performed and evaluated meticulously under uniform test conditions. The data for this study were extracted from the database of a global pizza restaurant chain in Turkey. This paper summarizes the findings of the study and also provides evidence of its empirical implications to improve the performance of customer segmentation as well as achieving extracted rule perfection via effective model factors and variations. Accordingly, marketing and service processes will work more effectively and efficiently for customers and society. The implication of this study is that it explains a clear concept for interaction between producers and consumers.

Customer relationship management, which aims to manage record and evaluate customer interactions, is generally regarded as a vital tool for companies that wish to be successful in the rapidly changing global market. The prediction of customer behaviors is a strategically important and difficult issue because of the high variance and wide range of customer orders and preferences. So to have an effective tool for extracting rules based on customer purchasing behavior, considering tangible and intangible criteria is highly important. To overcome the challenges imposed by the multifaceted nature of this problem, the authors utilized artificial intelligence methods, including k-means clustering, Apriori association rule mining (ARM) and neural networks. The main idea was that customer clusters are better enhanced when segmentation processes are based on RFM analysis accompanied by demographic data. Weighted RFM (WRFM) and unweighted RFM values/scores were applied with and without demographic factors and utilized to compose different types and numbers of clusters. The Apriori algorithm was used to extract rules of association. The performance analyses of scenarios have been conducted based on these extracted rules. The number of rules, elapsed time and prediction accuracy were used to evaluate the different scenarios. The results of evaluations were compared with the outputs of another available technique.

The results showed that having an appropriate segmentation approach is vital if there are to be strong association rules. Also, it has been determined from the results that the weights of RFM attributes affect rule association performance positively. Moreover, to capture more accurate customer segments, a combination of RFM and demographic attributes is recommended for clustering. The results’ analyses indicate the undeniable importance of demographic data merged with WRFM. Above all, this challenge introduced the best possible sequence of factors for an analysis of clustering and ARM based on RFM and demographic data.

The work compared k-means and Kohonen clustering methods in its segmentation phase to prove the superiority of adopted segmentation techniques. In addition, this study indicated that customer segments containing WRFM scores and demographic data in the same clusters brought about stronger and more accurate association rules for the understanding of customer behavior. These so-called achievements were compared with the results of classical approaches in order to support the credibility of the proposed methodology. Based on previous works, classical methods for customer segmentation have overlooked any combination of demographic data with WRFM during clustering before proceeding to their rule extraction stages.

PRODUCTIVITY is a constant awareness of the need to make more efficient use of the production resources, and the efficiency/performance returns in each factory will testify to the thoroughness of work study. There will be those factories where work study is discredited in that production methods have remained static, original study work has not been properly recorded and amendments have gone by the board with the inevitable consequence that standards slip. Any work study findings are no longer accepted as valid with the result that work measurement degenerates to the level of rate fixing.

The question has been recently raised as to how far the operation of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts of 1875, 1879, and 1899, and the Margarine Act, 1887, is affected by the Act 29 Charles II., cap. 7, “for the better observation of the Lord's Day, commonly called Sunday.” At first sight it would seem a palpable absurdity to suppose that a man could escape the penalties of one offence because he has committed another breach of the law at the same time, and in this respect law and common‐sense are, broadly speaking, in agreement; yet there are one or two cases in which at least some show of argument can be brought forward in favour of the opposite contention.

Disconfirmation models of service quality have attracted a lot of discussion about how consumers’ expectations are formed, but relatively little about the nature of their perceptions of service performance. This paper seeks to redress the absence of literature on the psychological underpinnings of perceptions in disconfirmation models of service quality. It argues that an individual’s perceptions may not be stable over time and that suppliers should be particularly interested in consumers’ perceptions at the time that the next repurchase decision is made. A model of the time elapsed effects of service quality perception is presented and research reported on a longitudinal survey of hotel customers’ perceptions.