Search results

Intercultural competence has been found to be increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to understand how intercultural competence impacts service providers’ ability to recognition faces of both black and white consumers.

Two experiments were administered to understand how intercultural competence impacts recognition of black and white consumer faces.

The authors find that the more intercultural competence that respondents report with blacks, the better they are at distinguishing between black regular customers and black new shoppers in an experiment. The authors find no impact of intercultural competence on the ability of respondents to differentiate between white consumers. These findings hold for respondents in the USA and South Africa.

One limitation of this research is that the studies were conducted in a controlled lab setting. Thus, one could imagine additional noise from a true consumer setting might increase the effects of these results. Another limitation is the focus on only black and white consumer faces. In this paper, the authors focused on these two races, specifically to keep the factorial design as simplified as possible.

The implications of this research are important given that the ability of employees’ recognizing customer faces can affect customers’ day-to-day interactions in the marketplace.

Purpose – We study weight loss communities to contribute to the understanding of how gifting, sharing, and the relationship between them allow individuals to pursue status transitions for a social identity.

Methodology – We employed archival netnography to capture emic experiences for a stigmatized circumstance in American society. We analyze data from four communities to obtain a broad range of consumer experiences within fee versus free communities.

Findings – We explain how individuals differentially employ sharing and gifting to create and sustain communities in support of status transitions within a social identity. Further, we describe roles of gifting, sharing, and prosumption, and their contributions to the transformative process of weight loss.

Research limitations/implications – The data comes from communities that may be viewed as stigmatized within the United States, one cultural milieu. Future research should examine these concepts across additional contexts and cultures.

Practical implications – Our analysis reveals the basis for virtual community development in support of status transitions. These results underscore the necessity to examine how consumers co-opt market resources to enact private, albeit life altering, goals.

Originality/value of paper – Most extant literature focuses either on gifting or sharing with little attention to how consumers employ community and membership to achieve personal goals. Our research articulates how individuals employ market resources to enact customized rituals and achieve individual goals within communities.