Search results

The article introduces practitioners to the concept and process of co-creating customization with buyers.

This article offers a process and a model that mass market companies can use to take a scalable approach to involving customers in offering development, delivery and use.

Companies that co-create customization in a truly collaborative process enjoy significantly more sustainable competitive advantages.

For the company, co-creating leads to better offerings – including new capabilities that can be used with different customers in differing combinations – and also a more complete and clear picture of what its customers want.

The article introduces the co-creation customization model and nine strategies practitioners can use to provide individualized customer value.

Managing through crises, especially economic ones, represents both peril and opportunity. Libraries of all types, whether academic, special or public, would benefit from an infusion of marketing activity in the current economic climate. Such marketing need not be resource‐intensive but must be relevant to specific user populations. In order to reap the greatest rewards while expending the least effort or resources, adopting a narrative or story‐based marketing message that develops and reinforces a consistent value proposition can improve patron experience by speaking in a language that resonates with them regarding services and resources that may be unclear or altogether unknown. This paper aims to discuss current trends in developing narrative or story‐based marketing that focuses on customer needs and applies it to library marketing specifically.

The paper discusses of current trends informed by current marketing scholarship and draws upon the author's prior experience in sales and marketing as a vendor for LexisNexis.

Adopting a narrative‐based marketing plan for libraries of all kinds, one that is based upon a specific user population's needs and expectations, can promote a notion of increased value as well as an overall sense of being indispensable and critical to those patrons. The ultimate goal is a demonstrable strengthening of support from user populations that will translate into avoidance of deeper or ongoing cuts during the current economic climate. Further benefits also include the ability to identify and target users and groups for fundraising opportunities while improving library personnel morale based upon the increased, generalized perception of the library's value within the broader organization or community.

Based upon years of sales and marketing experience, the author takes a practical and seasoned approach to creating a marketing plan that draws upon little to no resources but is compelling in its tailored and targeted approach that uses identifiable language to reinforce and describe specific user‐driven needs.

The paper provides recommendations for developing, creating and executing a narrative or story‐based marketing plan that speaks to users in the language and needs most critical to them while highlighting resources and services that may not be currently valued or even known.

Seeks to address the challenge of aligning IT systems and their use with the arena of value creation in customer relationships . It begins by characterizing value in customer relationships as being viewed along two dimensions; that of potency and of time. The interaction of these dimensions, and the implications for enhancing value as a result of these interactions are discussed. The impact of information technology (IT) on acquiring and utilizing customer information in consumer markets, and the ways in which it may facilitate the influence of outside environments upon customer/firm relationships is also explored. In conclusion, as marketing activity and value creation becomes IT driven, managers will be required to integrate both product and market knowledge in a more dynamic environment where customer input is critical, in order to enhance value in customer relationships.

There is a current trend in healthcare management away from produced and standardized one-size-fits-all processes toward co-created and individualized services. The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the value concept in healthcare organization and management by recognizing different levels of value (private, group and public) and the interconnectedness among these levels.

The paper uses social constructionism as a lens to problematize the individualization of service logic’s value concept. Theories from consumer culture theory/transformative service research and public management add group and public levels of value to the private level.

An intersubjective (rather than subjective) approach to value creation entails the construction and sharing of value perceptions among groups of people. Such an approach also implies that group members may face similar barriers in their value creation efforts.

Healthcare management should be aware of the inherent individualism of service logic and, consequently, the need to balance private value with group and public levels of value.

Identifying and addressing disadvantaged groups and the reasons for their disadvantaged positions is important in order to enhance the individual’s value creation prerequisites as well as to address public and societal values, such as equal/equitable health(care).

It is important to complement service logic’s value creation with group and public levels in order to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of value and the creation thereof.

Although there are at least two important characteristics of targeted promotions—promotion individualization (i.e. whether the offer is personalized for the recipient) and notification exclusivity (i.e. how small the number of recipients is)—most previous studies on targeted promotion have conceptualized them synonymously. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of targeted promotion on consumer purchases by conceptualizing these separately and incorporating them in a single model. Also, this study explores how the effects of these differ depending on customer loyalty. We particularly examine the promotional responses of extremely loyal customers, distinguishing them from other loyal customers.

Using actual customer purchase data, we develop a two-stage model of the consumer decision-making process involving decisions of whether and how much to purchase. The two characteristics of targeted promotions—promotion individualization and notification exclusivity—first influence the probability of purchase and then the purchase amount given purchase.

The results show that customers respond positively to individualization and exclusivity. The effect of individualization is reduced as customer loyalty increases from loyal customers to extremely loyal customers while that of exclusivity remains the same.

By clearly identifying the two characteristics of targeted promotions and developing an empirical model that captures the effects of these separately, this paper provides new academic and managerial insights that were not clearly identified in the current literature.

This paper uses the case of Islamic banking in Amman, Jordan, to assess the wide moral range of expectations, levels of satisfaction, and means of evaluating banks’ “Islamicness.”

The information is gathered from interviews conducted during over 21 months of ethnographic research and one month in participant observation and research access as an intern at the Middle East Islamic Bank (MEIB) in Amman, Jordan.

I found three modes for evaluating “Islamicness” when actors decide whether or not to become customers of Islamic banks.

These modes demonstrate that Islamic banking is no longer the cultural protectionism of a relatively homogeneous community of Muslims. Rather it is a fraught and tense field for actors’ debates about types of moralities in the markets and modes of moral assessments of “Islamicness.”

The amplification of the individual and individual choice and authority in the moral assessments of Islamic banking may ultimately serve to unseat prior dichotomous theoretical framings of morality’s presence or absence as “Islamic” or “not Islamic” and “good” and “bad.” By unleashing to individuals the construction of morality in the markets, moral rights and wrongs, and moral evaluations, fragmentation of moral consensus in market practices will occur.

This article aims to discuss the individualisation trend in the provision of social services, focusing on activation services specifically.

The individualisation trend in the provision of activation services is analysed against the background of public sector as well as social sector as well as social policy reforms: the introduction of new modes of governance and the rise of the active welfare state respectively.

Concrete manifestations of individualised service provision are often based on various interpretations of individualisation and reflect different meanings of citizens’ participation, and refer to different modes – or rather, mixes of different modes – of governance. The general argument of the article is illustrated and elaborated by analysing three national case studies of individualised service provision in the context of activation: the UK, The Netherlands and Finland.

The trend that is analysed in the article – individualised service provision – is very clearly present in welfare state reforms, but has thus far not received much attention in academic literature.

Customers today expect businesses to cater to their individual needs by tailoring the products they purchase to their own preferences. The term “Industry 5.0” refers to a new wave of manufacturing that aims to meet each customer's unique demands. Even while Industry 4.0 allowed for mass customization, that wasn't good enough before, customers today demand individualized products at scale, and Industry 5.0 is driving the transition from mass customization to mass personalization to meet these demands. It caters to the individual needs of each consumer by meeting their demands. More specialized components for use in medicine are made possible by the widespread customization made possible by Industry 5.0. These individualized parts are included into the medical care of the patient to meet their specific needs and preferences. In the current medical revolution, an enabling technology of Industry 5.0 can produce medical implants, artificial organs, bodily fluids, and transplants with pinpoint accuracy. With the advent of AI-enabled sensors, we now live in a world where data can be swiftly analyzed. Machines may be programmed to make complex choices on the fly. In the medical field, these innovations allow for exact measurement and monitoring of human body variables according to the individual's needs. They aid in monitoring the body's response to training for peak performance. It allows for the digital dissemination of accurate healthcare data networks. In order to collect and exchange relevant patient data, every equipment is online.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how different design elements of retailer coupons increase the attitudinal loyalty towards retailers.

Three design elements are manipulated in a 2x2x2 experimental design. Data is analysed using structural equation modeling.

The results demonstrate that addressing customers personally and face value have a positive impact on attitudinal loyalty. Surprisingly, the positive effect of personalization is stronger than that of typical variations in face value. In contrast, a high minimum purchase amount restriction has a negative total effect on loyalty and neutralizes the positive effects generated by personalization. The results illustrate further that personalization influences loyalty via self-reference and enjoyment independently of any cognitive evaluation of the coupon, while face value and the minimum purchase amount require at least some cognitive processing to have a loyalty impact.

Future studies can use the developed framework to test the impact of other design elements, promotion types or loyalty schemes.

The results underline that personalization offers opportunities for increasing loyalty without the necessity of large investments. As these effects can occur without redemption, coupon promotions should not be evaluated based on redemption rates only.

The study extends existing research by focusing on retailer coupons, analyzing the combined loyalty effects of three coupon design elements and developing a framework to analyze direct and indirect loyalty effects as well.