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The purpose of this study is to develop a model that investigates the antecedents and the consequences of buyer‐seller relationship quality in the financial services.

Data were collected from a survey of more than 400 dyads (414 financial advisors and 772 clients in Canada) and were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results notably show that, for both financial advisors and clients, customer orientation has an impact on buyer‐seller relationship quality, whereas buyer‐seller similarity does not. The link between relationship quality and both consequences (purchase intention and word‐of‐mouth) is significant for the two samples.

Limitations and research directions refer to the measure of word‐of‐mouth construct, which is only weakly reliable, and the need to consider a multilevel approach.

The study can be helpful for financial advisors to build effective strategies for enhancing their relationships with clients.

The study is one of the few to consider both perceptions (financial advisors and clients) in order to analyze buyer‐seller relationship quality in the financial services sector.

For many years, the financial industry has been perceived as conservative, old‐fashioned, and somewhat tedious. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of humour usage by financial advisors on several sales performance outcomes.

A survey was completed by more than 400 buyer‐seller dyads. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses were conducted. An important strength of SEM is its ability to incorporate the psychometric notions of constructs and measurement errors in the same estimation procedure.

A financial advisor's good sense of humour has a positive impact on the clients' perceptions of service quality, trust, satisfaction, purchase intentions, and word‐of‐mouth propensity.

Although only customer perceptions were used, the paper suggests many ways to use the results as a spring board by sales researchers to accrue research efforts in understanding the truly rich role of humour.

Many practical implications are suggested to entice organizations to emphasize salespeople's humouristic skills as a competitive advantage.

This is believed to be the first paper to investigate the effects of humour usage in sales encounters in the financial industry. A better understanding of humour is useful for service providers owing to its mass potential, its low cost, and its positive benefits for customers and financial advisors alike.

The service‐dominant logic describes customer‐actualized value as being idiosyncratic, experiential, contextual, and meaning laden. Since positive word‐of‐mouth (WOM) is an expression of customer‐actualized value, the paper postulate that WOM is not only related to a holistic set of assessments of the service experience but also to the idiosyncratic nature of the individual customer. In particular, do socially oriented individuals have a greater propensity to engage in positive WOM? The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses that socially oriented personality traits, and personal values as well as a set of dimensions of the total service experience, are antecedents of positive WOM. The context studied is a surgical operation involving considerable personal meaning and implication in the whole service process.

A cohort of 500 surgical patients are studied prior to, three‐days after and one‐month post‐surgery. Independent variables include the socially oriented personality traits of agreeableness and extraversion, social‐ vs self‐oriented personal values, as well as dimensions of the total service experience assessed by information adequacy, pain and discomfort, patient‐to‐patient interaction, patient‐to‐personnel interaction, and recovery outcomes. The dependent variable is the strength of positive WOM intentions.

The sociability of surgery patients as measured by both their personality traits and socially oriented values is significantly related to the strength of positive WOM intentions. Self‐oriented values are not associated with positive WOM intentions. Also, to varying degrees, all dimensions of the total service experience are associated with positive WOM intentions.

The paper is the first to illustrate that, in a given service context, the antecedents of customer loyalty may be complex, not only dependent on customer assessments of their interactions and experiences throughout the service process, but also relative to their dispositional characteristics such as sociability. The consistency of the results for positive WOM assessed at three‐days and one‐month post‐surgery adds to the robustness of the findings. This paper makes a significant contribution to the service‐dominant logic and the concept of value co‐creation.

Concerns related to the environment are evident in the increasingly ecologically conscious marketplace. Using various statistical analyses, investigats the demographic, psychological and behavioral profiles of consumers who are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products. Finds that this segment of consumers were more likely to be females, married and with at least one child living at home. They reported that today’s ecological problems are severe, that corporations do not act responsibly toward the environment and that behaving in an ecologically favorable fashion is important and not inconvenient. They place a high importance on security and warm relationships with others, and they often consider ecological issues when making a purchase. Managerial implications for green marketers and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The marketing literature suggests that product intangibility is positively associated with perceived risk and the intangibility construct encompasses three dimensions: physical intangibility, mental intangibility, and generality. The purpose of this research is to test which dimension of the intangibility construct is the most correlated with perceived risk. A survey was conducted and structural equation modeling analyses were used to test the proposed model. Results show that the mental dimension of intangibility accounts for more variance in the perceived risk construct than the other two dimensions, even when knowledge and involvement are included as moderators. Hence, the challenge for marketers might not be so much to reduce risk by physically tangibilizing goods and services, as has been advised for the past two decades, as rather to mentally tangibilize their offerings.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a reliable and valid integrative scale for online relationship quality based on both the relationship marketing and electronic commerce literature.

The scale was developed using the approach put forward by Churchill (1979). The scale development and validation process includes a qualitative exploratory phase, three pre-tests and a final study using an online questionnaire (476 members of a consumer panel).

The findings support a third-order integrative model of online relationship quality composed of three dimensions (trust, commitment and satisfaction). The final scale is composed of 21 items.

The study shows a lack of discrimination between satisfaction and trust, which other studies have also found. As the scale is validated in only one sector, online banking, it should be tested and replicated in other contexts (e.g. insurance).

An instrument for assessing the quality of online relationships between banks and consumers is important for marketing professionals who want to determine their relational positioning and focus on those dimensions that promote long-term online relationships. The scale developed here can be used to assess customers’ perceptions of the quality of the relationship with an online financial institution, to segment those customers more effectively, and to improve targeting of marketing strategies and activities.

This study contributes to the enrichment of the body of theory and provides researchers with a tool for the further investigation of the quality of online relationships.

The chapter investigates factors shaping convenience orientation in the 21st century as well as present-day barriers to the consumption of food and non-food convenience products.

A qualitative research approach with two kinds of data triangulation is used. Multiple key informants (marketing managers and consumers) allow a consideration from different angles and multiple methodologies (in-depth and focus group interviews) help to gain deeper insights into the topic.

Convenience orientation comprises dimensions that were previously not considered in marketing research. In addition to the known factors time and effort saving, consumers buy convenience products because of the flexibility they provide. Moreover, concerns for health, environment, and quality are important barriers that prevent consumers from buying and consuming convenience products.

Our results suggest that factors increasing and decreasing convenience consumption depend at least partly on the product category. Future research should integrate various other product groups to further explore domain-specific convenience orientation.

The conceptualization of convenience orientation offers important implications for new product development as well as for the design of the marketing mix. For instance, existing barriers could be overcome by improving transparency or meeting environmental concerns.

The chapter reveals the factors shaping the consumption of convenience products. The presented findings are important to academics researching convenience consumption and practitioners producing and distributing convenience products.

Communication about sustainability in fashion is complex. While fashion businesses have increasingly sought to manage their sustainability practices, their understanding of how to communicate about sustainability persuasively remains limited. The authors argue that a key problem with a firm’s efforts in communicating about sustainability is that it is a psychologically distant issue for both businesses and stakeholders. This paper aims to apply construal level theory to explore managers’ construal level in shaping communication about sustainability.

The paper used a two-phase qualitative methodology. Phase one involved undertaking interviews with ten managers in fashion firms to address communications about sustainability in the UK. In phase two, 16 consumers interpreted and reflected on the persuasiveness of communications about sustainability encompassing both concrete and abstract forms of messaging.

The authors identify the factors driving different approaches to communication (concrete and abstract) depending on the construal levels of managers, managers’ perceptions of the construal level of target stakeholders and the perceived authenticity of the sustainability claim. The paper highlights the conditions under which the (mis)match with the brands’ sustainable practices works in crafting communication. The authors also highlight three main communication strategies in responding to the complexity of sustainability in fashion ecosystems: amplification, quiet activist and populist coupling.

As an in-depth qualitative study, the authors seek to expose an under-researched phenomenon, yet generalisations both within the fashion industry and beyond are limited by this focus.

Fashion managers need to be flexible and evaluate how their communications about sustainability affect stakeholders’ evaluations of their brands. As sustainability in fashion brands grows, concrete and specific sustainability messaging may be necessary to improve sustainable behaviours.

The prevailing literature encourages symbiosis between sustainability practices and communications; such relationships are rare, and studies outside the consumer perspective are also rare. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this exploratory study is the first to understand how managers’ construal level influences decisions around communications about sustainability in fashion and how these messages are perceived by consumers.