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Claims that effective price communication for services requires understanding variables that mediate the effects of price and the cognitive systems consumers use to process price information. Presents a model which indicates that involvement and source credibility mediate the effects of price. Discusses the heuristic and analytic cognitive systems which consumers could use to process price information. The article also reports the results of an experiment which tested the model, and discusses the managerial implications of the model.

Previous research demonstrates the importance of product category fit in evaluating brand alliances. However, many factors determine fit between alliance partners. For example, conclusions from brand extension research suggest that the evaluation is a question not only of product category fit, but also of brand concept consistency. Therefore, this study introduces brand concept consistency in research on brand alliances.

The paper builds on the categorization and incongruence literature. An experiment was employed to test the two hypotheses in the study.

The results indicate that both product category fit and brand concept consistency influence consumers' evaluations. However, the results also show that product category fit is important in only functional and mixed‐brand concept‐based alliances. For expressive brand alliances, product category fit is not important in evaluating the alliance.

Managers should take care in finding potential alliance partners who have brands that in some way, either on the product category level or in brand concept, fit well with their company's brands. However, managers of a functional brand should find a partner whose brand has high product category fit, since low‐fit partners presumably will hurt the potential alliance.

The paper demonstrates that brand concept consistency, not only product category fit, is an important variable in consumer evaluations of brand alliances.

This study examines how various characteristics of the discount retail environment and the overall attitude towards a discount retail store, considered to be an abstract and global image component, influence consumers’ satisfaction and how consumers’ satisfaction, in turn, affects store loyalty. The data, collected from a sample of 517 discount retail customers in Daegu, Korea, indicate that: (1) forming the overall attitude is more closely related to in‐store services: atmosphere, employee service, after sales service and merchandising, (2) store satisfaction is formed through perceived store atmosphere and value, (3) the overall attitude has strong influence on satisfaction and loyalty and its impact is much stronger on loyalty than on satisfaction, (4) store loyalty is directly affected by most significantly location, merchandising and after sale service in order, (5) satisfaction is not related to customers’ committed store revisiting behavior. The applications in management and implications for future research are discussed.