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This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement. The intangibility spectrum is presented as a mental model for service managers to consider how to use cognitive computing to support augmenting their value proposition by moving across the spectrum.

Three frameworks are integrated: a five systems framework, a system's impact classification of types of cognitive computing and a tangibility spectrum.

Three examples illustrate the potential value of this integrative approach for service management.

This is the first integration of these frameworks, and two of them are the result of the first author's research.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main developments from the early days of manual content analysis to the adoption of computer-assisted content analysis and the emerging artificial intelligence (AI)-supported ways to analyze content (primarily text) in marketing and consumer research. A further aim is to outline the many opportunities these new methods offer to marketing scholars and practitioners facing new types of data.

This conceptual paper maps our methods used for content analysis in marketing and consumer research.

This paper concludes that many new and emerging forms of unstructured data provide a wealth of insight that is neglected by existing content analysis methods. The main findings of this paper support the fact that emerging methods of making sense of such consumer data will take us beyond text and eventually lead to the adoption of AI-supported tools for all types of content and media.

This paper provides a broad summary of nearly five decades of content analysis in consumer and marketing research. It concludes that, much like in the past, today’s research focuses on the producers of the words than the words themselves and urges researchers to use AI and machine learning to extract meaning and value from the oceans of text and other content generated by organizations and their customers.

Until recently stakeholder communication has tended to be mostly unidirectional and simple. However, the advent of the Internet has brought unprecedented change. Stakeholder communication is no longer unidirectional, and as stakeholders increasingly communicate with each other this communication becomes infinitely more complex. Unfortunately many of the tools and models of PR were developed and refined in a pre‐Internet world. This paper introduces an integrated Internet stake‐holder communication matrix (I²SCM), and explains its use for the identification of issues that need to be managed with regard to the Internet and2 PR.

The use of students as subjects in academic research is widespread. A systematic review of research‐oriented journals ranging from the behavioural sciences to pure sciences shows that a great deal of research involves student subjects. In business and management oriented research these students tend to be largely male and undergraduate. As three eminent marketing academics remarked somewhat cynically some years ago, “What we know about consumer behaviour may be too closely tied to the sociopsychological and behavioural profile of the college sophomore” (Cunningham, Anderson and Murphy, 1974). Marketing has been an area particularly prone to student‐based research, with an audit of the first 30 issues of the Journal of Marketing Research revealing that over half of the consumer behaviour experiments (48 of 81) used students as subjects (Enis, Cox and Stafford, 1972). Casual perusal of a wide variety of present day journals in other areas, such as accounting and finance, management information systems, work study, and human resources management points to the increase of this practice. This paper reviews briefly the extensive literature on the question of student surrogacy and presents a bibliographic summary of studies accepting the use of, and those rejecting, student surrogation. It also offers a decision model for consideration by researchers contemplating using students in their endeavours.

Describes how disciplinary surveys conducted in the USA and South Africa reveal some interesting comparisons. Also how concentration strategies can assist targeting, marketplace production and assess market sales situations.

This article reviews factors necessitating the application of effective selection and motivation criteria when using independent distributors. It reports findings concerning the criteria utilised by South African manufacturing companies and compares these with findings based on another study using United Kingdom and United States samples. The findings seem to be very similar across cultures and a model is presented to aid manufacturers in the proper selection and motivation of their distributors.

Groups and group dynamics have been areas which have received considerable attention not only in Social Psychology and Sociology, but in the last thirty years, also in the field of managerial decision‐making. Many activities within organisations are performed in a group context. Budgets are compiled by committees, new products are evaluated by marketing teams and strategic plans constructed by top management team members. Much of the confidence in the use of groups in management decision‐making has its origins in the belief that “two heads are better than one” and from early research which in fact indicates that this is so.

Previous research has focused on identifying factors that influence buyers who uses price as a cue to quality. However, little work has been done to explain the theory of association and the psychological processes behind the buyer’s price‐quality association. This study examines the process from a psychological perspective and examines some antecedent variables in the formation of a price‐quality inferential belief. Data is collected for two product categories among a sample of young respondents. Results show that (1) the link between perceptual and inferential belief about the price‐quality association is stronger when the perceptual belief is based on direct purchase experience rather than on advertising; (2) buyers that lack direct purchase experience of a product category tends to rely on advertising to form their inferential belief. Implications are discussed, limitations are noted and directions for future research are indicated.

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in the marketing activities of organisations across a wide range of industries. While the opportunities afforded by this phenomenon seem readily apparent, there is still much debate and speculation on exactly what impact it will have on marketing. To shed some light on this uncertainty, the present study examines managers’ perceptions of the impact of the Internet on key marketing activities. It employs a quasi‐longitudinal research design involving mail surveys to Australian marketing decision makers. Findings suggest that expectations in 1999 may have been unrealistically optimistic and exaggerated. It would appear that the so‐called “dot.com crash” has led to more realistic and pragmatic expectations among practicing managers in 2001. The study then focuses on differences in perceptions between industries. As expected, divergent views emerge, particularly from within the services sector. Managerial implications are then considered, conclusions drawn and future research directions outlined.