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The purpose of this paper is to revisit prevailing notions of service quality by developing and testing a model of service quality for experience-centric services.

By problematizing the service quality literature, a model is developed to capture impacts of outcome-achievement, instrumental performance and expressive performance on customer loyalty. A multi-group structural equation model is tested to establish the moderating effect of perceived service character – utilitarian or hedonic.

Outcome-achievement mediates the direct relationships between instrumental and expressive performance, respectively, and loyalty; the strength of these relationships is moderated by perceived service character.

Emotional design to improve the experience is effective provided the expected outcome is achieved. However, for services that customers perceive as experience-centric, the outcome may be somewhat ambiguously defined and expressive performance is valued more highly than instrumental performance.

Understanding customers’ perception of a service – whether customers seek value related to outcomes or emotions – is crucial when selecting appropriate measures of service quality and performance. Creating a good experience is generally beneficial, but it must be designed according to the character of the service in question.

The research presents empirical evidence on how service experience contributes to customer loyalty by testing a model of service quality that is suited to experience-centric services. Furthermore, it identifies the importance of understanding service character when designing and managing services.

Leadership is an essential contributor to employee creative self-efficacy, and past research suggests a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy. However, the relationship is complex and contingent upon moderating variables, and this research examines the moderating effect of role clarity by drawing on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory.

Data collected from a survey among 116 emergency room employees is used to test the research model using moderated ordinary least squares regression.

The results confirm a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy and suggest a U-shaped relationship between role clarity and creative self-efficacy. Furthermore, role clarity positively moderates the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

The sample used for this research mainly consisted of highly educated employees within a specific setting. Future research is needed to study if the relationships found in this research can be generalized to other organizational settings.

This research suggests that leaders can support employees' creative self-efficacy through servant leadership, particularly when coupled with high role clarity.

Rapidly changing work environments are characterized by decreased role clarity, so attention is needed to its moderating role on the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

Online games based on a freemium business model face the monetization challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how players’ achievement orientation, social orientation and sense of community contribute to willingness to pay (WtP).

A multi-method study of an online game community is used. Interviews and participant observation are used to develop an understanding of social and achievement orientations followed by the development of hypotheses that are tested using survey data.

The findings indicate that a sense of community is positively related to WtP, whereas satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the service provider is not. The authors examine the moderating role of players’ achievement orientation and social orientation and find that while a stronger connection to the community may encourage achievement-oriented players to pay, the opposite is indicated for socially oriented players.

Decision makers need to understand that not all players are potential payers; while socially oriented users can help to maintain and grow the community, achievement-oriented players are more likely to pay for the value they extract from the community.

While communities are held together by people with common interests, which intuitively suggests that WtP increases with the strength of connection to the community, the authors find this only applies in the case of players with an achievement orientation. For those with a social orientation, WtP may actually decrease as their connection to the community increases. These perhaps counter-intuitive findings constitute a novel contribution of value for both theory and practice.

The ability to make use of social network sites (SNSs) to promote new products and facilitate positive word of mouth around new product launch (NPL) presents an important opportunity. However, the mechanisms and motivations of SNS users are not well understood and businesses frequently fail to realise these opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the forces that motivate people to spend time on SNS sites and how these motivations are related with people’s propensity to engage in behaviours that can be beneficial for NPL.

Hypotheses are tested using data collected using an online survey from a broad sample of SNS users worldwide.

People who spend time on SNSs to be challenged, to escape, or to connect with others are more likely than other users to pay attention to advertisements on SNS. Users that spend time on SNSs in the pursuit of information, to be challenged, or to connect with others are more likely than other users to provide word of mouth reviews and recommendations about products.

The authors make an empirical contribution to knowledge by providing evidence about the categories of user motivations for engagement with SNSs that might be related with their contributions to NPL activities, namely, paying attention to advertisements and providing WOM recommendations.

By understanding what motivates SNS users, firms can identify potentially valuable users and develop a more strategic and targeted approach to NPL. This can help firms turn disappointing social media campaigns into more successful ones.

Whilst the growth in usage of SNS has important implications for business and NPL there are also wider societal implications. Arguably, even before the widespread adoption of SNSs, society has been in a state of flux and transition as people sought to liberate themselves from the norms and social codes of previous generations. We have witnessed a rise of individualism, associated with values such as personal freedom and where people actively construct their own identities. Somewhat ironically, individualism has motivated people to seek alternative social activities and form communities, such as those on SNSs where they can fulfil their need for connection and belonging. SNSs appear to have accelerated this trend.

This study provides new insights about the use of SNSs for NPL and what motivates users to engage in behaviours that are beneficial to NPL.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of experiential augmentation on product evaluation by consumers. An important distinction is made between product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the environment. Furthermore, the research examines how brand familiarity moderates the effect of experiential augmentation.

In two experiments (N = 210 and N = 70), both product-related and environmental experiential augmentation were varied. Participants tasted and evaluated a new coffee product from either a well-known or a fictitious brand.

The findings of the first experiment indicate that product-related experiential augmentation contributes positively to product evaluation for both an unfamiliar and a familiar brand. Experiential augmentation of the environment influences product evaluation negatively, but only in the absence of product-related experiential augmentation. The second experiment tests some possible explanations for this negative effect and shows that it occurs only in the case of a familiar brand.

The findings offer implications for marketing managers seeking to positively influence consumer product evaluations through experiential augmentation. First, marketing managers are advised to make a distinction between product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the evaluation environment, and, second, they should take brand familiarity into account when employing experiential augmentation of the environment.

This research contributes to the literature by showing that product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the environment differ in the impact they have on product evaluation and providing insight into the relationship between brand familiarity and experiential augmentation.

The purpose of this paper is to identify service design strategies to improve outcome-oriented services by enhancing consumers’ emotional experience, while overcoming customer variability.

An abductive, multiple-case study involves 12 service firms from diverse online and offline service sectors.

Overall, six service design strategies represent two overarching themes: customer empowerment can involve design for typical customers, visibility, and community building, while customer accommodation can involve design for personas, invisibility, and relationship building. Using these strategies helps set the stage for a service to offer an emotional experience.

The study offers a first step toward combining investigations of service experience and user experience. Further research can strengthen these links.

The six design strategies described using examples from case research offer managerial recommendations. In particular, these strategies can help service managers address the customer-induced variability inherent in services.

Extant studies of experience staging have focused on particular sectors such as hospitality and leisure; this study contributes by investigating outcome-focused services and identifying strategies to create unique experiences that offset variability. It also represents a rare effort to combine research from service management and interaction design, shedding light on the link between service experience and user experience.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a solution to the challenges of professional service firms (PSF), which are referred to as cat herding, opaque quality and lack of process standardization. These result from misalignment in the mental pictures that managers, employees and customers have of the service. The study demonstrates how the process of articulating a shared service concept reduces these challenges.

A narrative methodology is used to analyze the perspectives of old management, new management and employees during organizational change in a PSF – a website design company growing to offer full-service branding. Group narratives are constructed using longitudinal data gathered through interviews and fieldwork, in order to compare the misaligned mental pictures and show the benefits of articulating the service concept.

Professional employees view growth and change as threats to their culture and practice, particularly when new management seeks to standardize processes. These threats are revealed to stem from misinterpretations caused by miscommunication of intentions and lack of participation in decision making. Articulating a shared service concept helps to align understanding and return the firm to equilibrium.

The narrative methodology helps unpack conflicting perspectives, but is open to claims of subjectivity and misrepresentation. To ensure fairness and trustworthiness, informants were invited to review and approve the narratives.

The study contributes propositions related to the value of articulating a shared service concept as a means of minimizing the challenges of PSFs.

The purpose of this study is to examine the negotiation tactics used in business-to-business (B2B) negotiations in creative sectors and to shed light on some of the characteristics of creative sectors that might drive these behaviors.

This is a multiple-case study involving interviews with 18 creative sector negotiators engaged in B2B negotiations.

The findings suggest that negotiators in B2B firms in creative sectors use a variety of negotiation tactics to reach agreement, but that there are some differences compared with other sectors. One group of tactics, not represented in existing taxonomies, is identified and termed closure-seeking tactics, referring to tactics intended to speed up the negotiation process and reach agreement as quickly as possible. The reasons for creative sector negotiators’ choice of closure-seeking tactics might stem from their desire to expedite the start of new projects to enable them to fulfill their creative drive.

In addition to the identification of group of tactics observed in creative sectors, but not anticipated by existing research, the findings indicate that negotiators in creative sectors seem to lack interest in, and expertise for, negotiating and might be driven more by the desire to get on with the creative process than by concerns over monetary gains when negotiating. This could reflect unique characteristics of creative sectors and the people who work in these sectors.

This work offers new insights and understanding about tactics used in B2B negotiations in creative sectors. These findings have important implications for both practitioners in creative sectors, who might be too eager to reach closure quickly, and practitioners negotiating with firms in creative sectors, who need to understand the unique characteristics of these firms.

The originality of this work lies in its consideration of tactics used in B2B negotiations in the under-studied context of creative sectors and investigation of the reasons that drive the choice of tactics.

This chapter explores the relationship between emotional design and customer experience. It begins with an introduction to the concept of emotional design, comprising behavioral, visceral, and reflective elements. Next, the nature of service experiences is examined, leading to a framework that classifies services according to their functional and experiential positions. Understanding customer goals allows this framework to be used to design customer experiences, in terms of the journey that customers take when consuming a service. The chapter then discusses the cognitive traits associated with designers and argues that they are well suited to understanding the customer journey and designing the prerequisites for the desired experience. Two different approaches to understanding and acting on customer requirements are explored – user centered and design driven.

Brent B. Allred is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA. He earned his Ph.D. in Strategic Management/International Business at The Pennsylvania State University. His current research interests are in technology sourcing and patent rights. He has published in various journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, the Journal of International Management, Academy of Management Executive, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.