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Intangibility has long been studied in marketing, especially its physical aspect. This paper seeks to verify whether a branding strategy is efficient in reducing the risk perceived by customers.

A sample of university students answered the measurements considering both perspectives (brands and product categories). The paper uses a three‐dimensional approach of intangibility and explores its relationships with evaluation difficulty (ED) and perceived risk (PR). These relationships were tested in two different perspectives: brands and product categories.

Two analyses were made to test the hypotheses which were generally supported. Several relationships between the variables were found, but three should be highlighted. First, it was shown that brands are more mentally intangible than product categories, which may lead to a difficulty to evaluate. Second, it was found that evaluation difficulty increases the perceived risk in the product category perspective. Third, it was found that higher involvement generates a stronger relationship between evaluation difficulty and perceived risk for the product category perspective.

Theoretical and managerial implications to the literature are discussed along with examples of how managers could use the findings.

The research incorporates prior knowledge and involvement as moderating variables of the proposed framework and reinforces their relevance to the field. The results not only show the importance of branding, but also support the argument of considering evaluation difficulty in future research.

This paper aims to explore the association between intangibility and perceived risk using a sample of North American households. This relationship is explored within two purchase environments, namely online and offline. The authors also investigated the moderating effects of privacy, system security and general security concerns when purchasing in an online environment.

The survey was delivered to 156 households in a small town in the Midwest and collected upon completion.

The perception of risk is increased when two negatively loaded pieces of information are processed simultaneously (i.e. product intangibility and privacy concern). Furthermore, system security was identified as the most relevant concern in e‐commerce.

The representativeness of the sample is limited. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The results provide interesting insights about the generalizability of previous findings based on student samples, and show the importance of privacy concerns, system security concerns, general security concerns for those purchasing in online environments.

The purpose of this research is to show how the dual mediation model has been used to explain consumer responses toward an ad and a brand. This study attempts to incorporate ad affect and competition into the framework and examine the effects of advertising on consumers' attitudes and purchase intentions in multiple‐ad and multiple‐brand environments.

A total of 165 usable data (54 percent female, mean age=36.2) were collected from an experiment conducted in North America.

The findings revealed that the higher level of affective responses to a focal ad significantly leads to a higher evaluation of that ad. Our findings also indicated that information about a competing ad and brand is processed comparatively and that evaluations of the competing ad and brand negatively influence evaluations of a focal ad and brand.

Important theoretical contributions of this study are that ad affect is an important determinant in the formation of ad attitude and it can be incorporated into the dual mediation model to explain the effects of advertising on consumer behavior. Our research also challenges the dual mediation model by incorporating competition into the model. Managerial implications of these results were discussed.

The information‐processing activity of consumers' selection of a bank is examined. Questionnaire data are collected from a sample of consumers to determine the way they categorise banks and the effect demographic differences have on this process. The results support the existence of a “foggy” set as distinct from a “hold” set of bank brands in the consumers' perception, and show the ways these and other decision sets vary with age, language, education and income.

Interpersonal influences play a major role in shaping consumer choice decisions. This is particularly evident in the case of services, where intangibility and variability add to the decision difficulty. While all consumers are susceptible to interpersonal influence, people differ in the extent of their susceptibility to interpersonal influence, with some individuals being chronically more susceptible to social influence than others. Seeks to speculate in this paper that, in addition to individual differences, susceptibility to interpersonal influence also varies systematically across cultures with varying degrees of individualism‐collectivism.

Hypothesis is tested by investigating and comparing the structure, properties, and mean levels of the susceptibility to interpersonal influence scale across samples of French and English Canadian consumers.

It is found that: French Canadians are significantly more susceptible to normative influence than English Canadians; French Canadians score significantly lower than English Canadians on measures of individualism; and individualism has a significant negative effect on consumer susceptibility to normative influence.

By showing that French Canadians were indeed less individualistic than English Canadians, and that individualistic orientation had a significant negative effect on both the utilitarian and the value‐expressive dimensions of consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence, hopefully it has been demonstrated that differences in susceptibility to normative influence between French and English Canadians are partly driven by cultural differences in individualistic orientation.

Traditionally, researchers in environmental psychology have developed the classic C (cognition)‐ E (emotion)‐ B (behavior) paradigm. However, some researchers have failed to replicate this classic paradigm and suggested that cognition is an antecedent to emotions. The main goals of this research are to extend the C‐E‐B paradigm by incorporating consumers' perceptions of service quality and to determine whether the extended model of consumer shopping mall decision process is invariant across English and French Canadian consumers.

By conducting a three‐step analysis, six hypotheses are empirically examined through a survey of 266 “real” English and French Canadian consumers in a shopping mall.

Findings indicate that consumers' evaluations of service quality in a shopping environment mediate their pleasure and purchase intention. Consumer mall shopping decision‐making process is invariant across English and French Canadian consumers.

For researchers who are interested in understanding consumer mall shopping behavior cross‐culturally, this research provides a model that can be tested in cross‐cultural contexts. For mall operators and store managers attempting to improve the mall environment, product quality, and offer better service, the study provides interesting solutions.

By incorporating service quality into consumer mall shopping decision making, this research has demonstrated that consumers' moods evoked by their perceptions of shopping mall environment and of product quality influence their purchase intentions through their perceptions of service quality. The mall shopping decision‐making process of English and French Canadian consumers is universal, regardless of their cultural orientations.

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.

Some major segmentation issues in retail banking are examined. It is found that primary institutions are associated with frequency of visits and that it is usually a low involvement decision oriented towards convenience. It is also shown that financial services consumption is a product driven decision‐making process, further suggesting that more emphasis be put on product and multi‐institution usage research.

A comparison of attitudes towards credit cards and purchase behaviours reveals some major differences between French and English Canadians. The determinants of frequency of usage are identified for both groups and reveal five attitudinal factors. Finally, it is shown that increased income does not lead to convergence of the two subcultures.