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The present study aimed to provide an understanding of the roles of community-based financial service organizations (i.e. rotating savings and credit associations [ROSCAs] as institutional pillars in facilitating low-income, unbanked consumers’ access to informal financial services).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 39 low-income, unbanked consumers participating in ROSCAs in Pakistan, where only 21% of adults have a bank account and almost four out of five individuals live on a low income. The obtained data were analyzed using the thematic analysis technique.

ROSCAs’ regulatory, sociocultural and cognitive aspects facilitate low-income, unbanked consumers’ utilization of informal financial services owing to their approachability by, suitability for, and fairness to such consumers. Thus, they promote such consumers’ financial inclusion.

Low-income consumers are mostly unable to access formal financial services due to the existing supply- and demand-side impediments. Understanding ROSCAs’ institutional functioning can help formal financial service providers create more transformative financial services based on the positive institutional aspects of ROSCAs to enhance poor consumers’ financial inclusion and well-being.

The inclusion of low-income, unbanked consumers in formal banking services will help them better control their finances.

Many low-income, unbanked consumers in developing countries utilize informal financial services to meet their basic financial needs, but service researchers have rarely investigated how informal financial institutions function. The present study showed that ROSCAs, as informal institutions, meet low-income, unbanked consumers’ personal, social and financial needs in a befitting manner, which encourages such consumers to use the financial services offered by ROSCAs.

Advertisers use various tactics to influence consumer purchases and create positive associations with their brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the formation of peer-endorser credibility and its influence on attitude formation. The role of product involvement in the formation of attitudes and endorser credibility is also examined.

A quantitative study was conducted among university students. Data were collected using an online questionnaire concerning three advertisements for which identical questionnaires were constructed; 364 responses were generated.

The authors show that the credibility of a peer endorser is constructed from trustworthiness, expertise, similarity and attractiveness dimensions that positively affect consumers’ attitude toward an advertisement and a brand. Product involvement affects advertising effectiveness indirectly through the endorser-credibility construct. Finally, the authors show that a consumer’s experience with an advertised product affects the perception of endorser credibility and the effectiveness of the advertisement.

The findings reveal new insights into the little studied area of peer-endorser effectiveness. The authors shed light on the construction of peer endorser credibility and the relative importance of specific credibility dimensions on the effectiveness of an advertisement. This study also provides information on the direct and indirect effects of consumers’ brand involvement on attitudes toward advertisements.

Most recent service experience research considers customers as sensemakers and sensemaking as a focal process in experience construction. Despite this, the sensemaking theory engendered in organization studies has not been applied in the quest for an in-depth understanding of the service experience. This study introduces a sensemaking perspective to the service experience and develops a conceptualization of how customers construct their experiences cognitively through sensemaking.

The service experience literature is dominated by a focus on firms implementing service experiences for customers. This study, in contrast, investigates service experience and its formation from the customers' viewpoint: how service experiences are formed as a part of customers' everyday life and sensemaking processes instead of under service providers' control.

Service experience is characterized as a mental picture – a collage of meanings created by a customer through the sensemaking processes. A sensemaking framework that characterizes service experience formation and its four seminal dimensions, including the self-related, sociomaterial, retrospective and prospective sensemaking, is introduced.

This article contributes to the service literature by introducing a new theoretical lens through which the service experience concept can be investigated and reframed.

Grocery retailers are operating in a slow‐growth market. The pursuit of market share is one of the main concerns for retail managers. The retail structure is becoming increasingly standardized and homogenous because of concentration of the ownership of stores. Cultural differences remain, however, between different European countries. Cultural factors influence the success of a positioning strategy. This study examined how consumers perceive grocery retail formats and brands in Finland. Data from personal interviews were used in highlighting the consumer perspective. Consumers perceive meaningful differences in various store formats, meanwhile store brands are seen as quite similar. Consumers rely on functional attributes of stores when discussing grocery stores. However, it seems that consumers are unable to recognize the fabricated, often imaginary differences at the brand level. The informant’s own, creative symbolic work results in this case to interpreting all grocery retail brands as similar. Managerial implications of the study are presented.

The shift from physical (brick and mortar) stores and hard copy catalog stores toward electronic stores (e‐tailing) may be seen as a continuous innovation building on past changes brought about by in‐home shopping methods such as catalog, TV and direct mail. Why are e‐tailers then having such difficulty retaining their customers? In this paper, we examine the influence of consumer characteristics on perception of shopping benefits associated with electronic and physical shopping. Based on a mail survey of upscale US households, the empirical study finds the two shopping formats to be clearly different from each other in terms of perceived shopping benefits. The data supports the influence of individual characteristics (such as age, household income and family composition) as well as past behaviors on the shopping benefits associated with the two modes of shopping.

Customer and value‐oriented business strategies are increasingly important in the context of business to business services. However, little is known about the construction of customer value of B to B services. Also the influences of specific dimensions of service quality on customer value are open to debate. This study aims to explore the construction of customer value of B to B services, and to examine how specific dimensions of service quality contribute to customer value.

The research data consists of 90 questionnaires which were collected through the structured interview method among Finnish business organizations. Hypothesis testing was conducted through linear multiple‐regression analysis.

The results suggest that customer value of B to B services is composed of attribute and consequence level elements. Reliability, responsiveness, and assurance were found as the key contributors of consequence level customer value. Attribute level customer value is affected by empathy, responsiveness and assurance dimensions of service quality. Thus, by focusing on right dimensions of service quality organizations are most effectively able to cultivate customer value.

The study identifies the dimensional structure of customer value and suggests a detailed method to investigate the relationship between service quality and customer value.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a process approach for identifying potential sources of customer value of a package in a packaging value chain and illustrate the approach through interview data.

The proposed process approach is a synthesis of customer value theories presented in marketing literature and packaging functions presented in packaging-related literature. Packaging value chain members were interviewed to illustrate the critical packaging-related processes among their business processes and to reveal value in the level of packaging attributes and packaging functions/consequences in use situations.

Interviews with packaging experts operating at different levels of a packaging value chain provide support for the proposed approach. The data provide a snapshot of value creation throughout the value chain. While the value of a package is perceived at all levels of the value chain, the value-creating attributes and their consequences, along with the value creation processes, take diverse forms.

The proposed process approach includes the first two steps of a customer value assessment in a packaging value chain, namely: identification of customers' packaging-related processes and the critical points in those processes; and generation of a list of value-affecting attributes and their consequences in each packaging-related process.

The paper provides a means to improve understanding of value creation in the business-to-business context. In particular, the authors' focus on the packaging value chain illustrates the multiple ways in which value is perceived by a group of interconnected firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts that a new retailer entering a previously stable market has on the domestic retailers' pricing behaviour. The paper describes and analyses the context of the entry of the hard discounter chain Lidl into the Finnish market.

To illustrate the effects of competitive entry on pricing behaviour of competitors, prices of 20 grocery items were collected from three different chains and three market areas in three different points of time. Based on these data the pricing initiatives of the entrant and the reactions of the domestic competitors are described and analysed in terms of four dimensions: competition, geographical, assortment, and time.

The analysis reveals that the domestic retailers reacted to the intensifying price competition by engaging in selective price changes. Both price cuts and price increases were detected.

The paper provides empirical insights about the impacts of intensifying competition on pricing.

Previous studies have indicated that antismoking advertising potentially prevents or reduces smoking among teenagers. However, not all message themes of antismoking advertising have proved effective. This study aims to explore the effects of different message themes on teenagers' intention to smoke. Attitude towards the advertisement and attitude towards the act (smoking) are proposed as mediating variables between the message theme and smoking intentions. The paper also aims to examine effect of three themes, namely health effects, mental effects and social effects on smoking/not smoking.

The data consist of 325 Finnish high school students aged between 13 and 16. The hypotheses are tested using LISREL 8.

The paper finds that only the attitudes towards advertisements displaying social effects are significantly related with attitudes towards smoking. The attitudes towards the advertisements portraying the themes of health effects and mental effects are not significantly related with attitudes towards smoking and thus are not effective in influencing the respondents' attitudes towards smoking and smoking intentions.

Data were gathered only in one European country (Finland). Future studies should examine whether teenagers in other European countries differ in the way they are affected by different message themes.

Teenagers are susceptible to messages that are related to social approval of not smoking or disapproval of smoking, thus social appeals should be used in antismoking advertising targeted at them.

This study focuses on exploring how message themes used in antismoking advertising affect smoking intentions among teenagers in the European context and specifically in Finland.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of advertising expenditure on brands' market shares, utilizing a novel four‐week advertising‐sales data from the highly competitive oligopolistic Finnish beer market in which price competition among the homogeneous larger‐type beer brands is not allowed during the period of the study.

Competition is modelled using the Lanchester model. The impacts of advertising on market shares are estimated using the impulse‐response functions from vector autoregression, and the full information maximum likelihood and advertising elasticities.

Some new insights into beer market dynamics are obtained. First, the impacts of advertising are not similar across brands. Second, overspills of advertising impacts across brands are detected. Third, the reactions to competitors' advertising attacks are mild.

The paper utilizes four‐week brand‐level data on the market shares of the leading beer brands in Finland and the brands' advertising expenditure. During the period of the data, price competition is not allowed, which creates a unique opportunity to study the impacts of advertising on the market shares of brands.