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The purpose of this paper is to research the effect of uncertain rewards on the recommendation intention in referral reward programs (RRPs) and investigate the interaction of tie strength and reward type on the recommendation intention.

The research adopts a quantitative exploratory approach through the use of experiments. Study 1 adopted a 2×2 between-participants design ((reward type: certain reward vs uncertain reward)×(tie strength: strong tie vs weak tie)). Respectively, by manipulating uncertain probabilities and expected value, Studies 2 and 3 further explore the effect of uncertain rewards and tie strength on customers’ referral intention.

This paper finds the following: compared to certain rewards, customers’ referral intention under uncertain rewards is higher and positive experience has a mediating effect between reward type and recommendation intention; when only the recommender is rewarded, the tie strength between the recommender and the receiver moderates the effect of reward type on the recommendation intention; for strong ties, customers’ recommendation intention is higher in uncertain reward condition, but for weak ties, customers’ willingness to recommend is almost the same in both reward types; when both the recommender and the receiver are rewarded, although certain rewards have a higher expected value than uncertain and random rewards, for strong ties, the participants have a higher referral intention under random rewards than that under uncertain rewards, which have a higher referral willingness than that under certain rewards. Additionally, for weak ties, the reverse is true.

The research has both theoretical implications for research on uncertain rewards and tie strength and practical implications for marketing managers designing and implementing RRPs.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the nature of consumers' relationship with a brand influences brand evangelism, which represents an intense form of brand support behavior. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of two consumer-brand relational constructs, brand trust and brand identification, on brand evangelism. Brand evangelism, conceptualized as an amalgam of adoption and advocacy behaviors, is operationalized in terms of three supportive behaviors: purchase intentions, positive referrals, and oppositional brand referrals.

Drawing from prior research on consumer-brand relationships, a framework of brand relationships and brand evangelism is developed. To provide a more robust test of theory, consumers' extraversion, gender, and brand experience are included as control variables. Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The findings reveal that consumer-brand relationships influence brand evangelism, albeit in different ways. Whereas brand trust influences purchase intentions and positive referrals, brand identification influences positive and oppositional brand referrals. Overall, the findings reveal the power of consumer-brand relationships in engendering brand evangelism, relative to other factors such as extraversion, gender, and brand experience.

In today's consumption society, where it is increasingly easier for consumers to demonstrate extreme devotion and derision toward brands, it is important for marketers to understand the drivers of behaviors directed toward brands. This study suggests that marketers can cultivate brand evangelism by building brand trust and brand identification.

Marketing researchers and practitioners are only recently beginning to understand brand evangelism. This study demonstrates that consumer-brand relationships, rather than personality, gender, and usage experience, trigger brand evangelism and offers directions for future researchers to further explicate brand evangelism.

This paper explores how organizational culture type and cultural satisfaction are associated with employee referral intention.

A total of 1,789 online reviews on glassdoor.com of nine companies from the three industries were collected. Applying directed content analysis based on the competing values framework (CVF) to identify the organizational culture type that employees perceived, the authors conducted a hierarchical logistic regression analysis to test the proposed hypotheses.

Cultural satisfaction significantly increased the probability of employee referral intention. However, the moderating effect of organizational culture type on the relationship between cultural satisfaction and employee referral intention was not statistically significant.

Direct content analysis is beneficial for capturing the dominant organizational culture type that employees perceive through online reviews created by employees. However, this method prevents this study from fully enjoying the benefits of big data even though this study collected data from a big data source.

The authors’ findings imply that cultural satisfaction plays a more important role in organizational outcomes than culture type itself. Thus, when managers and practitioners plan to change culture, they need to establish organizational culture aligned with organizational strategies and consider how to increase cultural satisfaction.

Many organizational culture studies have usually focused on exploring organizational culture type to impact organizational outcomes considering culture perception as cultural satisfaction. This study created empirical evidence of the role of cultural satisfaction in organizational outcomes such as employee referral intention by exploring the interaction effect of organizational culture type and cultural satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effects of referral rewards in referral reward programs (RRPs) are moderated through perceived social risk of a recommender.

A total of 717 consumers are accessed through Amazon's Mechanical Turk worker panel. The authors use t-test and analysis of variance to test the proposed hypotheses.

The findings show that consumers with high perceived social risk balance financial rewards with social risks, while low social risk consumers largely ignore these social risk elements surrounding a referral decision.

The inclusion of perceived social risk provides the opportunity to fully understand how a consumer goes about balancing social risk and referral rewards in making referral decisions. The concept of social risk has not been previously applied to this context.

This study aims to explore the influence of surprise and delight on the loyalty intentions of retail banking customers in an emerging market context. This study also considers the moderating effect of trust on these relationships.

Using convenience and purposive sampling methods, data collection was secured from 350 customers in the retail banking industry who are delighted with their banks.

This study found that for delightful experiences to occur, customers need to be surprised and see value in the product/service offered by the retail bank, coupled with the expertise of employees in delivering the service.

The sample’s demographic profile was mostly skewed towards the younger generation (individuals 20–39 years of ages), meaning the results could be biased towards this group.

Retail banks need to create delightful experiences, as they are more memorable and leave a permanent mark in customers’ minds.

Limited studies have explored the relationship between delight, its antecedents and outcomes in a developing African market context, such as Botswana, hence the contribution of this study to literature.

With the rise of customer engagement in online products and services innovation, enterprises are seeking effective referral reward program (RRP) to encourage customers’ follow-up electronic-referral (e-referral) behaviors. Therefore, how to stimulate more customers to participate in the RRP is very important to enterprises. However, little empirical work has systemically investigated the impact of RRP on customers’ follow-up e-referral, as well as the moderating effects of customers’ characteristics. To fill those research gaps, the purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of RRP (particularly, reward amount and reward type) on customers’ follow-up e-referral, and the role of creative self-efficacy.

Based on the self-perception theory and the context of online customer innovation, this paper establishes a theoretical model and uses an experiment with 160 participants to test the hypotheses on the role of reward (amount and type) and the moderating effect of creative self-efficacy.

The results of the experiment suggest that both reward amount and reward type in RRP positively impact customers’ follow-up e-referral. Furthermore, customers’ creative self-efficacy moderates the relationship between rewards and customers’ follow-up e-referral. Customers with low creative self-efficacy, reward amount significantly stimulate their follow-up e-referral, but such effect is insignificant when customers’ creative self-efficacy is high. In terms of reward type, gift reward has more positive effect on customers’ follow-up e-referral when they have high (rather than low) creative self-efficacy, but cash reward has more positive effect on those with low (rather than high) creative self-efficacy.

First, based on the self-perception theory, the study clarifies the inconsistent relationship between reward and customers’ e-referral and contributes to related research. Second, the study broadens the existing research perspective by introducing creative self-efficacy, which shows interesting and powerful moderating effect but has been ignored in previous studies. Third, the study provides valuable advice on how enterprises design an effective RRP to enhance customers’ follow-up e-referral.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asset size regarding how the level of a bank’s premium asset management service interaction quality influences the referral intention using performance expectation and customer satisfaction as mediators.

The study employs data collected from an anonymous survey on 185 customers who visited the PB centers. The study employs confirmatory factor analysis methods following a path analysis and structural equation modeling for testing research hypotheses with stepwise moderating effect test.

The results indicate that superiority in interaction quality of premium asset management services has a positive influence on customer satisfaction and performance expectations, and these quality factors also show a positive influence on the intent to maintain relationships and even referral intentions. The results also show that customers with larger asset sizes only have mediocre intentions to refer bank services to people around them.

Marketing positions, which remain faithful to the asset management obligation to fulfill a stable profit rate through constant interactive processes based on a trusting relationship between the customer and dedicated staff member that forms over time, can be a basis for service quality that can secure mid-to-long-term competition superiority in financial firms that offer asset management services.

This study focuses on whether interaction factors that form the quality of services for customized premium asset management through the bank’s dedicated staff member have a positive influence on customer satisfaction and referral intentions. Based on this analysis, the authors presented strategic implications on conditions that financial firms must focus on in order to secure competitiveness.

Research in sport has examined the use of social media by organizations and athletes, but little research has assessed the effectiveness of social media marketing, especially in terms of relationship-building. When relationship marketing is used as a framework for using social media, it should also be used to guide assessment. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine a model for measuring the impact of fans’ Facebook interactions with their favorite sport team on relationship quality, purchase intentions and referral intentions.

After conducting a survey of professional sport fans through Amazon Mechanical Turk, data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The total sample size was 425.

Results indicated the more a fan interacts with their favorite team on Facebook, the higher their relationship quality and intentions to purchase. There was no significant effect on referral intentions. Additionally, the indirect effect of Facebook interaction on purchase intention as mediated by relationship quality was positive and significant.

Based on results, it appears that relationship marketing can be used as a framework for assessing social media marketing effectiveness in sport, and that as suggested by relationship marketing theory, social media interaction does improve relationships between fans and teams. Researchers should continue to explore this model and include other variables, such as team identification, to gain a thorough understanding of social media marketing effectiveness.

Sport marketers should focus strategy on Facebook on building relationships through content that encourages interactions between the team and fans.

While research in sport has suggested social media be used to build relationships, little research measuring whether it actually does so exists. This study extends social media research in sport by modeling and testing the relationships between social media interaction, relationship quality and consumer behavioral intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how referral reward programs (RRPs) utilizing scarcity messages influence bank credit holders’ referrals to and adoptions by close or distant friends.

A 2×2 experiment is implemented with 760 consumers solicited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk worker panel. Logit transformation and general linear models are used to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results showed that offering RRPs with limited available referrals (quantity scarcity) increases the overall number of referrals to and adoptions by close and distant friends. The percent of strong ties also increases with RRPs. As quantity scarcity is relaxed, the percentages of referrals to and adoptions by close friends decrease.

The inclusion of tie strength with scarcity framing greatly enhances our understanding of the effectiveness of RRPs for bank credit cards. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research attempt on this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to extend prior research on referral reward programs (RRPs) by examining if and how the mode of customer acquisition (RRP-acquired customers vs non-RRP-acquired new customers) moderates the relationships between customer satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty, perceived switching costs and attitudinal loyalty, and attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty (i.e. recommendations, cross-buying, and total spend).

Set in a banking context, this study is the first in an RRP context to link survey data with actual purchase data from a bank’s CRM records. Specifically, the survey captured customers’ satisfaction, perceived switching costs and attitudinal loyalty, whereas the CRM data provided actual loyalty behaviors (cross-buying and total spend).

The findings show that the effect of satisfaction on attitudinal loyalty, and the effects of attitudinal loyalty on recommendations, cross-buying, and total spend were stronger for RRP-acquired customers than for non-RRP-acquired new customers. Furthermore, perceived switching costs had a lower effect on attitudinal loyalty for RRP-acquired customers than for non-RRP-acquired new customers.

The findings offer managers a better understanding of how RRP-acquired customers differ from non-RRP-acquired new customers with regard to their satisfaction, perceived switching costs, and attitudinal and behavioral loyalty, thus enabling effective management of RRPs.

This is the first empirical study that explores the differences between RRP-acquired customers and non-RRP-acquired new customers with regard to the effects of satisfaction and perceived switching costs on attitudinal loyalty, and the effect of attitudinal loyalty on behavioral loyalty.