Search results

Many industries have witnessed a shift from traditional features and benefits marketing towards creating experiences for their customers (Pathak, 2014), but perhaps none more so than the service industry. The concept of experiences and experiential marketing has garnered much attention in recent years and has evolved to where it now has become more strategic and encompasses

the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs and aspirations profitably, engaging them through authentic two-way communications that bring brand personalities to life and add value to the target audience. (Smilansky, 2018, p. 12)

Despite its popular usage however, experiential marketing has had to contend with a lack of acceptance that was – at least in part – justifiable given its emergent nature and poor measurability properties. Its theoretical underpinnings have been explored but are less codified than many other areas of marketing. Nonetheless, it is an established part of a marketer’s armoury, is innovative in its use of technology such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) and, interestingly, has paved the way for a move to a focus on overall business experience. Where customer experience was limited to the marketing domain, business experience is a priority of the CEO, where customer-centricity becomes the driving force throughout the entire company. In this way, the role of experience is central to the ways that companies will grow and achieve better performance in a fast-changing global market. This is of particular relevance to the service industry, which perhaps has experienced the most upheaval of all, throughout the global Covid pandemic. To succeed in a post-Covid world, this chapter will establish how service companies must examine every aspect of their business to create meaningful experiences for customers, that will in turn translate into brand differentiation, ongoing customer satisfaction and business growth.

This paper aims to explore relationship marketing and the existence of relationships in mass consumer markets from the consumers' perspective, with the focus on the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector.

Ten focus groups were conducted with consumers from a broad range of demographic and socio‐economic backgrounds to enable in‐depth exploration of the research issue.

The study highlights the dominant negative attitudes that exist among consumers to relationship marketing as it is operationalised in FMCG markets. It is found that from the consumers' perspective relationships do not and cannot exist in these markets and that the nature of exchange in such markets is not relationship based. Consequently, the research concludes that there is a necessity to move away from relationship rhetoric in FMCG markets, and to explore the true nature of exchange in the quest for effective marketing strategies. The research also suggests that further research on relationship marketing should focus on situations where relationships do and can exist and consequently the boundaries of relationship marketing should be limited to only these situations.

By offering the consumer perspective on relationships and relationship marketing this study broadens understanding of the phenomenon and makes an important contribution to the relationship marketing debate.

The purpose of this article is to provide an interview with Allan Leighton.

The paper provides an interview with Allan Leighton, author of Tough Calls.

In the interview, Leighton discusses his leadership style, and some of the toughest calls he has had to make.

The interview offers insight into Leighton's philosophy, and the lessons leaders can learn from the armed forces.

Public health authorities have long regarded schools as important sites for improving children and young people’s health. In Australia, and elsewhere, lessons on health have been an integral component of public health’s strategy mix. Historical accounts of schools’ involvement in public health lack discussion of the role of health education curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to redress this silence and illustrate the ways health education functioned as a key governmental apparatus in Victoria in the 1980s.

The paper draws on governmentality studies to consider the explicit governmental role of official health education curriculum in the 1980s in Victoria, Australia. The authors conduct a discourse analysis of the three official curriculum texts that were released during this period to consider the main governmental rationalities and techniques that were assembled together by curriculum writers.

School health education functions as a key governmental apparatus of governmentality. One of its major functions is to provide opportunities to responsibilise young people with an aim to ensure that that they can perform their duty to be well. The authors demonstrate the central role of policy events in the 1970s and how they contributed to conditions of possibility that shaped versions of health education throughout the 1980s and beyond. Despite challenges posed by the critical turn in health education in the late 1980s, the governmental forces that shape health education are strong and have remained difficult to displace.

Many public health and schooling histories fail to take into account insights from the history of education and curriculum studies. The authors argue that in order to grasp the complexities of school health education, we need to consider insights afforded by curriculum histories. Historical insights can provide us with an understanding of the changing approaches to governing health in schools.

Cyberstalking is a growing threat to society, and policymakers should address it utilizing the input of constituents. For this, two key components are required: actionable objectives informed by the values of society and the means of implementation to maximize their potential benefits. The process should be guided by the constituent's values, requiring the elicitation of intrinsic values as individual preferences that are extrapolated to society at large.

The authors utilize Keeney's (1990) public value forum and Sen's (1999) social choice theory (Sen, 1999) to elicit and convert these intrinsic values to serve as the basis for developing public policy to prevent cyberstalking.

The results demonstrate a strong desire by participants to have clear regulations, policies and procedures developed in concert with industry and enforced by the government that elucidate required protections against cyberstalking in combination with strong technical controls. These policies should guide technical control development and implementation, but leave ultimate control in the hands of technology users to decide what controls they want to utilize.

This study is the first to utilize Keeney's (1988) public value forum in the context of cyberstalking to develop quantitative measures regarding technology users' desired cybersecurity protections against cyberstalking. The authors provide a decision-making framework for policymakers to develop a new policy based on the input of their constituents in a manner that maximizes their potential utility and ultimate benefit.

Activity Based Costing (ABC) has been researched extensively in developed countries. Research on these issues in South Africa is limited. This article creates a better understanding of the design of ABC systems in South Africa, comparing ABC implementation in South Africa to that in several developed/developing countries. A quantitative methodology was adopted to evaluate the extent of ABC implementation. A survey‐case study methodology was used to identify reasons for implementation/ non‐implementation, problems and critical success factors relating to implementation. The results show that the extent of ABC implementation in South Africa is lower than that found in developed countries, but the evidence is inconclusive. Nevertheless, the results suggest that the issues facing ABC implementers in South Africa are similar to those faced in many other countries. This study provides South African companies with a comparative framework of important variables to be considered in implementing ABC.

In an era where a growing segment of fantasy league participating and video game playing sport consumers has become more interested in managing individual major league players than in following the fortunes of actual major league teams, North American major league attendance is dropping. The authors aim to argue that team management could keep their attention, strengthen the team‐fan bond, and increase attendance and overall revenue, by giving their fans input into decisions related to the team's on‐field, on‐court, or on‐ice management.

This paper chronicles the rise of fantasy sport and sport video game participation and argues that a new breed of sport consumer is emerging that values managing sport over spectating. Previous attempts by teams to give fans input into management decisions are outlined and critiqued.

It is suggested that teams wishing to increase the team identification and attendance frequency of these management‐centric consumers should use technology to establish a platform whereby dues‐paying members vote on team‐related management issues. Utilizing a members‐only webpage for some votes will encourage the growth of a geographically diverse fan base, while utilizing in‐stadium hand‐held wireless technology for other votes will encourage game attendance.

This paper has value to marketers of professional sport who are constantly searching for ways to increase fan identification and sell tickets. It also has value to sport fan academics by suggesting that traditional conceptualizations of the team‐fan bond may be becoming outdated in an era where a new generation of sport consumers is becoming increasingly player‐focused and management‐centric.

With grocery brands manufacturers trying to respond to the increasingly concentrated retailing environment and the significant investment in own labels by retailers, a less than healthy future has been reported for some brands (eg Leahy, 1987). To succeed, grocery brands manufacturers should not only take into account consumer buying behaviour, but also recognise and respond to retailers' strategic objectives. However, brands manufacturers have to strike the right balance between satisfying consumers' needs and helping retailers achieve their corporate goals. Warnings have been sounded about the dangers of brands manufacturers shifting their attention too much to retailers, with the consequential cut in consumer related activities, and during the first part of this decade there has been speculation about whether own labels and brands were becoming more alike. This paper is concerned with the problem of similarities/dissimilarities between brands and retailer labels and by reporting on a major consumer research programme provides insight as to the way consumers perceive the competitive tiers of brands, own labels and generics.

Equipping pre-service teachers with the skills and knowledge needed to teach health in socially critical ways requires pre-service teachers to examine and critique individualistic understandings of health. The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s concepts of the bodily hexis (the body as both separate from society (autonomous individuals) and the body as socially mediated (the influence of social forces upon individuals)) and pedagogic work to investigate the challenges of redressing the reproduction of individualistic conceptualizations of health in teacher education.

The paper focusses on an analysis of 31 pre-service teachers’ reflective writing in a foundational health education course, which sought to engage students in thinking about health in socially critical ways. A systematic and procedural form of document analysis was employed to examine and interpret data to investigate the ways in which students were engaging with the socially critical health discourses and course content.

The findings evidence that while students attempted to engage with and demonstrate their knowledge of a socially critical view of health, contradictions, or places where students unknowingly slipped into individualistic ways of thinking appeared frequently across the data. Findings are presented to elucidate challenges facing pre-service teachers in teaching the AC:HPE curriculum.

Findings suggest the need for teacher educators to employ pedagogic practices that can disrupt previous pedagogic work, serving to challenge and interrogate current constructions of health, and delve deeply into critical discourses through interchange and reflection.

This paper extends the current scholarship of Bourdieusian theoretical concepts in relation to critical health discourses and pedagogies.