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Primarily, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the interaction and direct effects of tie strength between sender and receiver of word of mouth (WOM) and the receiver’s service purchase decision involvement on WOM influence. A secondary aim is to investigate how a distinctive conceptualization of perceived risk, consisting of two types (outcome risk and psychosocial risk), affects service purchase decision involvement. A conceptual model incorporating these constructs and associated hypotheses is developed and tested.

In a survey of actual service consumers, respondents were asked to recall a recent instance where they had received service purchase information via WOM, and relate their responses to this instance. Established scales were used to measure the constructs. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling.

Principally, findings demonstrate a strong interaction effect between service purchase decision involvement and tie strength. Also, results highlight the complexity of the perceived risk construct, suggesting that it is appropriately modeled as two types: outcome risk, and psychosocial risk.

This research has contributed to the service marketing literature by testing a model that predicts WOM influence. Evidence confirmed that the effect of service purchase decision involvement on WOM influence is moderated by tie strength. Additionally, a conceptualization of two different types of risk associated with purchase decisions was suggested, together with empirical confirmation of their hypothesized antecedent effects on service purchase decision involvement. Findings have special implications for the literatures of persuasion, social and interpersonal influence, as well as consumer behavior in general.

To harness the power of WOM, managers should understand who their target audience is and how consumers are related to each other (tie strength) and to the service purchase decision (service purchase decision involvement). Recommendations are made with specific illustrations of how firms can leverage tie strength under conditions of low service purchase decision involvement to enhance WOM influence.

The formidable power of WOM wields substantial influence on consumers, particularly within a service (vs goods) purchase context, typically characterized by higher perceived risk and lower search qualities. The significant interaction between tie strength and service purchase decision involvement is a unique contribution to the service WOM literature.

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a scale to determine the consumer’s level of decision-making self-efficacy for a high-involved service purchase, specifically the purchase of medical insurance. One question to ask is how service providers can help consumers purchase the services that best meet their needs? Before interventions can occur, it is necessary to benchmark consumers’ perceptions of their own decision-making control and abilities.

A scale that measures consumers’ service decision-making self-efficacy was developed using the principles established for scale development validation. A four-study approach was used to reach the research objective.

The research consisted of four studies designed to: generate items to measure consumer service decision-making self-efficacy (CSDMSE); purify the scale and assess its dimensionality (second-order structure); establish the reliability and validity of the scale; and establish norms to provide details on its usefulness for aiding consumers with service purchases. The scale was found to be a higher-order construct, comprising three lower-order constructs.

Research suggests that consumer self-efficacy may affect their decision-making. The greater the consumer’s self-efficacy for decision-making tasks, the more efficient the decision-making process strategies are expected to be. This is the purpose for which the CSDMSE scale measure was created: to understand how, where and when service professionals can assist consumers with making appropriate service-related decisions and purchases.

The extant literature provides very little insight into the way in which public purchasing departments are contributing to competitive acquisition processes for consulting services. This research attempts to address this shortcoming by describing the way that public purchasing departments have been able to contribute to these decisions throughout the various stages of the acquisition process. Study informants included 1782 public purchasers from federal, state, provincial, and local government agencies throughout the United States and Canada. While the purchasing department is involved in these important purchase decisions, it would seem that their respective agencies might benefit from increased involvement and consequently the value that can result.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products, which has not been explored in previous research. This study aims to explore how appearance personification of service robots affects customer decision-making in the product recommendation context.

Based on authentic in-store product recommendation service interactions, an experiment for three simulated scenarios was conducted and data was collected from 338 valid samples.

The results show appearance personification has a positive impact on customer purchase behavior while it has negative impacts on customer decision time and degree of hesitation.

This study not only enriches the literature on application scenarios of service robots but also supplements the literature on various customer decision-making variables in the field of service robots. It provides important practical guidance for designing robots to optimize their impact on customer decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether social media may impact a customer’s purchasing decision during the pre-purchase stage of service consumption.

This study implemented a primary field survey design and developed an online self-administered questionnaire. A total of 285 usable questionnaires were collected. Factor analysis was performed to condense the large set of independent variables, and multiple regression analysis was performed to test the study hypotheses.

The results indicate that the benefits of social media do have a positive relation with customers purchase decision, but not all items are crucial to a similar extent. Functional (convenience, efficiency, information, sharing experiences) and monetary (free coupons, price discounts, special deals) benefits from social media were found to have a positive impact on customers’ purchase decision (H1, H2), while socio-psychological benefits were found to have no relationship with customers’ decision (H4). Still, hedonic benefits (amusement, enjoyment, entertainment, fun) were found to have a relationship with purchase decision (H3).

While social media received much attention in research due to its rapid development and its popularity, there are still limited studies that investigated the effect of social media during the pre-purchasing stage. Findings of this study are expected to contribute to the growing body of hospitality research on social media. Additionally, this research is expected to assist hospitality businesses to understand customers’ behavior regards to social media and develop appropriate marketing strategies.

The puprose of this study is to empirically test the suggestion that branding is more important for services than for physical goods and that there is a direct relationship between the level of intangibility and the importance of branding.

An exploratory study is employed using a scenario‐based repeated measures ANOVA design, wherein the degree of product intangibility is varied from high (mutual funds) to medium (hotels) to low (computers) through a survey distributed to 101 respondents.

The results support the position that intrinsic brand cues are more important for highly intangible service purchases (mutual funds) than for purchases that are more tangible (hotels and computers). The results also reveal that extrinsic brand cues are less important in purchase decisions of highly intangible services.

This study answers a call for additional empirical research into the dynamics of services branding and its effects on consumer decision making.

This study provides managers with information about how to prioritize brand‐building activities.

This study fills an important gap in the services marketing literature by offering a rare empirical study on services branding. Furthermore, this study makes an important extension to the research of Krishnan and Hartline in their article, “Brand equity: is it more important in services?”by testing the effects of specific brand cues on consumer's purchase decisions. The findings are more in line with prior conceptual research on the importance of services branding than the results presented by Krishnan and Hartline.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information search behaviors of mature consumers (age 55 and older) for new service purchases across several contexts.

Almost 200 mature consumers in the Midwestern USA were surveyed regarding new home, medical, or financial service purchases made within the past 12 months. Questions regarding information search, importance of different information sources, satisfaction with the service decision, and demographics were collected.

Mature consumers consulted few information sources for service decisions, irrespective of context. Service context did affect the number of service providers considered; significantly fewer providers were considered for medical and financial services than for home services. Information search was negatively related to age, but unrelated to service outcome satisfaction and responsibility for the decision.

No comparison was made between the search behavior of older and younger consumers. Although the breadth of information search was examined, the depth of search within each type of information source was not. As a descriptive study, it was not possible to address why such little external search was conducted. A convenience sample was used.

Mature consumers conducted more external search for less‐involved service contexts (e.g. home services) than for those more‐involved (e.g. medical and financial services). Companies are beginning to realize the value of maintaining relationships with mature consumers; the results may suggest ways to improve those relationships with mature consumers by detailing the service decision process. Additionally, public policy interventions or education programs based on the work might help mature consumers to learn better service decision strategies.

A large range of ages was sampled in the study (respondents ranged from 55 to 93) and multiple responses were obtained from some participants across several service contexts, allowing for a within‐subjects design of the survey. It was then possible to explore the effect of context on the number of service providers considered and the number of external information sources consulted prior to purchase.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a systematic literature review on the sunk cost effect from consumers’ perspectives. By applying a comprehensive approach, this paper aims to synthesise and discuss the impact of financial and behavioural sunk costs on consumers’ decisions, judgements and behaviour before and after purchasing. This study also identifies potential research avenues to inspire further studies.

Following a search in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, a systematic literature review was conducted by identifying and analysing 56 peer-reviewed articles published between 1985 and 2022 (November). Descriptive and content analysis was implemented based on the selected papers to examine and synthesise the effect of sunk costs on consumers’ choices, evaluations and actions in a comprehensive approach; uncover research gaps; and recommend paths for future research.

The research results found in the literature are discussed according to five related themes: factors affecting the sunk cost effect; the impact of past investments on purchasing decisions; consumers’ post-purchasing evaluation, behaviour and choices; the mental amortisation of price; and the sunk cost effect on loyalty and switching.

The originality of this study lies in the comprehensive approach to the sunk cost effect from consumers’ perspectives. This review paper synthesises and discusses the research results found in the literature related to financial and behavioural sunk costs that can influence consumers’ decisions, judgements and behaviour before and after paying for a good or service.

During the last several decades, logistics has increasingly emerged as a source of sustainable competitive advantage. This article incorporates recent work in services marketing on customer information acquisition, with research on industrial buying behavior to help logistics service providers understand and manage their customers’ information acquisition and purchase activities for logistics services.

Service branding research predominantly focuses on the purchase and postpurchase stages of the customer journey. This study aims to expand the lens of enquiry to the prepurchase stage, showing the role service brand awareness and service brand retrieval play before customer experiences and relationships can be established.

The research presents and empirically examines a new framework that links service brand awareness and service brand retrieval to key “battlegrounds” in the prepurchase stage of the customer journey: entry into the Awareness Set, Consideration Set and Repertoire Set. The empirical work draws on data from both services and goods markets from two UK-based consumer surveys (N = 771 and N = 270, respectively).

The findings indicate that, prepurchase, service brands compete most intensively to establish and reinforce a broad array of memory associations, rather than a specific corporate or brand image.

To improve the generalizability of the conclusions drawn, the findings of this study should be replicated in additional service categories and consumer samples.

The findings translate into novel, long-term strategies for the management of service brands at the prepurchase stage of the customer journey, especially opportunities for effective and creative marketing communications.

This study contributes to marketing research and practice by introducing the notion of service brand retrieval and highlighting its role, together with service brand awareness and prepurchase.