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1 – 10 of over 2000Savaş Artuğer, Kursad Sayın and Songül Kilinç Şahi̇n
The aim of this research is to determine the price fairness of the social servicescape and the effect of price fairness on customer trust. In this context, first of all, the…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this research is to determine the price fairness of the social servicescape and the effect of price fairness on customer trust. In this context, first of all, the effect of the social servicescape on price fairness and then the effect of price fairness on customer trust were tested.
Design/methodology/approach
The universe of the research consists of people who visit Starbucks coffee stores. In the study, data were collected from 338 people who visited Starbucks coffee stores. The relationships between the variables were analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) Technique.
Findings
As a result of the research, it was concluded that employees, other customers and social crowds, which are from the dimensions of the social servicescape, do not have a significant effect on price fairness, the interaction between employee and customer, which is from the sub-dimensions of the social servicescape, has an effect on customers' perception of price fairness, and price fairness also has an effect on customer trust.
Originality/value
The important point in this research is to determine the effect of the social servicescape on price fairness, which has not been studied in the literature before. Although the effect of physical servicescape on price justice has been investigated, the effect of social servicescape on price justice has not been investigated. When evaluated from this point of view, it is thought that the research will have an important contribution to the literature.
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Zhiwei (CJ) Lin, Wenjie Xiao, Baolin Deng, Changjiang (Bruce) Tao and IpKin Anthony Wong
While the rise of chain restaurants has attracted increasing research interest, few studies have taken servicescape into consideration to examine its effects on transformative…
Abstract
Purpose
While the rise of chain restaurants has attracted increasing research interest, few studies have taken servicescape into consideration to examine its effects on transformative service outcomes. This study aims to assess how social service elements can provide customers with restorative qualities, though social components are considered vital in constituting a dining locale's servicescape (AKA Social Servicescape).
Design/methodology/approach
The study fills the void above by undertaking a survey-based quantitative research method. Using online surveys with a sample of 306 diners, the study employed structural equation modeling to explore a proposed moderated mediation model. A post-hoc interview followed to provide qualitative data to complement the findings developed from surveys.
Findings
Results first point to a positive relationship between social servicescape and attention restoration. Moreover, the authors unveil that substantive servicescape has a moderating effect on the relationship of interest, suggesting the interplay of social and built servicescape in promoting restorative experiences.
Research limitations/implications
Social and built stimuli can be intertwined to offer restorative qualities for customers. Through such an intertwined network of relationships, one may derive better mental health resources from hospitality settings.
Originality/value
This research presents new nuances to the existing field of inquiry by linking social servicescape and restoration through an intertwined network of attentional recovery.
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Awes Asghar, Ruba Asif and Naeem Akhtar
The existing literature has examined the determinants of post-purchase behavioral intentions. However, less attention has been devoted to the factors that contribute to perceived…
Abstract
Purpose
The existing literature has examined the determinants of post-purchase behavioral intentions. However, less attention has been devoted to the factors that contribute to perceived usefulness of fast-food restaurants attributes. The current study considers the servicescapes and social servicescapes of restaurants as well as their relationship with customers' perceived usefulness, with the moderating role of customer experience. It also explores how perceived usefulness influences choice process satisfaction and subsequent behavioral responses, including revisit intention and negative word-of-mouth.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from 485 fast-food restaurant consumers in Pakistan were collected using purposive sampling. The data were analyzed using both structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS 24.0 and the PROCESS macro in IBM SPSS 27.0.
Findings
The research revealed that perceived usefulness in fast-food restaurant industry is positively influenced by servicescapes and social servicescapes. Similarly, choice process satisfaction is primarily caused by perceived usefulness and affects behavioral responses. It also found that choice process satisfaction is positively associated with revisit intentions and negative word-of-mouth. Customer experience significantly moderates the relationship between ambient condition, facility aesthetic, layout, perceived similarity and perceived usefulness. However, customer experience insignificant moderates the relationships of physical appearance and suitable behavior with perceived usefulness.
Research limitations/implications
The findings provide insightful information for both academic and managerial fields, contributing to the literature on consumer psychology, consumer behavior, servicescapes and the stimulus-organism-response theory. The study also assists restauranteurs in the fast-food restaurant industry in overcoming the challenges posed by a highly competitive environment and developing strategies based on consumer perceptions.
Originality/value
This study, conducted in Pakistan, took a pioneer step in testing and confirming a novel perceived usefulness model that incorporates not only servicescapes but also social servicescapes in consumer behavior. It enhances the knowledge of consumer visit intentions by quantifying the significance of perceived usefulness developed by different servicescapes.
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Mark S. Rosenbaum and Carolyn Massiah
The purpose of this paper is to put forth an expanded servicescape framework that shows that a perceived servicescape comprises physical, social, socially symbolic, and natural…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to put forth an expanded servicescape framework that shows that a perceived servicescape comprises physical, social, socially symbolic, and natural environmental dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper offers an in‐depth literature review on servicescape topics from a variety of disciplines, both inside and outside marketing, to advance a logical framework built on Bitner's seminal article (1992).
Findings
A servicescape comprises not only objective, measureable, and managerially controllable stimuli but also subjective, immeasurable, and often managerially uncontrollable social, symbolic, and natural stimuli, which all influence customer approach/avoidance decisions and social interaction behaviors. Furthermore, customer responses to social, symbolic, and natural stimuli are often the drivers of profound person‐place attachments.
Research limitations/implications
The framework supports a servicescape paradigm that links marketing, environmental/natural psychology, humanistic geography, and sociology.
Practical implications
Although managers can easily control a service firm's physical stimuli, they need to understand how other critical environmental stimuli influence consumer behavior and which stimuli might overweigh a customer's response to a firm's physical dimensions.
Social implications
The paper shows how a servicescape's naturally restorative dimension can promote relief from mental fatigue and improve customer health and well‐being. Thus, government institutions (e.g. schools, hospitals) can improve people's lives by creating natural servicescapes that have restorative potential.
Originality/value
The framework organizes more than 25 years of servicescape research in a cogent framework that has cross‐disciplinary implications.
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Quynh Xuan Tran, My Van Dang and Nadine Tournois
This study aims to investigate the effects of servicescape on customer satisfaction and loyalty – centered on social interaction and service experience in the café setting.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the effects of servicescape on customer satisfaction and loyalty – centered on social interaction and service experience in the café setting.
Design/methodology/approach
Data for this study were collected from approximately 1,800 customers at 185 coffee stores located in the three largest cities in Vietnam through the self-administered questionnaires.
Findings
The research findings pointed out the significant impacts of café servicescape on social interaction quality, including customer-to-employee interaction (CEI) and customer-to-customer interaction (CCI). Social interactions and servicescape were shown to remarkably influence customer experience quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Moreover, the study confirmed the interrelation between service experience, satisfaction and loyalty in the café setting.
Practical implications
This study provides marketers and service managers a deeper understanding of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty through the control of servicescape attributes and social interactions in café contexts.
Originality/value
This research explores the significant impacts of café servicescape on social interaction quality (CEI and CCI). Additionally, it provides insights within the role of social interactions to customer’s affective and behavioral responses in service settings, especially the CCI quality.
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David Ballantyne and Elin Nilsson
The emergence of new social media is shifting the market place for business towards virtual market space. In the light of the emerging digital space for new forms of marketing…
Abstract
Purpose
The emergence of new social media is shifting the market place for business towards virtual market space. In the light of the emerging digital space for new forms of marketing, the traditional servicescape concept is critically examined. This paper aims to show why servicescape concepts and attitudes need to be adapted for digital media.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the authors explain how the traditional servicescape concept adds meaning to a service provider’s value-proposition by modifying customer expectations and customer experience. Second, recognising that the environment for service is no longer bound to a physical place, the authors discuss the implications of the epistemic shift involved.
Findings
The authors’ examination shows that digital service space challenges traditional concepts about what constitutes a customer experience and derived value. The authors conceptually “zoom out” into a virtual service eco-system and show with exemplar examples why the servicescape in digital space is more socially embedded and necessarily more fluid in its time-space design. In the more advanced sites, interactions between various artificial bodies (avatars) are co-created by controlling off-line participant-actors; yet, these participant-actors remain strangers to each other at an off-line level. This is entirely a new and radical development of old times.
Research limitations/implications
The research findings are based on scholarly research of the relevant literature, from practitioner reports, and evidence emerging from the examination of many digital web-sites. It has not been the authors’ intention to objectively represent current servicescape functionalities but more to indicate the major directions of change with exemplar examples. The future cannot be predicted, but their interpretive conclusions suggest major challenges in service marketing and management logic ahead. New forms of digital servicescape are still being created as technology and service imagination enables, so further research interest in virtual atmospherics can be expected.
Practical implications
Social media platforms are enabling organisations to learn more about their customers and also to engage them more. In these changing times, bricks and mortar stores would be well advised to review their servicescape presence to allow and encourage engagement with the more involved consumers. And, by integrating their digital space into their physical place, bricks and mortar stores might take on more relationship oriented process-like characteristics, both in the digital space and in their physical places, with developments on one platform leading to possible service innovations on the other.
Social implications
The digital era is changing consumer behaviour. Service managers need to take into account that many customers are already equally as engaged with digital-space social networks as they once were with bricks and mortar stores. The more time consumers as participant-actors spend in social networks, the decision on what and where to buy is decided by interactions with friends and other influencers.
Originality/value
New forms of digital servicescape are being created as technology and service imagination enables. Further scholarly research interest in virtual atmospherics can be expected, impacting on the authors’ sense of place, and self-identity.
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This research aims to explore and theorize the role of embodied practices – orchestrated by service providers – in the social production of servicescapes. It is claimed that the…
Abstract
Purpose
This research aims to explore and theorize the role of embodied practices – orchestrated by service providers – in the social production of servicescapes. It is claimed that the social character of the servicescape is shaped not only by narratives and materialities but also through the body. Bodily physical behaviors like physical movements in space, gestures, facial expressions, postures and tactile engagements with the surrounding materiality constitute a body language that conveys information and expresses meanings. In this kinetic capacity, the body becomes a building agent in the social constitution of the servicescape. As the author empirically demonstrates in the context of city tourism with diverse experiential opportunities, it is due to the body’s discriminatory orientation, walking, looking, pointing and acting in selective ways that the city emerges as a servicescape of particular kind.
Design/methodology/approach
Market-oriented ethnography was conducted in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where the author observed the guiding practices of tour guides leading international tourists during two-day city excursions.
Findings
This research identifies and unpacks three clusters of embodied practices deployed by service providers as they guide customers at the servicescape: spatializing, emplacing and regulating. The role of the body and its association with narratives and materialities is identified in each cluster.
Practical implications
A number of embodied practices are provided for use by contact employees as they guide customers in the servicescape. Specific guidelines are also offered to service providers for the strategic employment of body language, their training is navigational skills and the coordination of body, narratives and materialities.
Originality/value
This study extends current materialistic and communicative approaches on the construction of servicescapes by claiming that the servicescape in not only a physical and narrative construction but something that is also configured through the body; provides three clusters of embodied practices deployed by service providers; theorizes the intertwined nature of narratives, materiality and the body; defines servicescapes as dynamic socio-spatial entities emerging from the constant {narrative-material-body} arrangements orchestrated by service providers; and sheds light on the mediating role of the body in the social production of servicescapes.
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Eric Olson and Heelye (Jason) Park
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of physical servicescape, social servicescape and age on gay consumers’ evaluations of a LGBT advertisement of a gay bar of a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of physical servicescape, social servicescape and age on gay consumers’ evaluations of a LGBT advertisement of a gay bar of a gay bar.
Design/methodology/approach
A 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design was used to test the effects with a sample of gay males in the USA. Data were analyzed using ANCOVA and bootstrapping mediation.
Findings
Results of this study indicate a statistically significant three-way interaction effect of the two independent variables and age on the gay bar’s perceived LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender)-friendliness. Perceived friendliness mediated the effects of the independent variables on behavioral intentions. Furthermore, the mediation effect was moderated by the age cohort.
Research limitations/implications
The findings indicate a changing perception of gay servicescape between the older and younger gay men. Implications for hospitality managers are provided.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the servicescape literature by expanding the realm of research to gay servicescape and gay consumers, an emergent and more visible hospitality segment.
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Nathaniel Discepoli Line and Lydia Hanks
The servicescape is increasingly being recognized as a function of two distinct components: physical and social. While these two dimensions have often been studied independently…
Abstract
Purpose
The servicescape is increasingly being recognized as a function of two distinct components: physical and social. While these two dimensions have often been studied independently, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of both dimensions simultaneously in a fast casual restaurant context.
Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 1,110 fast casual restaurant patrons in the USA was collected. The data were analyzed using nested structural equation modeling.
Findings
The results suggest that both the social and the physical servicescape can affect consumption behavior in the fast casual restaurant industry and crowding can act a moderator of these relationships.
Research limitations/implications
Theoretically, these results are significant because they suggest the importance of capturing a holistic account of the servicescape when conducting research on the consumption environment.
Practical implications
This study is among the first to examine the effect of the social servicescape (and specifically the effect of crowding) in fast casual restaurants. The results suggest that restaurateurs need to be mindful that crowding affects the relationship between social servicescape and satisfaction.
Originality/value
This research is the first to look at both aspects of the servicescape as drivers of consumer behavior in the fast casual dining segment. Additionally, this research makes a second contribution by assessing the effect of crowding on the servicescape-driven relationships inherent in the proposed model.
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Berta Tubillejas-Andrés, Amparo Cervera-Taulet and Haydee Calderon Garcia
This paper aims to posit servicescape from a multi-dimensional formative approach beyond mere conceptualizations limited to its physical dimensions. An analysis is carried out to…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to posit servicescape from a multi-dimensional formative approach beyond mere conceptualizations limited to its physical dimensions. An analysis is carried out to predict loyalty behaviours in a cultural service.
Design/methodology/approach
Partial least square was conducted for testing a third-order aggregate formative construct of servicescape on a sample of 867 opera goers. In addition, the authors carried out a predictive performance assessment of our model.
Findings
The proposed research model was largely supported by the evidence. Results show that the physical (exterior and interior) and social dimensions (employees’ and attendees’ characteristics and interactions) must be considered together in the artscape, servicescape named in the performing arts services, conceptualization and measurement. An appropriate servicescape can be of vital importance in the perception and subsequent consumer evaluation of the service in terms of loyalty.
Research limitations implications
Further research is required to extend the analysis of the holistic servicescape.
Practical implications
Cultural managers are provided in terms of highlighting the importance of managing the artscape in all its dimensions “not only physical but also social – showing its relevance as an antecedent of opera goers” loyalty.
Social implications
Besides the cultural product itself, designing appropriate artscapes can enhance the experience and post-use behaviour of performing arts attendees.
Originality/value
The authors make a relevant contribution in the configuration of high-order formative constructs, showing that marketing literature should appraise servicescape from a comprehensive perspective to predict post-consumption behaviour.
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