Search results

The purpose of this study is to identify conditions under which consumers prefer matte packages and those under which they prefer glossy packages and to extend the findings to the context of consumer evaluations.

A series of four experiments-conducted across a diverse range of settings and consumers (through lab experiments and field studies) and using different types of products (mobile phones, invitation cards, wrappers and coffee packs)- examined the effects of matte and glossy packaging finishes on consumer evaluations (i.e. preferences, attitudes and purchase intentions). This paper further developed moderated mediation models to illustrate the mechanisms underlying the examined effects.

People with warmth and competence focus favored matte and glossy packaging, respectively. In addition, the warmth (competence) focus enhanced the positive influence of matte (glossy) packaging on brand sincerity (competence), leading to more favorable consumer evaluations (i.e. brand attitudes, product attitudes and purchase intentions).

This study provides managers with insights into conferring desired impressions of sincerity (competence) upon a brand and methods of attracting certain warmth focused (competence focused) consumers by using matte (glossy) packaging finishes.

This is the study to systematically investigate the effect of packaging finishes on brand impressions and consumer evaluations.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) marketing has become ubiquitous in the hospitality industry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of donation appeals containing warmth-focused versus competence-focused messages in hospitality CSR marketing. Moreover, we offer an innovative visual design strategy focusing on the typeface (handwritten vs machine-written) in donation appeals to encourage consumers’ donations and boost their brand loyalty.

This research used a 2 (message framing: warmth-focused vs competence-focused) × 2 (typeface: handwritten vs machine-written) between-subjects experimental design.

The findings suggest that donation appeals featuring warmth-focused messages combined with handwritten typeface and competence-focused messages combined with machine-written typeface can maximize donation intention and brand loyalty. Furthermore, results from the moderated mediation analyses indicate that brand trust is the psychological mechanism underlying these effects.

Hospitality managers should use typeface design, which is easy and inexpensive to manipulate, to enhance the effectiveness of CSR marketing. Specifically, for donation appeals featuring warmth-focused (competence-focused) messages, the handwritten (machine-written) typeface can boost consumers’ donation intention and brand loyalty.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to reveal the competitive advantage of typeface design in hospitality CSR marketing. This research sheds light on the congruency effects of message framing and typeface design in donation appeals on consumers’ donation intention and brand loyalty while using the contemporary context of The Coronavirus Disease 2019 to test the theory.

User-oriented care, defined as individualized assisting behaviors, is the dominant approach within elderly care today. Yet, there is little known about its conceptual structure. This paper proposes that user-oriented care has a bi-partite structure which may be decomposed into the two dimensions of task and relation.

Care workers were “shadowed” (i.e. observed) at their work (n=391 rated interactions). User-oriented care was assessed along ten process quality indicators targeting the acts of caregiving (i.e. task focus, relation focus, involvement, time-use, body language, autonomy, respect, warmth, encouragement, and information) in two elderly care settings, i.e. home care and nursing home. Observations added up to 45 hours.

Principal component analyses confirmed the proposed two-factor structure of user-oriented care. Specifically, the user-oriented care indicators loaded on two distinct factors, i.e. task and relation. The underlying structure of user-oriented care revealed to be invariant across the two settings. However, the results revealed interesting structural differences in terms of explained variance and the magnitude of factor loadings in the home care and nursing home settings. Differences also emerged specifically pertaining to the indicators of autonomy and time-use. These findings suggest that user-oriented behavior may to some extent denote different acts of caregiving and what may be called task- and relation-orientation may be loaded with different meanings in these two care settings.

This is the first study investigating user-oriented behavior in the context of elderly care using a quantitative observational approach. The authors propose that the observed differences between the two care settings are primarily not due to better elderly care work in home care, but due to some inherent differences between these two contexts of care (e.g. better health and living at home).

This study aims to investigate bystanders' perceptions and reactions to management responses to consumer complaints through digital service channels. Specific purposes are to examine how management response (i.e. warmth, competence) and individual differences (i.e. bystander power) work together to influence bystanders' information processing of service recovery.

This research consists of two main studies which employed web-based experiments. Both studies used a 2 (management response: warmth vs competence) × 2 (individual power: low vs high) between-subjects design. A total of 240 participants were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform in Study 1, and 233 participants were recruited from a market research company in Study 2.

Study 1 suggested that for the high-power group, warmth-related responses increased service perceptions (perceived diagnosticity and perceived fairness), and for low-power group, competence-related responses enhanced service perceptions. Study 2 confirmed the results of Study 1 and further demonstrated bystanders' service perceptions as the underlying mechanisms to connect the interactive effect of management response and individual power on satisfaction with complaint handling and WOM intentions.

The current research demonstrates how companies can effectively manage customers' experiences (i.e. bystanders' experiences) with service recovery management on digital platforms by demonstrating effective management responses to consumer complaints through digital service channels.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that explores bystanders' individual characteristics related to the information processing of service recovery through digital service channels.

This paper aims to explore how color-based visual sensation affects people’s judgment of other people and their environment. The authors focus primarily on uncovering the causal mechanism in which such effect is mediated by warmth stereotype.

The authors used data collected from experiments and field surveys in the USA and South Korea.

Pilot study shows that an anonymous person against a warm color background (vs neutral and cold color background) is perceived to be one with warmer personality. Study 1 shows that warm (vs neutral) color in advertising increases a perceiver’s warmth stereotype and trust and, consequently, a favorable attitude toward the advertiser. Study 2 shows that color-based warmth of an e-commerce website increases a web user’s warmth stereotype and trust of the website and higher intention to purchase. Study 3 shows that the nurses’ perception of warmth from a hospital’s ambient color affects their favorable judgment of the hospital and intention to take on an extra role. Importantly, all effects observed across studies were mediated by the activation of warmth stereotype.

The findings provide practical guidelines to companies for the usage of colors in crafting advertising artifacts, designing a website and creating a workplace environment to induce positive attitudes and motivations toward each target.

The extant research on warmth experiences focuses on tactile sensation as a key independent variable and transient mood as a dominant mediator. This study extends the stream of research by adopting perceived visual sensation as an independent variable and warmth stereotype as a new mediating construct.

The purpose of the current study is to investigate occupational stereotypes among a professional sample of recruiters and other employees on the two fundamental dimensions of warmth and competence.

The authors conducted a survey to collect professionals´ (mostly recruiters´) ratings of preselected occupations. Participants were asked to rate warmth and competence attributes. Factor and cluster analysis were employed to investigate the two-dimensional structure of the warmth/competence space and how and whether occupations cluster as predicted by the stereotype content model (SCM).

Almost all occupations showed a clear two-factorial structure, corresponding to the warmth/competence dimensions. A five-cluster solution was deemed appropriate as depicting how occupations disperse on these dimensions. Implications for stereotyping research, the design of hiring discrimination experiments, and HRM are discussed.

In contrast to previous related research, in which participants select the included occupations themselves, the authors included prespecified common occupations, which should be important for representativeness. In addition, previous research has been conducted in the United States, while the authors conduct this study in a European context (Sweden). Finally, instead of studying students or participants with unspecified work experience, the authors focus on professionals (mostly recruiters).

The aim of this research is to examine the application of the stereotype content model (SCM) in the field of marketing from macro (the country of origin), meso- (corporate image) and micro (service providers, brands, advertising and promotions) levels.

This paper collects, reviews and summarizes the relevant literature, and prospects future research directions from three levels on this research topic.

First, the authors contend that competence primacy popularizes in the early work but warmth becomes more influential recently. Second, they identify and discuss two doubts of the SCM in marketing, namely the moral dimension and the link between brands as intentional agents framework (BIAF) and the brand personality theory. Finally, they suggest several research avenues for the use of SCM in marketing research, including research on nation branding, emerging global brands and Confucianist cultures at macro level, artificial intelligence and warmth-as-competence strategy at meso-level, and brand personality and the brand animal logo at micro level.

As an established framework in social psychology, the SCM has been increasingly applied in marketing research and a literature review in this light appears timely. This paper conducts for the first time a comprehensive review of the SCM in the marketing field on three levels, projects promising research directions, and thus contributes to the academia of marketing.

This paper aims to examine the effects of restaurant managers’ warmth and competence on employees’ turnover intentions mediated by job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The study aims to enhance existing literature related to the influence of social perceptions that casual dining restaurant employees may adopt regarding their restaurant managers.

The data came from 781 employees of a large US-based casual dining restaurant franchise group that owned 43 restaurants. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed, followed by multilevel path and post hoc mediation analyses, to assess the effects of the proposed model.

Results demonstrated that managers’ warmth and competence represented a single factor, instead of two distinct constructs, thus contradicting several sociopsychological studies. Moreover, managers’ warmth and competence had an indirect influence on employees’ turnover intentions through both job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Knowing that employees develop improved job attitudes and lower turnover intentions when they evaluate their managers as warm and competent individuals, restaurant operators should focus on both of these social characteristics when designing interviewing processes, management training, and performance appraisal programs.

By studying a casual dining restaurant franchise group that operates a single brand, thus minimizing variation in policies and procedures, this paper fulfills an identified need to examine two fundamental social dimensions that people often use in professional settings, and which have not been vastly studied in organizational behavior or hospitality literature.

This study aims to investigate how business-to-business (B2B) companies build brand personality via the products they provide and via their interactions with customers.

A multiple case study, which spans 10 years, investigates via interviews, observations, workshops and document analysis how two fast-growing B2B companies selling industrial equipment to manufacturers build brand personality.

The studied companies concentrate on different brand personality dimensions depending on the activities in which they engage. By focusing on brand competence in the realm of the actual product and brand warmth in the realm of the augmented product, the companies manage to create a complete and consistent brand personality.

The research approach provides in-depth knowledge on how the companies build brands for a specific type of B2B product. However, the article’s perspective is limited to that of management and therefore does not take customer reactions into account.

The study describes how firms can build strong B2B brands by emphasizing competence in product design and R&D and warmth in activities related to sales and customer service.

The study introduces a conceptually consistent view of brand personality in the form of warm and competent brands to the B2B marketing literature. It builds on and contributes to the emerging research on B2B brand personality. By relating the companies’ brand-building activities to the type of products they sell, this study illustrates how context affects B2B brand building, and by integrating brand personality theory with product levels and marketing philosophy, it extends previous theory on B2B branding.