- This paper presents the key findings in relation to current consumer perspectives on the role of relationships, the nature of loyalty and types of customer interaction from an in‐depth qualitative consumer study of Irish retail banking.
- Although the literature proposes that the RM approach is particularly applicable to the financial services sector, the research findings identify key supply and demand‐related changes within Irish financial services and raise questions as to the appropriateness of general RM theory to the current nature of interaction between consumers and their financial suppliers.
- Key customer factors such as low involvement, apathy and dissatisfaction have resulted in much apparent customer loyalty actually being spurious. More important for customers in this study was how convenient the bank was for their lifestyle.
- In an age in which increased depersonalisation and automation impact upon the nature of consumer‐supplier interaction and service delivery, it would appear that the concepts of relationship and loyalty need to be fundamentally re‐examined and their role and relevance within current retail financial services re‐appraised.
- An important consideration for marketers is determining the best approach to take when marketing their product or service across national borders. It has become clear that the answer to this is not as simple as complete standardization or adaptation, and the appropriate approach may be contingent on a complex set of variables. One key aspect of the puzzle relates to an understanding of the attitudes and behaviours of consumers. The current study examines consumer style (variables related to the way people engage in their consumption activities) as an important area of consideration related to international marketing efforts. Consumer style was investigated in three European countries and the US, using data from the DDB Brand Capital Study (a multi‐country survey). Although results showed that country differences are evident on consumption style, a cluster analysis suggests that there were four segments of consumers that transcend country boundaries. The findings add to our knowledge about consumers in these countries and the characteristics of the segments with respect to differing styles of consumption.
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Highlights
- We studied in a Dutch sample how the amount and quality of daycare interacted in relation to children's socio‐emotional outcomes.
- High levels of daycare quality were related to more teacher‐rated social competence.
- Children spending 3.5 days or more in highly supportive daycare centers showed less parent‐rated externalizing behavior.
- While there is evidence that an endorser's likeability plays a determining role in the advertising effectiveness of explicit persuasive appeals, this paper examines the impact of the need for cognition (NFC) as a moderator of this relationship. We find that this effect holds, as predicted, for individuals with lower NFC, but not for those with higher NFC. Furthermore, the effects of explicit persuasion and the endorser's likeability on evaluations of products or services by lower‐NFC consumers were found to be mediated by the attribution of self‐interest. In contrast, advertising effectiveness for higher‐NFC consumers was predictable only by the valence of their cognitive responses to the product.
- This paper describes a study in the psychology of market mavenism, the consumer tendency to become especially involved in the marketplace. The purpose was to investigate empirically associations with the important consumer characteristics of innovativeness, status consumption, and need for uniqueness. The findings support the notion that market mavenism is due less to the demographic characteristics of consumers as it is more a socially constructed phenomenon. Global innovativeness, status consumption, and creative choice counterconformity explained more variance in market mavenism than did demographics. Theoretically, these findings enrich our knowledge of the psychology of market mavens by suggesting some motivations for their behavior. Practically, marketing strategies can be fine‐tuned to appeal more effectively to this important segment of consumers by appealing to mavens' willingness to try new things, to their need for uniqueness, and to their willingness to seek social status through consumption.
- A company or brand's reputation is inherently linked to how ethically/unethically it is perceived to conduct its business. While it is generally assumed that consumers' ethical perceptions are either built on first‐hand experiences or other concrete information, this research demonstrates that reputation can be influenced by processes outside the company's direct control. The article is based on interviews with general consumers and presents the finding that, in the absence of concrete information or personal experience, consumers may infer ethical beliefs. Four distinct types of cues may instigate ethical inferences and act as surrogate indicators: product‐, company‐, category‐ and origin‐related cues. A framework that illustrates the hierarchical structure of the various cues depending on their level of specificity is presented. The results suggest that controlling corporate reputation becomes increasingly challenging. Implications for marketing practitioners and general managers are discussed and further research opportunities highlighted.
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Identify the health needs of transgender and transsexual (TG/TS) individuals;
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Hear the experiences and perceptions of TG/TS individuals who are using the current health care system;
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Identify any barriers to obtaining services, support and/or resources;
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Assess the extent to which health care providers and systems are able to offer sensitive, high quality and user friendly services that meet TG/TS consumers' needs; and
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Identify ways that health care services can be enhanced to better meet the needs of the target population.
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Transgendered and transsexual persons frequently encounter providers who will not treat them and blatantly say so. There is a need for education and a change in anti-discrimination law needed to change this.
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The lack of provider training on transgender issues creates insensitivity to simple issues of respect for trans people. One example is the unwillingness to address TG/TS people by the pronoun preferred by the patient/client.
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Many providers lack the knowledge to adequately treat many of the routine health care needs of TG/TS individuals when such treatment relates to issues of hormone use, gynecological care, HIV prevention counseling, or other concerns related to gender or sexuality.
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Providers frequently refer to trans issues in unrelated health care situations such as setting a broken bone, filling a cavity or treating a cold. Greater familiarity with the health care needs of the trans population would reduce such incidents.
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Mental health and substance abuse treatment providers need additional training in order to work cooperatively with TG/TS clients to identify when gender issues are or are not relevant to specific mental health or substance abuse treatment episodes. Sometimes gender issues are central to mental health or substance abuse treatment, sometimes they are peripheral and sometimes they are unrelated.
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Discrimination in health insurance is the rule, not the exception. There is a need for education to encourage policy changes on the part of insurers and public policy changes on the part of legislators and regulators.
- In the marketplace, consumers often encounter framed scenarios for optional product features, whereby they can add desired product options to a base model or delete undesired product options from a fully loaded model. The results of two experiments show that such option framing can influence consumers' decision making regarding the total number of finally chosen product options. Also, consumers' processing modes – rational versus experiential, can influence their choice behavior under option framing. Specifically, consumers choose a higher number of options in the delete (versus add) frame, and the effect is magnified when making decisions in an experiential mode, and it is diminished when making decisions in a rational mode. Moreover, cognitive constraints further moderate these effects.
- The globalization of media allows brand placements subtle ways to reach local and international consumers. This study examines Indians' responses to brand placements in a Bollywood film. Psychological processing of embedded brands was assessed by gauging the effects of film involvement and brand consciousness on recall. Film involvement showed an adverse effect on brand recall, while brand consciousness had a positive effect. Brand consciousness was also positively related to the notion that brand placements enhanced film realism, but was not related to attitudes toward product placement in general.
Practitioner points
- Popular practices such as 360‐degree feedback may reveal discrepancies between a person's self‐ratings and other's ratings.
- Although often attributed to a lack of self‐awareness, these discrepancies also may be explained by factors such as the personality and gender of the focal individual.
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Practitioner points
- Organizations seeking to promote mindfulness among their workforce should try to keep workload to a manageable degree.
- Organizations may also pay attention to care for employees' day‐to‐day recovery as it has been shown to facilitate mindfulness.
- This paper examines the contextual aspects of problem‐solving behaviour of ‘green’, environmentally oriented consumers. It is argued that by profiling the consumer in cognitive terms, a more robust understanding of green consumer behaviour can be provided.
- To illustrate this, we draw upon the cognitive anthropological concepts of practical thinking and bricolage. These are used to integrate ‘context’ into a model of cognition via qualitative, interview‐based research which examined how consumers assess the environmental friendliness of supermarket products.
- In order to increase external validity two respondent groups were compared, British and German consumers. Different levels of successful and unsuccessful practical thinking and bricolage were identified.
Research Highlights
- Children's vocabulary size is positively correlated with their concurrent executive functioning skill at ages 2, 3, 4, and 6
- Young children's early vocabulary scores predict their later EF performance across measurement waves, even after controlling for initial EF skill
- There is stability in children's relative vocabulary size and executive functioning performance over time in early childhood
- Health marketplace offers a lucrative business for many companies. However, there is a gap in consumer research in understanding what health as a target of consumption really means to consumers. The subtleties and multiplicity of meanings rural and urban (both younger and older) consumers attach to health in their everyday lives are empirically explored in this article. Findings of a focus group interview‐based interpretive analysis are reported. It was found that meanings consumers associate with health are profound and multi‐faceted (identification of several health‐meaning categories) with some evidence for age‐ and area‐of‐ residency‐related health‐meaning differences. The article is concluded by advancing theory‐building in consumer research in the form of developing a tentative framework model that can be used to analyze health consumption meanings.
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Highlights
- This study examined pathways from parent mental health to children's executive function (EF) and behaviour problems.
- Maternal depression was negatively related to children's EF and positively related to children's behaviour problems.
- The negative association between maternal depression and children's EF was completely mediated by maternal parenting. There was an indirect effect from maternal parenting to children's behaviour problems through EF.
- This paper sets out to conceptually explore emerging communication patterns online and apparently deviant behaviours they can sustain within the scope of consumer‐producer relationships as power struggles. In addition it seeks to advance a conceptualisation of the balancing of power between consumers and producers on the web through contesting discourses labelling deviance. Theories in computer‐mediated‐communications (CMC) and cyber‐cultural studies are first covered to describe why consumers might engage in apparently deviant behaviour. Following this, definitions of power are provided and the work of Foucault is borrowed in order to evaluate how strategies of power can be based on deviant behaviour online. This paper concludes that given the yet to be normalised nature of the Internet, the current balance of power between producers and consumers could be determined by the establishment of a discourse outlining what is the norm and what is deviant. Implications for producers and consumers are discussed.
- 1 a formal representation of plausible inference patterns; such as deductions, inductions, and analogies, that are frequently employed in answering everyday questions;
- 2 a set of parameters, such as conditional likelihood, typicality, and similarity, that affect the certainty of people's answers to such questions; and
- 3 a system relating the different plausible inference patterns and the different certainty parameters.