The effect of salience on mental accounting: how integration versus segregation of payment influences purchase decisions

Although mental accounting principles are generally robust, the integration‐of‐losses principle often fails. This research argues that when information salience is high, people actively segregate. To demonstrate that effect, this research uses purchase decision making for which the total payment is a key decision factor and compares examples such as the following equivalent total payments: “$120.95 for a stroller plus $19.95 for shipping” (i.e., segregation) versus “$140.90 for a stroller including shipping” (i.e., integration). Two studies demonstrate that integration increases purchase intentions when the salience of the smaller payment is higher. Specifically, integration leads to higher purchase intentions than does segregation when (1) the surcharge is visually more salient, (2) the surcharge is easy to process, and (3) price perceptions are stimulus instead of recall driven. Therefore, this research extends mental accounting by identifying conditions in which the integration‐of‐losses principle is likely to prevail. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of delight in driving repurchase intentions

A channel differentiator for brick-and-mortar retail stores is the availability of salespeople to assist customers directly in their purchase decision. This research considers two aspects of customer interactions with retail salespeople that lead to perceptions of extraordinary service and enhance repurchase intentions: customer comfort and salesperson expertise. Retail customers desire value-added informational assistance from the salesperson to minimize ambiguity associated with the product and to reduce the risk associated with a purchase decision. A retail salesperson needs to make customers feel comfortable so that the customer will share specific needs during the interaction, and the salesperson can recommend appropriate products and services. Our findings reveal that while both customer comfort and salesperson expertise positively influence satisfaction with the salesperson and customer delight, only customer delight leads to repurchase intentions. While satisfaction is a commonly asserted goal for retailers; the present research suggests that in a transaction-based environment, elevated emotions such as customer delight represent a more powerful predictor of repurchase intentions. This research provides evidence of trainable salesperson behaviors that enhance customer perceptions of extraordinary service and offer firms an opportunity for significant performance gains.     

Counterfeit intimacy: A dramaturgical analysis of an erotic performance

Observations of customer‐waitress interaction in a topless club over a two‐and‐one‐half month period are presented. Data were generated by a participant‐observer who worked as a waitress‐dancer in a topless club during this period. Analysis focuses on the setting, appearance, and manner of the “cynical performance” (Goffman 1959) orchestrated by the waitress through which she uses semi‐nudity, nudity and nude dancing to stimulate the fantasies of her patrons and thereby creates “counterfeit intimacy” (Boles and Garbin 1977). The overriding goal of the club and the waitress‐dancers is to make money through the sale of alcohol and table dances; customer goals are to have a “sexual experience” (not necessarily intercourse) of some sort. Various “ploys,” enacted by both customers and waitresses, are analyzed, with the ultimate goal of these ploys being to enhance the effectiveness of the “counterfeit intimacy” contrived by both parties. Conclusions suggest that all forms of “counterfeit” can be studied as sources of benefits for people whose expectations have not been met by “legitimate” institutions and that rationality in performance is maximized in performances explicitly designed to be counterfeits.     

顾客授权行为对员工职业成长的影响：自我决定理论视角

聚焦于顾客授权行为这一概念, 以自我决定理论为基础, 分别引入基于组织的自尊作为中介变量和职业中心性作为调节变量, 探讨了顾客授权行为对一线服务员工职业成长的影响机制和作用边界。通过一项三阶段的时间滞后研究设计, 获取了245份有效样本, 结果显示: (1)顾客授权行为对员工职业成长具有显著的正向影响; (2)基于组织的自尊在顾客授权行为与员工职业成长之间起着部分中介作用; (3)职业中心性对顾客授权行为与基于组织的自尊的作用关系具有正向调节作用: 当员工职业中心性水平较高时, 顾客授权行为对基于组织的自尊的正向影响更强; (4)职业中心性进一步调节顾客授权行为通过基于组织的自尊对职业成长的间接影响: 当员工职业中心性水平较高时, 顾客授权行为通过基于组织的自尊对职业成长的正向效应会增强。     

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After first demonstrating that definitions of customer relationship management (CRM) vary widely, we build upon stakeholder and network theories and argue that there are two fundamental categories of participants in any CRM initiative: (1) “core” stakeholders (i.e., the firm selling its products or services as well as its customers), and (2) various “noncore” stakeholders (e.g., CRM consultants). We then develop a process-based framework and related propositions capturing the various stakeholders involved in a CRM initiative as well as several important mediating and moderating relationships yet to receive attention in the literature. Next, we highlight the specific frame of reference and inherent biases of each type of CRM stakeholder, with particular emphasis on how each attempts to sell its offerings, services, or wares. At the core of our framework is a little-commented-upon mediating construct that we label “Shared Understanding of CRM.” The paper next offers an additional, and perhaps more pragmatic, framework for managers to garner a better understanding of which specific stakeholders are at work in any given CRM initiative, which type of customers might be involved, and which outcome variables or metrics might be salient. The paper’s conclusion offers insights into how the elusive goal of shared understanding of CRM might best be achieved.     

“No More” leads to “Want More,” but “No Less” leads to “Want Less”: Consumers' counterfactual thinking when faced with quantity restriction discounts

The current research examines the impact of point‐of‐purchase (POP) discounts on consumers' counterfactual thinking (CFT). Study 1 reveals that consumers tend to engage in upward CFT (what might have been better) rather than downward CFT (what might have been worse) in response to POP discounts. Study 2 shows that upward CFT depends on how the discount information is framed. A discount with a lower‐quantity restriction (e.g., “X % off if you buy at least Y items”) leads consumers to counterfactually wish to buy more, but a discount with an upper‐quantity restriction (“X % off – limit Y items per customer”) leads consumers to wish to buy less. Study participants in both conditions report they would buy the same POP‐suggested amount, but for completely opposite reasons. In Study 3, this convergence effect in purchase quantity disappears when the maximum and minimum restrictions are lifted, suggesting that quantity restrictions in POP discounts guide quantity decisions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feeling bad and doing good: The effect of customer mistreatment on service employee's daily display of helping behaviors

Mistreatment by customers is a common occurrence for many frontline service employees. Although some evidence suggests that employees engage in dysfunctional workplace behaviors as a result of mistreatment, others studies have suggested that employees may cope with such negative experiences by helping others. Drawing on negative state relief theory, we conducted 2 studies to test these relationships and examine whether service employees cope with negative emotions arising from such daily customer mistreatment by engaging in helping others. In Study 1, daily surveys from 70 restaurant employees showed that daily customer mistreatment predicted the experience of negative moods the next morning, which, in turn, led to higher levels of coworker helping the next day. In Study 2, daily surveys from 54 retail employees showed that daily customer mistreatment led to higher customer helping the next day, but only when customer orientation was high. Our results further show that helping behavior was associated with elevated positive affective experiences and that the proposed relationships differ depending on whether customer mistreatment is measured at a daily or a cumulative perspective. Specifically, cumulative customer mistreatment over time decreased general helping. These findings are discussed in relation to employees' coping strategies towards acute and cumulative mistreatment.     

Using Social Cognition and Persuasion to Promote Energy Conservation: A Quasi-Experiment1

A quasi-experiment was conducted to determine if the effectiveness of the R.C.S. Home Energy Audit Program could be improved by training auditors to use social-psychological principles during the audit procedure. Nine experienced home energy auditors attended two 1-day workshops in which they were trained to: (a) communicate vividly; (b) personalize their recommendations to homeowners; (c) induce commitment; and (d) frame their recommendations in terms of “loss” rather than “gain”. The effectiveness of the trained auditors was compared with a control group of experienced auditors who did not receive specific training. Both telephone interview data and utility company records pointed to the success of the auditor training. In interviews, customers served by the trained auditors reported a greater likelihood of acting on the auditors' recommendations, and a large number of these customers reported applying for utility programs to finance retrofits. Utility records validated these customer claims: A significantly larger number of customers served by trained auditors actually did apply for retrofit finance programs. A longitudinal measure of actual energy consumption showed no difference between experimental and control households. Taken as a whole, these findings demonstrate the potential for using principles uncovered in the social psychological laboratory to design applied interventions.     

The Effects of Onset and Offset Responsibility on Affects and Helping Judgments1

Attributional studies of helping have examined perceivers affective responses and helping intentions as a function of responsibility (controllability) for the onset of a problem. This study extended the analysis to a responsibility for the solution (offset) of a problem and examined how the cause of both the onset and the offset of a problem determined perceivers' affective responses and helping intentions. One hundred and eighty subjects participated in the study. The subjects read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior at the onset of falling behind in school (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”) and reported their perceptions of the cause of the problem, affective responses, and helping intentions. Then they read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior for the offset of the problem (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”:' and responded again to the previously administered scales. Results indicated (a) that the final responses were strongly determined by the offset information. and (b) that sickness at the time of the onset led to negative affect and less helping intention when the offset information was “no effort.” The latter effect is discussed within the context of the moral judgment. Furthermore, structural equation analyses for the responses after the offset information revealed (a) that Weiner's “attribution-emotion-helping” model was applicable. and (b) that the effect of the effort perception on the helping intention was mediated by anger and pity.     

The moderating effects of purchase importance in customer satisfaction process: An empirical investigation

Customer satisfaction continues to draw the interest of researchers and practitioners because it can lead to long term benefits including customer loyalty. Purchase importance plays a role in pre‐purchase process, yet little is known about how it may influence customer satisfaction formation process and loyalty intentions. This study examines the moderating effect of purchase importance in the customer satisfaction formation process and in loyalty intentions. A survey was conducted with customers in a restaurant setting, and structural equation analysis via LISREL was performed. The results show that perceived performance has a stronger influence on satisfaction when purchase importance is low, whereas satisfaction seems to be influenced both by disconfirmation and perceived performance when purchase importance is high. Post‐consumption expectations were found to influence on loyalty intentions under both high and low importance purchase conditions. The implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are made. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Individual differences in customer sociability

Two studies examined the quality of clerk-customer interactions. In the first study, customers in a mall were followed from one purchase to another and retest reliability of customer sociability was found to be 0.73. A second study of the same and another mall found a retest reliability of 0.56 for customer sociability and a correlation of 0.57 between sociability of different salespersons serving the same customer. These results indicate that the sociability of salesperson—customer interactions is determined by stable individual differences in customer sociability, and suggest that salespeople do better to echo than to escalate customer sociability.     

Call for Papers: National Conference in Sales Management

This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects.     

Locus of control,perceived responsibility for prior fate,and helping behavior

One-hundred-and-sixty adolescents participated in two studies designed to investigate the relationship between $\text{I}\text{E}$ and helping behavior as mediated by the perceived cause of another's need. In the first study, Ss were given the opportunity to help, either “indirectly” or “directly,” a supervisor who had been over- or underpaid in a prior similar task. Internals helped more in the “direct” help than the “indirect” help conditions but their helping behavior and their perceptions of their supervisors were not consistent. The perceptions of the externals were relatively consistent with their greater help of the “overpaid” supervisor. In study 2, the Ss were given additional information to increase the possibility of their making causal attributions as a function of the supervisor's prior fate. Once again, the external subjects' helping behavior reflected their perception of their supervisor's merit. The internal subjects exhibited relatively little helping behavior regardless of their supervisors' prior fate or perceived competence.     

A Comparison of Modalities in Modeling

Organizational display rules (e.g., “service with a smile”) have had mixed relationships with employee emotional labor—either in the form of “bad faith” surface acting (suppressing or faking expressions) or “good faith” deep acting (modifying inner feelings). We draw on the motivational perspective of emotional labor to argue that individual differences in customer orientation will directly and indirectly relate to these acting strategies in response to display rules. With a survey of more than 500 working adults in customer contact positions, and controlling for affective disposition, we find that customer orientation directly increases “good faith” acting while it moderates the relationship of display rules with “bad faith” acting.     

Purchases of food in youth. Influence of price and income

One way to increase choice of healthy over unhealthy behaviors is to increase the cost of less healthy alternatives or reduce the cost of healthier alternatives. The influence of price on purchases of healthy and unhealthy foods was evaluated in two laboratory experiments. In Experiment 1, thirty-two 10- to 12-year-old youth were given $5.00 and allowed to purchase multiple portions of a healthy food (fruit or vegetable) and a less healthy food (higher-fat snack). The price of one type of food varied from $0.50 to $2.50, while the price of the other type was held at $1.00. Increasing the price of a type of food reduced purchases of that type of food, but did not lead to substitution with the alternative type of food. In Experiment 2, twenty 10- to 14-year-old youth were given $1.00, $3.00, and $5.00 to purchase healthy and unhealthy foods. The price of each food was raised and lowered by 25% and 50%. Raising the price of healthy or unhealthy foods resulted in decreased purchases of those foods, and income available interacted with price to predict the pattern of substitution of alternative foods. These results show the potential for controlled laboratory studies of price and food purchases, and show that the substitution of healthier for unhealthy food is related to available money.     

Cost Effectiveness of Strategies for Recruiting Low-Income Families for Behavioral Parent Training

The goal of this study was to assess cost, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of recruitment strategies used to engage low-income families of young children with disruptive behavior disorder to participate in a Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) program. For this analysis, we used data on labor and non-labor resources associated with 13 recruitment strategies implemented in February 2014 through February 2016. We assessed the effectiveness of each strategy as the number of families that enrolled into the study. Cost-effectiveness of each recruitment strategy was expressed as cost per family enrolled; analysis was conducted in 2016. We calculated the cost of total recruitment effort for 13 strategies during the 2-year period to be $11,496 with an average cost of $885 per recruitment strategy or $255 per enrolled family. Across strategies, total costs ranged from $25 to $2540. “University mass e-mail” and “school flyers” resulted in the most phone screens (34 each); however, only 10% of these families enrolled in the study (three and four families, respectively). “Craigslist” was the most effective strategy with 30 families screened and 11 of them enrolling. Three strategies did not yield any participants. The four strategies with the lowest cost per family enrolled were “Facebook page,” “Craigslist,” “university mass e-mail,” and “organization/agency” (<$90). In conclusion, we found that some recruitment strategies were more successful at engaging low-income families to participate in a BPT program than others. Our results indicate that using a combination of recruitment strategies may be the optimal approach for recruiting low-income families.     

青少年对广告的态度及影响因素

通过对北京城八区11所中学的730个有效样本的研究分析,作者发现,北京青少年对广告的总体态度比较消极, 40.2%的青少年表示不喜欢广告, 27.9%中立,只有31.9%喜欢广告;此外,61.6%的青少年表示不信赖广告,24%中立,仅14.5%的青少年表示信赖广告。在对广告信念的因子分析中,青少年对广告“决策信息”功能表示基本肯定;对广告的“娱乐”、“购买体验”和“个人伤害”结果表示基本否定。此外,人口统计变量与广告总体态度以及各个因子之间有一定的关系。因此,要改变青少年对广告的消极态度,企业营销者需要从产品质量、广告表现形式、广告诉求内容等多个方面加以改善和提高。     

Brand switching and consumer identification with brands in the smartphones industry

Brand loyalty literature has mainly focused on how brands perform under normal market conditions. As the business environment grows more complex, globalised, and innovative, market disruptions become more prevalent. Taking a cognition‐based approach, this paper proposes that customers identify with brands to satisfy self‐definitional needs. A social constructivist perspective, using an inductive and case study strategy, was used. Data generation was based on purposeful sampling, and participants were chosen on the basis of their “lived” experience with the use of smartphones. Four major themes were identified in the purchase of smartphones: identity, satisfaction, brand loyalty, and brand switching. Participants' views suggested that this provides them with a sense of purpose and meaning, defining who they are and why they behave in specified ways in society, which increases their self‐esteem. Brand switching occurs when customers are motivated to review available alternatives in the marketplace due to a change in competitive activities. Socially, switching occurs when a customer's belief in a brand is externally influenced within the social setting. When the boundary between the “in‐group” and the “out‐group” is impermeable and changing, group membership is not realistic; social mobility is not a viable strategy to cope with identity threats.     

Not just apologizing: The impact of complaint handling on sustained participation behavior in live-streaming shopping

In a live-streaming shopping community, the quality of complaint handling may significantly influence relationship recovery between the consumer and retailer (or streamer) following service failures. Despite the significant progress made in previous works, there are still research gaps in the study of customer complaint handling and customers' post-behavior. Therefore, this study introduced the important variable “swift-guanxi” (SG) to explore the relationship between complaint handling and the sustained participation of customers. Data were collected through both online and offline methods. A structural equation model (SEM) was used to test the relevant hypotheses. The results from assessing these data indicate that the factors of conversational human voice (CHV), reply length (RL) and perceived justice (PJ) all exert a significant influence on SG, which in turn affects the sustained participation behavior (SPB) of customers. In addition, complaint publicization (CP) has a negative impact on this behavior.     

The impact of customer engagement on customer happiness

Previous studies have found relationships between variables that predict happiness and engagement. While this suggests that engagement is a basis for generating customer happiness, the literature does not provide sufficient confirmatory evidence. Thus, the effects of different engagement intensities remain unclear. Focusing on conditions related to the Starbucks brand, this study analyzed how (1) passive and active engagement impacted customer happiness and (2) happiness impacted word of mouth (WOM) and purchase intention. Data were collected through an online survey among 802 Peruvian customers, all of whom were recruited via non-probabilistic sampling. Because two exogenous variables were considered formative (i.e., customer engagement and customer happiness), a partial least-squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was used for the analysis. In sum, engagement (both passive and active) significantly and positively impacted customer happiness, which then positively impacted WOM and purchase intention. Given that engagement is associated with variables that are broadly related to happiness, this study makes new contributions by (i) clarifying how customer engagement can generate customer happiness, (ii) identifying differences between active and passive engagement, and (iii) adding evidence for use in the debate on the purpose of marketing and traditional practices such as engagement. As discussed in the paper, these findings have theoretical and practical implications for brand managers.