Trust,Commitment, and Older Women: Exploring Brand Attachment Differences in the Elderly Segment

Understanding older adults’ product consumption behavior is of high importance to consumer and marketing research. Prior studies have mainly focused on older adults’ cognitive decline and compared their behavior to that of younger consumers. A neglected area of research has been older consumers’ brand attachment that is associated with potential differences between consumers in their fifties and in their seventies. In this article, the authors provide insights into the under‐researched field of elderly women's brand attachment. Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory, a shift toward emotional aspects in brand relationships is proposed. A model involving trust and commitment processes is developed and empirically tested in a survey among 341 older women. Moderator analyses reveal significant differences between the “younger elderly” and the “older elderly” in relationships among self‐concept connection, partner quality, trust, and commitment. For the younger elderly, how a brand is (based on trust judgments) seems to be more important. For the older elderly, what a brand does in its role as relationship partner becomes more relevant.     

Consumers' choice among peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms: The other side of the coin

Many peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms are transforming their business model from sharing for free to renting with or without in‐person interactions. How will these changes affect consumers’ participation in peer‐to‐peer sharing of personal items? The work studies consumers’ choice among three business models that vary on two dimensions: “free versus renting” and “with or without in‐person interactions.” The novelty is to consider that consumers’ choice can be driven by their perceptions of relationships among peers, which are shaped by the business models of sharing platforms. Perceptions of communal sharing (CS) relationships among peers are found to differ across business models and to predict consumers’ choice among the platforms above and beyond the economic and social benefits that consumers seek. Interestingly, perceptions of CS are not only found to explain the choice of a sharing for the free business model over the two others, but also the choice of renting with in‐person interactions over renting without in‐person interactions. For managers of peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms, this means that renting does not make sharing completely similar to traditional market exchanges as long as in‐person interactions are involved. For scholars, this calls for more work on the factors that bring about perceptions of CS.     

Trusting and Monitoring Business Partners throughout the Relationship Life Cycle

Purpose: The goal of this research is to understand the theoretical and empirical confluence of multi-dimensional trust with the role of monitoring as business partnerships unfold and evolve dynamically throughout the course of the relationship life cycle.

Methodology: A pilot study is run in which in-depth interviews are conducted with managers to glean their insights regarding the theoretical questions and to verify terminology for survey items. A large-scale survey study is then conducted to test hypotheses about the relationships among the focal constructs. The participants in both studies are real procurement professionals reporting on their primary supplier relationships. The qualitative study and the samples of real world managers enhance the external validity of this research.

Findings: In early stages of business relationships, monitoring and benevolence trust interact to positively impact business performance. Continued monitoring in later stages interact with benevolence trust to performance detriment. Conversely, monitoring and competence aspects of trust hurt business performance in earlier life stages.

Research Implications: Theoretical frameworks that include the constructs of multidimensional trust, monitoring, and relationship life cycle stages can build on the nuanced 3-dimensional contingencies established in this research. In particular, this research furthers the concepts of monitoring and the relationship life cycle.

Practical Implications: There is a time and a place to trust one's business partners, and a time and a place to verify their trustworthiness. As business partnerships are forged, monitoring and benevolence trust can be particularly fruitful.

Contribution: In this research, the authors build on the business marketing literature that has begun to delineate the benevolence and competence dimensions of trust in business relationships; they demonstrate the role that partner monitoring has in maintaining business commitments; and establish how these effects are modified over the stages of the relationship life cycle; i.e., from exploration, to build-up, maturity, and decline.     

Interorganizational Trust and Technology Complexity: Evidence for New Technology‐Based Firms

Integrating the transaction cost economics and relational perspectives, this paper puts forward that technology complexity within new technology‐based firms negatively influences the level of interorganizational trust in key partner relationships. Using a data set of 105 key partner relationships of 59 new technology‐based firms, we find that the new technology‐based firm's level of trust in its key partners is lower when the level of technology complexity is high. Findings further show that both relationship and partner characteristics moderate the technology complexity—trust relationship. These results show that technology complexity as an appropriability mechanism becomes endogenous to collaboration, thereby extending the Teece framework.     

Relational Domain Switching: Interpersonal Insecurity Predicts the Strength and Number of Marketplace Relationships

In this paper, the authors test a compensation model of interpersonal and marketplace relationships. Guided by an attachment theory perspective, the authors argue that reflecting on or experiencing insecure interpersonal relationships can induce consumers to seek surrogate relationship partners in the marketplace. This general prediction is supported by results from an experiment and two surveys. Specifically, results show that interpersonally anxious consumers report more and stronger brand relationships. Furthermore, interpersonally avoidant consumers report more and stronger brand relationships, as well as more numerous but weaker service relationships. These studies support the prediction that people employ marketplace solutions to offset deficiencies in their personal relationships. The paper concludes by contextualizing the results within research on loneliness and materialism.     

Pet‐related consumption as a consumer identity constructor

The objective of this paper was to analyse how pet‐related consumption can be connected to consumer identity construction. This objective is based on the idea that consumers use symbolic meanings from possessions to construct and communicate their identities. Objects of attachment have especially been found to be closely connected to the formation of consumer identity. Furthermore, it is often assumed that consumers struggle to maintain a true sense of self or personal identity while retaining a feeling of belonging and social identity. This may be portrayed through layers of identity, which are composed of personal identity, social identity and other people. Empirical research was conducted using focus groups to create individual collages. The findings indicated that pet‐related consumption was used in the following six ways to construct consumer identity: ‘character developer’, ‘source of well‐being’, ‘means to connect’, ‘status communicator’, ‘object of devotion’ and ‘intermediary’, all of which found their places in the layers of identity. Each of these ways of using pet‐related consumption was paired with one other so that the extremes formulated three dimensions in a consumers' identity construction: the personal dimension, the social dimension and the dimension of emotional attachment. In conclusion, it was proposed that consumer identity construction illustrated via pet‐related consumption as created within both social interactions with meaningful others and those three dimensions is multi‐levelled and multifaceted. The paper invites future research to study both identity construction and emotional attachment, being such multifarious phenomena, and to explore the dynamic interactions that may exist.     

Brand‐Situation Congruity: The Roles of Self‐Construal and Brand Commitment

The present research examines the moderating roles of self‐construal and brand commitment in brand‐situation congruity effects in persuasion. Self‐construal refers to how individuals perceive themselves in the context of relationships with others (Singelis, 1994). Individuals with independent self‐construal, who emphasize autonomy and assertiveness, value consistency regardless of social contexts, whereas people with interdependent self‐construal value their relationships with others and adapt with flexibility to social situations. Commitment is a psychological state that globally represents the experience of dependence on a relationship and denotes a long‐term orientation, including a feeling of attachment to a relational partner and a desire to maintain a relationship (Rusbult, 1983). In the same vein, brand commitment refers to emotional or psychological attachment to and dependence on a brand (Beatty & Kahle, 1988x). Experiment 1 demonstrated that brand‐situation congruity, for which brand preference increases when the brand personality is congruent (vs. incongruent) with social situational cues, was stronger for interdependent (vs. independent) self‐construal individuals. Experiment 2 provided further support for the moderating role of self‐construal, when primed, in situation congruity effects as well as evidence for another moderator, brand commitment. That is, the moderating effect of self‐construal on brand‐situation congruity was stronger when consumers held weak (vs. strong) commitment to the target brand.     

An Empirical Study of Buyer–Supplier Relationships within Small Business Organizations

A paradox exists in small business organizations; although effective buyer–supplier relationships are essential to the success of small businesses, these organizations may not have the purchasing and selling power in terms of managerial resources to implement them. This provides us an opportunity for research to determine how well developed are buyer–supplier relationships within small business organizations. Grounded in transaction cost and resource dependence theory, this paper presents and empirically tests a model that examines the relationships between buyer and supplier specificity and long‐term buyer–supplier relationships and the latter's impact on organizational performance from the buyers' perspective. The results of this study provide insight into the development and impact of buyer–supplier relationships within small business organizations. Several managerial implications can be determined.     

Internationalization of Chinese Firms: What Role Does Guanxi Play for Overcoming Their Liability of Outsidership in Developed Markets?

This article explains how managers of Chinese firms can use guanxi when entering and expanding in developed markets. The empirical basis for the investigation is formed by interviews with 29 managers at 17 Chinese business‐to‐business firms internationalizing to Europe. The results generated are twofold. On the one hand, existing guanxi was largely irrelevant for initially entering the European market. On the other hand, Chinese firms managed to successfully overcome the liability of outsidership by building new guanxi‐like relationships with their Western business network partners after a certain period of time. Six propositions give insights on the process for Chinese firms to become insiders in the business networks of developed countries. The propositions were combined into two comprehensive models that give implications for future research and for management practice. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The effects of between‐partner congruity on consumer evaluation of co‐branded products

Branding studies, especially those focusing on brand extension, have often centered on establishing the relationship between consumer evaluation and the match between a product concept and the brand (concept congruity). This study introduces an additional type of congruity that arises in the evaluation of co‐branded products, the congruity between brand partners (between‐partner congruity). Between‐partner congruity has not previously been explicitly considered in the co‐branding literature, but is potentially an important influence on consumer perceptions of a brand partnership. Thus, this study represents an initial attempt to understand how the level of between‐partner congruity will affect consumer response to cobranded products. Several findings in the marketing literature have suggested that when respondents have the motivation to resolve incongruity, the relationship between congruity level and evaluation is nonmonotonic. In other words, moderately incongruent concepts are preferred to congruent or highly incongruent concepts to form an “inverted‐U” data function. Yet, when motivation to process is low, evaluation becomes less favorable in a linear fashion as incongruity increases. This study examines whether these findings can be extended to co‐branding. When concept congruity is controlled across brand pairs, the nonmonotonic relationship between between‐partner congruity level and product evaluation is observed when consumers are encouraged to elaborate on the rationale for the partnership (high involvement). However, when consumers attend to the global similarity of the partners (low involvement), product evaluation becomes less favorable as between‐partner incongruity increases. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Brand alliance and customer‐based brand‐equity effects

This research examines brand alliances, a specific marketing strategy designed to transfer the positive brand equity of two or more partner brands to the newly created joint brand. The study explores how customer‐based brand equity (that is, brand equity as seen from the customer's perspective) of partner brands affects consumer evaluations of an alliance brand; how the brand equity of one partner brand affects the other; how customer‐based brand equity of the partner brands affects consumers' evaluations of the search, experience, and credence attribute performance of the alliance brand; and how product trial influences such evaluations. Results suggest that merely the act of pairing with another brand elevates consumers' evaluations of the partner brands' customer‐based brand equity, and high‐equity partners enhance pretrial evaluation of experience and credence attributes that are relevant to the high‐equity partner. As hypothesized, product trial moderates the equity value of the alliance partner for experience attributes, and brand equity of the partner brands influences consumer perceptions of the alliance brand's equity. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The role of disclosure in organized word‐of‐mouth marketing programs

Prevailing views of organized word‐of‐mouth (WOM) marketing programs suggest that disclosing corporate affiliation reduces perceived credibility and hampers campaign effectiveness. To test this view we surveyed WOM marketing agents and their conversational partners (CP) after a WOM marketing episode. Results indicate that when disclosure occurred – defined as when the CP was aware they were talking with a person participating in an organized WOM marketing program – agents were rated as more credible, CPs had fewer negative feelings about the agent's corporate affiliation, and CPs told more people about the brand being discussed. These counter‐intuitive results can be explained in part by the existing personal relationship between the agent and CP and invite us to consider how personal relationships may moderate the impact and potential business advantages of disclosure in organized WOM marketing programs.     

A Contingency Perspective on Psychic Distance in International Channel Relationships

Internationalization theory states that firms, which attempt to forge exchange relationships with foreign counterparts, will be most successful with those who appear to be similar to their own culture and business practices. Other research has pointed toward a psychic distance paradox, whereby successful trading relationships thrive when the parties are “far apart” along these lines (i.e., great psychic distance). These inconsistent findings suggest a contingency approach may better determine when differences between international channel partners are a hindrance to success and when they are an asset. A conceptual model is proposed as to how psychic distance affects an international channel relationship at different stages of its development. In general, it is felt that significant psychic distance will be detrimental to the relationship in its early stages, where it may serve as an asset in later stages of the relationship.     

Distribution Channel Relational Cohesion Exchange Model: A Small‐to‐Medium Enterprise Manufacturer's Perspective

This study investigated the influence of dealers' expert, referent, and legitimate sources of power on small‐to‐medium enterprise manufacturers' relationship commitment in distribution channel systems. A theoretical model drawing on the relational cohesion theory and the extant marketing literature is developed and tested empirically using a sample data set of 452 from Zimbabwe. In this model, expert, referent, and legitimate powers are the predictors, whereas trust, cooperation, and relationship satisfaction are the mediators, and relationship commitment is the outcome variable. Analysis reveals that these three powers positively influence the mediators and outcome variable in a significant way, except for legitimate power to cooperation relationship. Managerial implications and future studies are suggested.     

Small Business Owners' Success Criteria,a Values Approach to Personal Differences

This study of 150 Dutch small business owners, identified through business/network directories, investigated relationships between owners' understanding of success and their personal values. Business owners ranked 10 success criteria. Personal satisfaction, profitability, and satisfied stakeholders ranked highest. Multidimensional scaling techniques revealed two dimensions underlying the rank order of success criteria: person‐oriented (personal satisfaction versus business growth) and business‐oriented (profitability versus contributing back to society). Furthermore, business growth, profitability, and innovativeness were guided by self‐enhancing value orientations (power and achievement). Softer success criteria, such as having satisfied stakeholders and a good work–life balance, were guided by self‐transcendent value orientations (benevolence and universalism).     

Commitment and Trust in Cross-National Channel Relationships

Abstract

Cross-national channel relationships are becoming increasingly important, so it is time for research in the channels literature to continue beyond a focus of channel relationships within a single country or channel design for market entry. The author presents a model of commitment in cross-national manufacturer-distributor relationshipsthat extends the commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing by incorporating four constructs conceptualized to represent the influence of a firm's current and prospective partners on the focal relationship: resource transferability-to partner; resource transferabil-ity-from partner; resource particularity-adaptation and resource particularity-consumption. Data collected from 143 U.S. manufacturers, 106 Mexican manufacturers, and 97 Mexican distributors show that the model generalizes across this national boundary. In particular, a similar influence of mutuality on trust and trust on commitment was observed for both manufacturers and distributors. The influence of resource transferability, particularity on the relationship, was also observed. The findings provide strong support for extending the commitment-trust theory to aid the study and management of cross-national channel relationships.     

Consumer–Brand Relationships: A Contrast of Nostalgic and Non‐Nostalgic Brands

This research examined how consumer–brand relationships change when one contrasts brands perceived as nostalgic with brands perceived as non‐nostalgic. Paired comparisons of brands in six product categories revealed that brand attachment, self‐brand connections, and storytelling, as well as, the propensity to offer the brand as a gift and collect brand‐derived products, depend on the nostalgic status of the brand. On a sample of 606 consumers, the results showed that a brand's nostalgic status has a positive effect on attachment, self‐brand connections, and storytelling. These effects had not previously been considered in nostalgia research. Furthermore, the nostalgic status of a brand has positive effects in terms of intention to purchase the brand as a gift and collect brand‐derived products. Moreover, ANOVA results illustrate that consumer relationships with nostalgic brands are systematically stronger than with non‐nostalgic brands. Finally, results indicated that product category moderates all of the dimensions of brand relationships while gender does not.     

Informal interorganizational business relationships and customer loyalty: Comparing Guanxi,Yongo, and Wasta

Based on social exchange theory, this research explores if informal interorganizational business relationships in China (guanxi), South Korea (yongo), and Egypt/Jordan (wasta) affect customer loyalty in a business to business context. A conceptual model hypothesizes interrelationships among three underlying dimensions of informal relationships, reciprocity, affect, and trustworthiness, and with customer loyalty. The hypotheses were tested using survey data gathered from manufacturing companies in China, South Korea, Jordan, and Egypt. Structural equation modeling shows that guanxi, yongo, and wasta are positively related to customer loyalty across all four countries. However, there are some differences in the relationships among the three dimensions. Although reciprocity is positively related to affect in guanxi and yongo, this relationship is not statistically significant in wasta. Further, the items measuring the dimensions of trustworthiness and reciprocity are the same in guanxi and yongo, but these differ from wasta. Thus, managers need to be aware of subtle differences in how informal interorganizational relationships are developed and used in international business to business relationships.     

Consumer Attachments to Human Brands: The “Oprah Effect”

Human brands offer an interesting complement to product brands in that consumer attachments to human brands take on personal relationship qualities that can engender greater affiliation and loyalty. At present, one of the most powerful human brands in the developed world is that of Oprah Winfrey. This research uses the Oprah brand as a context in which to explore and expand the existing model of human brand attachment because of the enduring strength and consistency of how she has cultivated her brand. The existing model of human brand attachment identifies autonomy, relatedness, and competence as the antecedents of attachment strength. However, the expanded model in the current research introduces and validates brand personality appeal (and its sub‐dimensions of favorability, originality, and clarity) as an important moderating factor in the relationship between these antecedents of attachment and attachment outcomes. Two studies utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data investigate the impact of these factors on attachment strength as manifested in emotional attachment behaviors, markers of relationship quality, and marketplace responses in the form of brand loyalty and purchase intentions.     

Influence of franchisee selection criteria on outcomes desired by the franchisor

Agency theory suggests that an efficient contract between a franchisor (principal) and a franchisee (agent) could be established by the use of selection criteria that would screen prospective franchisees based on their likely future outcomes desired by their franchisors. Franchisors can use franchisee selection criteria as a key input control to enhance the outcomes of their future franchisees. This article examines the relationship between key franchisee selection criteria such as franchisees’ financial capability, experience and management skills, demographic characteristics, attitude toward business dimensions (perceived innovativeness, desire for personal development, seek work-related challenges, personal commitment to the business, and business risk-taking), and key measures of outcomes desired by franchisors (perceived cooperation, satisfaction with the business decision, and franchisee opportunism). The findings show that certain franchisee attitudes toward business can be used as an effective input control strategy by franchisors because they explain a substantial portion of the variance in franchisees’ outcome desired by franchisors.