Restoring balance: how consumers orchestrate family care following unplanned disruptions

ABSTRACT

How do consumers orchestrate multiple and complex practices of care when faced with unplanned disruptions to their lives, such as chronic health conditions? We conduct a qualitative study of families where a child was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. Inspired by a dance metaphor, we explain how families (1) gather materials for movement, (2) link movements into phrases, and (3) develop an orchestrated style of care as they sense and respond to the dynamic requirements of caregiving when faced with insufficient or unfeasible market solutions. Adding this new perspective to the managerial view used by prior consumer research on family care, we propose an extended perspective on care, which better accounts for how families search to restore life balance in challenging circumstances. This extended perspective illuminates new aspects of consumer engagement with paid and non-paid service providers, and opens avenues for future research in the domain of family care.     

Bridging family boundaries: mediating postmodern complexity in urban Sinhalese Sri Lankan families

ABSTRACT

There is a bricolage of competing local and global ideologies, value systems, and practices vying for the attention of urban South Asian consumers. We term this as “postmodern complexity”. Drawing from a three-year ethnographic research expedition on Sinhalese Sri Lankan families, we illustrate the process by which these families mediate postmodern complexity during new family formation. Our findings support an emergent framework to understand the processes in which families negotiate the influence of competing discourses and illustrate that the process is a perpetual experimentation spanning across three overlapping stages. We argue that negotiating postmodern complexity in our families is a hybrid and creolised resolution that is tailored to each family’s unique identity needs. Families can draw from a multitude of meanings that are anchored in consumption in order to create a unique family identity that is most appropriate to their identity pursuits.     

The Role of Price in Consumer Quality Judgments for Professional Services

Abstract

Classifying services according to their level of search, experience and credence properties can help professional service providers better understand their customers. This research uses an experiment to study the influence of price information on consumer judgments of service quality and patronage intentions for professional services. The conceptual framework predicts that consumers believe in a price-quality relationship for search-based services but not necessarily for professional services that are high in credence properties. The study findings provide support for this proposition and suggest that professional service providers should carefully consider how consumers view their services when using price as a promotion tool.     

Factors Used by Parents in Selecting Child Care Providers

Abstract

Regardless of the type of small business, marketing research shows that understanding how consumers/clients select a particular product or service is useful when formulating a promotional program. Traditionally, marketing research results have seldom been applied to the world of child care, but child care providers have a valuable “product” to market. Child care research indicates that the most important three factors lor which parents are seeking relate to warmth, health and safety, and daily programming. In order to meet parents” (the consumers') needs, child care centers/homes should be characterized by, and advertise, these components.     

Feedback as a two-way street: when and why rating consumers fails

In efforts to keep ill-behaving consumers in check, managers are increasingly implementing the practice of rating consumers. We develop and test an account of when and why the practice of rating consumers backfires. Study 1 shows that consumers are more likely to misbehave toward service providers after receiving a low rating (versus those who receive a high rating or those who are merely aware that they are being rated). These findings are robust to consumer inexperience. The negative impact of low ratings on subsequent behavior is especially likely to emerge when directed toward consumers (versus service providers; Study 2). Study 3 situates our findings in a real-world context through a survey of Uber customers. Taken together, we offer insight into how firms can realize the benefits of the practice of rating consumers while mitigating its risks.

     

Neither passive nor powerless: reframing economic vulnerability via resilient pathways

ABSTRACT

Resilience, as an emerging construct within the contemporary field of consumer vulnerability, has received limited empirical attention within the context of economic adversity. This paper examines how low-income women strive to reframe their relationship to the market via resilient pathways. It establishes how through active agency, self-care practices and relational coping, women maximise care of self and care of others with limited economic means. Comprised of multidimensional coping resources for positive adaptation, resilient pathways offer vulnerable consumers distinct trajectories to well-being and overturn deficit-focused views about how those facing chronic economic disadvantage, (re)assert themselves in vulnerable consumption contexts.     

Other mothers: framing the cybernetic construction(s) of the postmodern family

This study conducts a critical cultural analysis of the assisted reproductive technologies (ART) market and selected consumption that takes place within that context. Specifically, it assumes the view of markets as cultures and conceptualizes the consumption strategies of “other mothers,” the unintended consumers of such body technologies, within the larger cultural context of what it means to be a family. The view of “markets as cultures” is employed to frame the ART marketplace and to address the multiple, local realities that emerge in the consumption process. The hyperreality of the ART marketplace emerges as a fluid and dynamic force that fosters the reversal of production and consumption through the creation of new forms of consumption. In this local context, marginalized ART consumers reappropriate body technologies to construct postmodern families of their own design. A conceptual framework of this cybernetic market culture is presented and discussed with implications for future research regarding bioethics, methodological approaches, family consumption, and new frontiers in postmodern consumption.     

Do ethics drive value co-creation on digital sharing economy platforms?

PurposeSharing economy is surging and so are the consumers’ ethical concerns regarding such platforms. The current study examines the antecedents of consumers’ intention to co-create value that include consumers’ ethical perceptions constructs (i.e. privacy, security, fulfillment/reliability, shared value, service recover, and non-deception) and relationship quality constructs (trust, satisfaction, commitment), focusing on the digital sharing economy platforms.MethodologySurvey method was applied to gather data from n=348 consumers at digital sharing economy platforms. Structural equation modelling technique through Amos version 24. was employed in order to further analyze the data.FindingsResults reveal that consumers’ ethical perceptions as a second order construct comprising of privacy, security, fulfillment/reliability, service recovery, and shared value does not influence consumers’ intention to co-create value. However, relationship quality as a second order construct including commitment trust and satisfaction influences consumers’ intention to co-create value. Furthermore, relationship quality serves as strong full mediator between consumers’ ethical perceptions and their intention to co-create value.OriginalityThe studies on drawing relationships between value co-creation and relationship quality constructs have been popular yet to the authors’ surprise; seldom any studies have been conducted in examining the role of ethical perceptions in the settings of digital sharing economy platforms. Therefore, the current study closes this gap.     

Faith,hope and love: doing family through consuming pilgrimage

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the consumption of Lourdes, a Catholic pilgrimage site in France. Based on a three-year ethnography, our findings focus on respondents’ ‘Lourdes stories’. Discussing themes of faith, hope and love, we illustrate the importance of the family in consuming Lourdes. Family members act as influencing agents in the initial and sometimes continuous consumption of Lourdes. Our findings differ from consumer research to date in that rather than furthering discussion of family structure or furthering discussion on family identity we suggest a new focus is the actual building of intimate family bonds and relationships – the ‘doing’ of family or ‘familying’ – with the context of the Lourdes pilgrimage offering consumers a unique setting comprising faith, fun and family.     

A Normative Model for Improving Services Quality

Abstract

As services businesses continue to proliferate, competition among professional and retail service providers rapidly intensifies. Amidst the competitive wars, service marketers are seeking new, innovative ways to improve services quality in order to maintain their competitive position. Many of the existing approaches are geared toward larger operations. This article proposes a normative model of services quality for service organizations of varying types and sizes with an emphasis on the small service provider. The utilization of this model can assist service providers in improving the quality of their service and overall customer satisfaction.     

Relational Perspectives of Perceived Service Quality in the Online and Offline Environments: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Today, service quality is a major driver enhancing and consolidating the relationship between consumers and their service providers. The diversity of research in this context revealed a gap between empirical results which investigated the relational consequences of service quality, and showed missing studies that allowed generalizing and specifying the perspectives of the service quality in the relational domain. So, this research suggests a Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling (MASEM) to validate a synthetic model integrating perceived quality, satisfaction and loyalty. It is based on 43 recent academic research derived from 22 countries. The results validated the meta-analytic structural model and showed that the service environment moderates causal links between perceived quality, satisfaction and loyalty.     

Systemic small-player market exclusion in an east African context

ABSTRACT

Producer–consumers in Kenya and Uganda face challenges in meeting their subsistence goals. They face a paradoxical inclusion and exclusion from the contemporary market system that the solutions proposed in the agriculture development, subsistence markets and BOP perspectives cannot address because of faults in the pervasive marketing ecosystem perspective. In this article, we go beyond the traditional discussion of producer–consumers’ market access, to include upstream as well as downstream challenges. We introduce the concept of integration gaps to markets as a counterpoint to typical measures of market access. We show the integration gap is a systematic neocolonialist exclusion of producer–consumers that international aid agencies exhorting greater market engagement may worsen. We offer suggestions for improvement from a marketing ecosystem perspective.     

Online service quality: Content and process of analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to build a comprehensive model of online service quality that confirms both the content of, and process of measuring, this higher-order construct. While the past decade has seen the Internet become a key channel for service delivery, there remains uncertainty around many aspects of both the content of, and process of how to measure, online service quality. We use a large sample of European consumers (n = 3399) of four companies (two pure play and two multichannel) to develop a new nine-dimension model of online service quality. We validate importance as a disconfirmation standard. We find trust in the company to be the most important dimension of online service quality, with customer service also highly rated. Issues of personalisation/customisation were very low rated. We find the online pure-play companies in the sample delivering better performance than multichannel retailers, despite having customers who are actually more demanding. We discuss the practical and research implications of these findings.     

Spatial divisions of expertise: Knowledge intensive business service firms and regional development in Norway

This article explores the regional geography of professional, information and intellectual services in Norway. Norway is used as one way of critiquing the global cities literature by exploring the multiple ways in which knowledge intensive services are created and consumed outside global cities. Norway's regional geography of knowledge services is one of concentration and dispersal; both processes are explained by the ways in which clients access external expertise. An evolving spatial division of expertise is identified based on the ways in which service suppliers and consumers access and combine expertise that is available in different locations. Part of this evolving spatial division of expertise is illustrated in the ways in which large European providers of consultancy expertise have displaced American providers from Norway's top ten ranking of consultancy providers. The paper identifies a series of fundamental changes that are taking place in the consultancy industry that affect the ways in which consultancy is provided to the Norwegian market.     

Taking care of you and me: How choosing for others impacts self-indulgence within family caregiving relationships

Consumers frequently make choices for family members they take care of or from whom they receive care (e.g., their children or partner), yet marketing research has given little attention to how these other-oriented choices might impact the chooser’s self-indulgence. In this research we consider familial caregiving relationships as a relevant and ubiquitous context of other-oriented choices and identify the role of the chooser (i.e., caregiver versus care-receiver) as an important moderator that determines when virtuous other-oriented choices within caregiving relationships lead to licensing and when they encourage consistent virtuous consumption behaviors.Three studies demonstrate that making virtuous food choices for others affect the chooser’s subsequent self-regulatory behavior in two ways: After making a virtuous choice for a care-receiving other (e.g., a young child), caregivers (e.g., parents) are more likely to license, and thus to subsequently self-indulge (Study 1, 3). In contrast, care-receivers are more likely to act consistently with an initial virtuous choice for the caregiver and thus are less likely to self-indulge (Study 2, 3).Our findings extend research on moral licensing and consistency effects by demonstrating that—within familial caregiving relationships—the degree to which one receives and provides care may determine when choosers engage in licensing and when they act consistently with an initial virtuous other-oriented choice.     

The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: toward a family embeddedness perspective

Families and businesses have often been treated as naturally separate institutions, whereas we argue that they are inextricably intertwined. Long-term changes in family composition and in the roles and relations of family members have produced families in North America that are growing smaller and losing many of their previous role relationships. Such transformations in the institution of the family have implications for the emergence of new business opportunities, opportunity recognition, business start-up decisions, and the resource mobilization process. We suggest that entrepreneurship scholars would benefit from a family embeddedness perspective on new venture creation.     

共享服务系统体验价值共创行为的影响因素

由于共享经济的发展和信息技术的进步,共享服务系统中的共创行为变得越来越容易实现,消费者与企业协作共创价值成为新的发展趋势。在消费者需求和共享行为都不断变化的情况下,如果共享服务供应商不清楚何种因素能够加速消费者价值共创行为的生成,则会影响共创价值实现。基于服务主导逻辑的理论,构建共享服务系统体验价值共创行为及其影响因素的理论模型。依据收集的450份有效问卷,对数据进行分析后发现,共享服务系统中感知利益、感知信任和社会可持续性通过互动协作(价值共创过程)对顾客体验价值产生影响,顾客体验价值对顾客的价值共创行为意向产生影响。研究结果表明,顾客参与共创动机中的效益动机和信任动机显著正向影响互动协作,互动协作显著正向影响体验价值和共创行为意向,而体验价值在互动协作和共创行为意向之间起到显著部分中介作用。共享服务提供方和产品制造方应多从顾客视角考虑其效益需求和信任需求,定位顾客需求和偏好,提供更有吸引力和说服力的商品与服务,使顾客感知到更多的收益,并形成较高信任度;提升与顾客的互动水平,建立顾客对服务方的好感,激发顾客更多的主动交互行为、参与行为和个人创新行为;重视资源的整合、分配和调动,实行以顾客驱动为核心的开放创新模式;招募优质用户,通过倾听和观察了解其价值主张,促进价值共创行为的生成,改善共享服务系统的整体服务质量。     

Understanding the Consumer Experience: It's 'Good To Talk'

The consumers of the 21^st Century can purchase goods and services by many off-site methods as well as by the 'traditional' mode of shopping in person. It is time to look again at the key feature that makes the traditional method popular for many consumers: the opportunity to mix with other people during the retail/service experience. This article reviews the extant literature on on-site consumer interactions, especially conversations consumers have with fellow consumers and employees. Out of the review, three inter-related strategic perspectives are proposed which store-based retail/service providers must take to compete for customer loyalty in the new millennium. They are: (1) view on-site consumers as a valuable (willing and able) human resource, (2) plan to facilitate consumer-to-consumer interactions and (3) accept some social responsibility for the quality of these interactions. There are still some significant gaps in our understanding of the social and communal elements of service experiences. A focus for future research is provided.     

Analyzing channel choice: Direct and indirect e-Tourism distribution

ABSTRACT

An increasing number of tourism service providers are involved in multichannel operations, combining online direct and indirect channels. Service providers and intermediaries need to know what drivers lead consumers to purchase on both channels in order to discover their own potential for differentiation and develop appropriate strategies. This research presents and tests a distribution channel choice model applied to data obtained by a survey aimed at online tourism purchasers. Not surprisingly, the results find that the Internet mitigates the differences between direct and indirect online channels from the demand perspective. Only one variable, information provided, has a positive effect on the choice of the direct channel, while two variables, assortment and basket size, have a positive effect on the choice of the indirect channel.