Facilitating transformative change in medication adherence practices

ABSTRACT

This article explores how healthcare consumer collectives integrate self-service technology as part of their everyday lives on a long-term basis. Combining previously published research with data collected from field observations, in-depth interviews and focus groups, the author uncovers distinct adoption styles and then links these to well-being in a chronic healthcare context. Importantly, findings from the research suggest that successful long-term adoption of new technology depends not only on improving a targeted practice (medicating patients in this case), but also other affected everyday practices in the lives of consumers. By drawing on insights from the literature of service-dominant logic and practice theory, the author identifies ‘value-in-context’ and ‘lifestyle fit’ that underlie resource integration in medication adherence. Four adoption styles were uncovered, in which two in particular, ‘door opener’ and ‘transformative change,’ should be emphasized by healthcare managers and developers as they tend to be associated with higher well-being.     

Consumer transformation through volunteer service experiences

A growing number of consumers are seeking to make a difference through experiences involving interaction and collaboration with organizations that offer charitable service opportunities. These experiences are noteworthy in not only their catalyzing influence on the organization and the beneficiary customer, but also the personal transformation in the volunteer. The authors introduce a phenomenon called transformative charity experiences (TCEs), a triadic framework highlighting an avenue of personal consumer well-being through the transformative effect of service interactions with key stakeholders. Building upon conceptual models proposed in Transformative Services Research and insights from their own embedded charity experiences, the authors introduce how service co-creation from three entities (charity, volunteer, and community) can lead to a transformative effect for the volunteer. An exploratory field study in an international setting provides insights into how the proposed framework accounts for TCEs. Implications and future directions for charitable services research are presented.     

Transformative service research and service dominant logic: Quo Vaditis?

This paper takes a closer look at the emerging topic of transformative service research (TSR) and compares its facets with the more established concept of the service-dominant logic (SDL). The paper thus contributes to both theory development and practical application. This work highlights the conceptual parallels in the two approaches, for example, their holistic approach, their systems thinking, addressing entities or actors within such system(s), inclusion of the wider environment, and their focus on the co-creative and interactive nature of well-being generation and value co-creation. The paper also reveals some differences, for example TSR’s focus on eudaimonic and hedonic well-being outcomes vs. SDL’s value co-creation. The paper concludes that both perspectives have merits, but could benefit from being used integratively. By comparing the areas of theory focus, practical application, value co-creation and co-destruction, intentionality, well-being and value concepts, and TSR and SDL’s “logic”, the paper provides suggestions for future research.     

The influence of hospitable design and service on patient responses

ABSTRACT

A study of 216 respondents examined a medical center environment’s influence on patient responses. A stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model was adapted to the theory that more hospitable healthcare servicescape elements will affect patients’ overall satisfaction with healthcare experience, loyalty intentions, and willingness to pay out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare services. Servicescape elements included atmospherics of the healthcare environment, service delivery by healthcare staff, physical design of the healthcare environment, and wayfinding. Results of structural equation modeling confirmed that the four servicescape elements – had a significant impact on patients’ overall satisfaction with the healthcare experience. Furthermore, overall satisfaction with the healthcare experience predicted patients’ loyalty intentions and willingness to pay out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare services. The study makes a significant contribution to the empirical modeling of patients’ behavioral responses to hospitable healthcare environments.     

Employee involvement in ideation and healthcare service innovation quality

ABSTRACT

This study hypothesizes and empirically tests the influence of involvement of (1) frontline employees and (2) top managers in ideation process on healthcare service innovation quality. Based on data from 168 service innovation projects in Dutch healthcare organizations, the empirical results indicate that frontline employee involvement and top management involvement in, respectively, idea generation and idea application both improve the quality of healthcare service innovation. We find that the positive effect of frontline employee involvement is stronger under the condition of higher service innovativeness. In the direct relationship of top management involvement and healthcare service innovation quality, our data do not show such a moderating effect. The key and general managerial implication of the findings is that healthcare organizations are inspired to involve frontline employees in the idea generation processes and involve top managers in the idea application processes of service innovation projects, in order to improve innovation quality.     

Consumers' captive service experiences: it's YOU and ME

Consumers in captive services often do not have the same experiences as consumers in typical service situations; this reality is largely ignored in existing service literature. To fill this void, this research makes a qualitative exploration of consumers' lived captive service experiences. It finds that consumers face several negative service processes. At the heart of these negative service experiences are the interactions of consumers with the service workers on whom they depend. Power has shifted to providers and this permits service organizations to deviate from accepted prudent service practices. Consumers experience service captivity and feel they have little or no recourse to the poor service treatment they receive. This does not, however, stop them from attempting to take back control of their consumption experience when and where possible. Consumers show marked resilience in the face of dehumanizing service interactions. Understanding developed in this research can be used to guide transformative service redesign in contexts of captive service and consumer service captivity.     

The role of personality characteristics and service failure severity in consumer forgiveness and service outcomes

Abstract

This study investigates how consumer personality characteristics of religiosity, spirituality, and emotional intelligence and the severity of service failure affect emotional and decisional forgiveness as a response to service failure. Further, the study explores the relationships between these two forms of forgiveness and service outcomes, including the intention to switch the service provider and spread negative word of mouth. Findings reveal that consumer religiosity has a strong and positive effect on both types of forgiveness. However, contrary to expectations, consumer spirituality has a negative relationship with decisional and no relationship with emotional forgiveness. While consumers' perceived severity of service failure is negatively related to both types of forgiveness, the findings also suggest that emotional intelligence exerts a significant moderating influence on the relationship between service failure severity and emotional forgiveness, whereas its moderating effect on decisional forgiveness does not appear to be significant. Results demonstrate the asymmetric effects of perceived severity of service failure and the two types of forgiveness on negative service outcomes. These findings contribute to the understanding on the role of consumers' implicit personality characteristics in interpretation of service failure incidents.     

A theatrical perspective on service performance evaluation: The customer-critic approach

Abstract

In this article, the customer-critic approach is presented as a complementary approach to existing service performance evaluation. It is based on methods, derived originally by Patrice Pavis, that have a distinguished pedigree in the evaluation of theatrical performances. An adaptation of Pavis's evaluation framework is illustrated in the context of a restaurant service performance. A focus on the work of Pavis directs attention to the mise-en-scène or metatext of a performance as a vehicle for consumer analysis, and explicitly acknowledges the value of nurturing and enhancing the critical capacity of an audience. Although an audience should be made aware of the main components of a performance, most importantly they should be encouraged to take a holistic, rather than fragmented, view of what is being presented. In addition, unlike other research approaches, the customer-critic process involves customers before, during, and after the performance, and builds in the opportunity for both reporting and reconstruction. It is an approach to data collection and analysis more closely aligned to the Service-Dominant Logic of marketing than methods currently adopted by service managers, recognising consumers as operant resources and the ‘value in use’ of the performance from a consumer experience perspective.     

Vulnerable consumer engagement: How corporate social media can facilitate the replenishment of depleted resources

Technology may facilitate health and wellbeing consumer engagement. When there is scant public health provision and socio-cultural norms marginalize consumers stigmatized from cancer, we reveal how a brand’s corporate social media campaign can support vulnerable consumers with resource constraints. Drawing from a transformative consumer research lens, we investigate five years of computer-mediated communications facilitated by the Indian brand Dabur Vatika. Through a grounded theory and an abductive reasoning approach, we unveil how vulnerable consumers directly or indirectly affected by cancer leverage brand's social media to replenish resources. First, we identify how vulnerable consumers engage to replenish depleted emotional and social support resources. We further expand consumer engagement scholarship by offering a preliminary definition of “vulnerable consumer engagement”. Second, we provide a nascent classification of vulnerable consumers in a consumer-producer role, Principal Vulnerable Consumers and Associate Vulnerable Consumers, distinguished by their proximity to the vulnerable context. Lastly, we reveal how brands may perform a transformative role, to replenish social, emotional and operant resources at the micro level through the engagement of vulnerable consumers with corporate social media. This insight is informative for policymakers, advertising practitioners and transformative consumer research academics.     

A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity,representations, and storytelling

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.     

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.     

Liminal mothers’ negotiation of conflicting service consumption

Pregnancy is a significant period of transition, transforming ‘women’ into ‘mothers’. The mid or liminal phase of transition is particularly ripe for consumer researchers. Transformative services research (TSR) considers that services may deliver objective well-being outcomes (e.g. consumer health). This article extends TSR into liminality and considers that services may also encompass hedonic (mood, satisfaction and happiness) and eudaimonic (mastery, autonomy, positive relations and self-acceptance) dimensions. The article unpacks women’s service experiences to enrich and expand understanding of positive and negative consumption meanings. It identifies that unanticipated outcomes emerge as a feature of transformative services. It demonstrates that services situates new mothers at the centre of a multiplicity of consumption. This may both overwhelm and act as transitional resource developing mothers as postmodern bricoleurs.     

Therapeutic servicescapes: Restorative and relational resources in service settings

This article introduces the concept of ‘therapeutic servicescapes’ to the retailing and services discipline. In the health literature, therapeutic landscapes emerge when physical and social conditions in a geographically bounded space combine to produce an atmosphere that is conducive to human well-being. Traditionally, therapeutic landscapes have been associated with natural and leisure settings, such as parks, green spaces, and beaches. This work breaks new ground in the marketing domain by linking therapeutic landscapes to commercial retail establishments. This study empirically demonstrates the extent to which physical and social conditions may combine in a customer-centric grocery store to positively enhance customers' well-being and promote feelings of attachment to the establishment. Furthermore, this study reveals that customers' future behavioral intention are driven by the store's impact on their well-being and their desire to maintain ‘place attachment.’ From a managerial perspective, this work recommends that retail and consumer service organizations facing online competition focus on creating architectural and human resource conditions that promote consumer well-being and place attachment.     

Leveraging the Existing US Healthcare Structure for Consumer Financial Well-Being: Barriers,Opportunities, and a Framework toward Future Research

Healthcare exchange often contains peril for consumers because of numerous barriers to financial well-being (FWB). Rather than ruing specific agendas of healthcare policy, we embrace a neutral and immediately actionable approach. The authors promote gains in healthcare's current composition by empowering consumers to be proactive, where possible, in reducing power inequities and improving their own FWB. As such, the authors identify primary barriers to the FWB of healthcare consumers and propose individual opportunities within the existing healthcare structure that are likely to improve fiscal outcomes. Moreover, the current research demonstrates collaborative paths wherein power-holders (i.e., practitioner, researcher, consumer, government) can collaborate toward and/or contribute to the same financial health. A proposed theoretical framework, with foundations of power-responsibility equilibrium and transformative service research, gives rise to future research directions. This research is intended to provide a foundation for healthcare and FWB thought/action, and to guide coming scholarly offerings.     

Key service drivers for high-tech service brand equity: The mediating role of overall service quality and perceived value

Abstract

This study investigates how different aspects of service quality could have effects on overall perception of service quality, perceived value, and service brand equity. Based on a survey of active users of mobile telecommunications services in Taiwan, we obtained the following findings. First, we found that empathy, network quality, reliability, and assurance, but not tangibles and responsiveness, have a significant effect on service quality and value perception. Second, the effect of overall service quality on brand equity is partially mediated by perceived value. Third, overall service quality has differential mediation effects on the relationships between specific service quality dimensions and perceived value. Finally, empathy and network quality have direct effects on brand equity. For managers, our study suggests the importance of identifying key service drivers for building strong service brand for high-tech service firms. The identification of key service drivers could then enable these firms to make strategic decisions on services investments. It also demonstrates the importance of the humanisation of technology for services firms. This study is original in that it explores the path from specific services qualities to service brand equity.     

Competing Online: Studying Consumer Choice Drivers for Online Financial Services

ABSTRACT

Given the rapid increase in the consumer use of online services and the increase in competition between firms that compete online, firms are faced with a crucial challenge. Having invested significant resources in transitioning consumers from using offline services to using online services, they now need to understand what drives consumers to choose between competing online services. Our study seeks an exploratory answer to the above challenge. Specifically, we consider, “what role do factors that drive consumers into using online services play in assisting firms better compete in the online space?” This paper explores the above question by quantifying the value that consumers of an online financial service place on having access to in-depth product information, an affordable online service, an easy to use online service, access to offline capabilities, and available marketing promotions. The results reported in this paper are based on a web-based discrete choice experiment in which 2,209 consumers were asked to compare various online financial service offerings, differing from each other in terms of the relative availability of our critical factors. The results demonstrate that consumer preferences (relative utilities) for various factors of an online financial service are different. Our results enable practicing managers to understand the factors that drive consumer choice when faced with competing online services. We believe that these results have both managerial and research implications for design, management and operations strategy formulation for online services.     

An exploration of consumers’ experiences in physical stores: comparing consumers’ and retailers’ perspectives in past and present time

Abstract

In this paper, we explore consumers’ in-store experiences and their components, from both a consumer and retailer perspective. This is a replication of a study we performed in 2006 and thus we also examine how the role of the physical store has changed over the last decade. We use the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to improve our understanding of consumers’ in-store experiences. Moreover, we conduct in-depth interviews with Swedish retailers to achieve an understanding of how retailers use aspects of the store environment to enhance the consumer experience. Interestingly, our results suggest that consumers’ in-store experiences to a large extent are created by the same aspects today as ten years ago (e.g. personnel, layout, atmosphere). Furthermore, while retailers today emphasize the importance of fulfilling new and more advanced consumer demands, they often still accentuate the weight and use of traditional values (e.g. personnel and layout) ahead of advanced technology.     

Impact of Traditional Chinese Culture on Business-to-Business Relationship Marketing and Service Firm Performance

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This work addresses the mixed findings in relationship marketing studies regarding the importance of traditional culture-level (i.e., interpersonal) relationships on service firm outcomes.

Methodology/approach: This article leverages customer relationship marketing (CRM) theory to advance a framework for understanding the causal relationship between the Chinese cultural worldview and relationship marketing in order to better predict firm performance.

Findings: The author suggests that five major Chinese cultural characteristics—iren-qing, wa-pao, mianzi, chaxu-geju, and collectivism—can qualify the business-to-business (B-to-B) relationship building process and impact the effectiveness of interpersonal and/or group relationships on service firm outcomes.

Research implications: The study’s framework suggests that Chinese cultural characteristics, universal concepts manifest in the activities of Chinese society and organizations, have a positive effect on customer relationship marketing. Chinese culture characteristics can be used to generate excellent relationships with customers and thus create a consumer preference for certain companies and drive service marketing repurchase.

Originality/value/contribution: This study’s theoretical framework (a) distinguishes between Chinese cultural characteristic and relationship marketing relationships; (b) suggests that Chinese cultural characteristics and customer relationship marketing have a positive and substantial effect on service firm performance and that Chinese cultural characteristics are related to customer relationship marketing in their effect on service firm performance; and (c) provides managerially relevant guidelines for strategic sales planning.     

Strategic planning using service roadmaps

Although useful service planning tools exist, few focus on how to integrate service planning into business and technology planning from a longer perspective, which is essential for a firm to survive and grow in the current and future service environment. We suggest that technology roadmaps, initially developed as a long-term strategic planning tool in the manufacturing sector, can be a good solution for the service sector – and indeed are in use in the service sector under the label ‘service roadmaps'. To help more firms enjoy the benefits of the service roadmap concept, this research aims to develop a taxonomy of service roadmap forms. We investigate 93 service roadmaps and identify five dominant types. Then, we analyze the characteristics of each type to understand their current and possible future uses. Our research findings are expected to facilitate the wider use of service roadmaps as a complement to existing service planning tools.     

How does religion discipline the consumer subject? Negotiating the paradoxical tension between consumer desire and the social order

ABSTRACT

In this article, we revisit Russell Belk, Guliz Ger and Soren Askegaard’s study on consumer desire. We do so in an effort to further advance the extant understanding of desire in consumer research. Specifically, informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic thought and sharing much affinity with Foucault’s central argument in The History of Sexuality, we consider how the institution of religion functions as a disciplining force by which to mediate the (potential) conflict between human desire and the social order. For the purposes of this article, we focus our analytical gaze on how consumption practices have the disciplinary effect of regulating desire. That is to say, we illuminate how religion (and religious ideology) dictates certain consumption practices, which ultimately perform to ensure that the pursuit of desire does not contravene the pre-existing social order that structures society and organises social relating. To animate our theoretical claims, we draw on a qualitative study of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic sub-culture originating in South Asia. This article builds on extant sociological and anthropological studies that have captured the nexus between religion and the workings of the marketplace. However, unlike past studies, the question posited at the crux of this article concerns desire and, particularly, how desire becomes subjected to the discourses pertaining to religiously prescribed consumption practices.