Improving the Effect of Guarantees: The Role of a Retailer's Reputation

This research examines the interaction of two cues, retailer reputation and guarantees on evaluations. Extending Mandler's (1982) incongruity framework, we illustrate across three studies how moderately incongruent signals can be combined to enhance evaluations. Unique to our application of moderate incongruity, however, is the fact that guarantee cues can be incongruent with the retailer's reputation, in terms of domain (e.g., price matching guarantee (PMG) offered by provider whose reputation is based on service, not pricing) or valence (e.g., PMG offered by retailer known for carrying expensive merchandize). This dual perspective on the source of incongruity (domain or valence) is important and highlights when guarantees enhance evaluations.     

The Contingent Effects of Semantic Price Cues

This research endeavors to understand the contingent effects of semantic price cues while taking into consideration several important contextual factors. These factors include where the customer encounters the semantic cue (in-store, at-home, online), whether the consumers’ shopping goal is hedonic or utilitarian in nature, the impact of shopping alone or with a companion, as well as the consumer's motivation to process the product information. Findings indicate that a within-store cue (compared to a between store cue) enhances evaluations when the shopping in a store with a utilitarian goal, when shopping alone, and when their motivation to process is low. A meta-analysis of the results demonstrates the robustness of the differential impacts of these semantic cues.     

Serving customers and consumers effectively in the twenty-first century: A conceptual framework and overview

In this article, the authors first propose and discuss a conceptual framework pertaining to the theme of this special issue. This framework portrays “markets” as consisting of “customers” and “consumers,” specifies the distinction as well as linkages between the two, and outlines specific components of individual linkages between pairs of entities within markets. Using this framework as a backdrop, the article then provides an overview of the rest of the special issue by discussing how each of the remaining articles relate to the framework and to one another. A. Parasuraman (D.B.A., Indiana University) is a professor and holder of the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. He teaches and does research in services marketing, service-quality measurement, and the role of technology in marketing to and serving customers. He has received many distinguished teaching and research awards, including, most recently, the “Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award” given by the American Marketing Association's (AMA) SERVSIG. He has written numerous articles in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Retailing, andSloan Management Review. He is the author of a marketing research text and coauthor of two books on service quality and services marketing. In addition to being the editor of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), he serves on the editorial review boards of five other journals. Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D., Virginia Tech) is Interim-Chair and a professor of marketing at the University of Miami. He has published more than 40 articles in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Retailing. His research interests focus on retailing, pricing, international marketing, and consumer behavior issues. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Retailing, and theJournal of Public Policy & Marketing. He has won awards for both his teaching and research. He has coedited a special issue of theJournal of Public Policy & Marketing and of theJournal of Retailing. He was recently elected to the AMA Academic Council—VP Research and Conferences (1999–2001). He is currently writing a book onMarketing Research (publisher: Houghton Mifflin).     

Marketing and the law

Marketing decisions are particularly vulnerable to legal rulings made in both the courts and the legislatures. The effective management of those legal implications challenges the modern marketing professional. Grasping marketing’s overall legal environment, including its governing case law, regulatory statutes and future trends, is essential. This review will provide analysis of recent court cases and legislation with particular emphasis on creatively assisting the marketer’s management of the legal factor.     

Bibliometric and Scientometric analysis on CSR practices in the banking sector

This paper provides a bibliometric and Scientometric analysis of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) in banking sector. Our study analyzes 551 articles from the Scopus database to find out the relationship between CSR and banking. A bibliometric method was used to visualize the results using R-studio and VOS viewer software. The Scientometric analysis was conducted to determine the findings and mappings of the research themes, directions of current and future research, impact, co-occurrence, co-citations and impact and collaboration trends. We explore how CSR literature has evolved over the years in the banking sector between 1993 and 2021. We find that publication in the CSR and banking domain has increased significantly during 2017 and 2021. Social aspects, board of directors, CSR, environment, competitions, Islamic banking, sustainability, disclosure, ethics, legitimacy theory, sustainable banking, loyalty, and brand equity are the popular research trends and collaboration trends identified. We also provide further scope of the study based on the extensive review of the past literature. Our findings may provide help to future researchers, bankers, and regulators in understanding the current trends and future research progression in the CSR and banking sector.     

Celebrity endorsement: How celebrity–brand–user personality congruence affects brand attitude and purchase intention

The present study provides and tests a conceptual framework aimed at comparing the relative effectiveness of celebrity–user, brand–celebrity, and user–brand personality congruence on brand attitude and brand purchase intention (BPI) thereafter. The data collection was done via an online survey of a representative group of consumers (n = 431) located across India. Hypotheses were tested using regression analysis with mediation approach. The results indicate that while user–brand and brand–celebrity personality congruence have a significant impact on brand attitude and purchase intention, celebrity–user congruence does not. Further, brand attitude is found to be a partial mediator on the relationship between the pair-wise personality congruence on BPI. The findings have major implications for marketers in understanding the significance of personality congruence among celebrity–brand–user in the formation of brand attitude and purchase intention that can be used in positioning and in increasing the advertising effectiveness of brands using celebrity endorsement. The present study is a pioneer in contributing to the celebrity endorsement literature by investigating the relative impact of three pairs of personality congruence: celebrity–brand, brand–user, and celebrity–user, on brand attitude and BPI, thereby supporting the applicability of McCracken's Meaning Transfer Model [McCracken (1989), The Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (3) 310–321) and the Hierarchy-of-effects model (Lavidge and Steiner (1961), Journal of Marketing, 25 (6) 59–62].     

Dynamic strategic groups: deriving spatial evolutionary paths

Recent theoretical developments in the domain of strategic groups, specifically those related to cognitive groups and strategic group identity, seem to suggest that strategic group membership is likely to be relatively stable over time and that firms in a strategic group co‐evolve. Yet appropriate data analytic approaches that use information about firms over time to identify stable strategic groups and their evolutionary paths have been lacking. To overcome such limitations, this research proposes a new clusterwise bilinear multidimensional scaling model that can simultaneously identify (1) the number of strategic groups, (2) the dimensions on which the strategic groups are based, and (3) the evolution of the strategy of these groups over time. Our discussion encompasses various alternative model specifications, together with model selection heuristics based on statistical information criteria. An illustration of the proposed methodology using data pertaining to strategic variables for a sample of public banks in the tristate area of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania across three time periods (1995, 1999, and 2003) identifies two underlying dimensions with five strategic groups that display very different evolutionary paths over time. Post hoc analysis shows pronounced differences in firm performance across the five derived strategic groups. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings, as well as potential future research directions. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Calculating,creating, and claiming value in business markets: Status and research agenda

A key challenge facing business marketers surrounds developing a deeper understanding of customer needs. We conceptualize that challenge as having three dimensions: calculating, creating, and claiming value. We discuss key problems, new developments and research challenges in each of these three domains and note the desirability for a deeper collaboration between academics and practitioners to address the research challenges.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Extreme Cherry Picking Behavior of Consumers in the Frequently Purchased Goods Market

Extreme cherry pickers are customers who seek price deals and excessively avail themselves of deep discount offers, which generates negative profits for retailers. This study uses market transaction and primary consumer survey data to provide insights into the determinants, prevalence, and profit impacts of such behavior in the frequently purchased goods market. We find that the extreme cherry picking segment is small (about 2% of all shoppers), but its relative value varies across stores, and consumers manifest this behavior only in secondary stores. An inverse U-shaped relationship marks consumers’ opportunity costs for cross-store price search and likelihood of extreme cherry picking behavior. Finally, we also find that a loss leader promotional strategy adds to retailers’ bottom lines, despite the pure loss generated by extreme cherry pickers.     

Modeling strategic group dynamics: A hidden Markov approach

With competition playing a critical role in market-based strategic planning and implementation, identifying and understanding competiton and competitive dynamics has become critical. In this vein, the strategic groups perspective has emerged as a powerful means to understand such competitive phenomena. Empirical approaches to model competitive dynamics within the strategic groups framework, however, have been piece meal as researchers typically resort to distinct sequential analysis by time period. To overcome the limitations of these simplistic approaches, we develop a hidden Markov model to study strategic group (competitive) dynamics. In this approach, we explicitly account for competitive dynamics over time by modeling strategic group memberships as latent states that follow a first-order Markov process. Thus, we explictly model the notion that firms adopt their strategy for the next time period based on their current strategy and respective outcomes. We illustrate the model with longitudinal data from COMPUSTAT on 63 public banks from the tri-state region of NY-OH-PA. The results show the proposed model to be superior to a number of viable alternative approaches that have been suggested in the literature. We find the existence of three strategic groups: the leveraged group has low current assets compared to current liabilities, high debt to equity, and high total borrowing to assets. The lending group consists of the largest banks that focus on lending with high ratios of gross loans to securities and gross loans to deposits. The balanced group has the largest number of banks where the values of the financial and product ratios are intermediate compared to the leveraged and lending groups. The asymmetries in the switching probabilites are also evident as there seems to be a higher probability of switching into the balanced group than switching out of this group. The switching probabilites are symmetric between the the leveraged and lending groups.