Branding and relationships: Customer and supplier perspectives

This paper explores and investigates the role of branding within financial services. Specifically, the study aims to assess the importance of branding and its associated elements including brand image and brand experience in the relationships that exist between consumers and their financial brands. It aims to achieve this through research, which identifies gaps between the managerial and consumer perspectives on branding in relationships in retail financial services. It is well established that the characteristics of services are different from those of manufactured goods and that service personnel play a central role in the services experience. Moreover, the concept of relationship marketing within services proclaims the importance of one-to-one relationships between businesses and customers as well as relationships between consumers and their brands. Drawing from the fields of brand management, relationship marketing and services marketing, this research aims to investigate the perceptional differences between consumers and suppliers in relation to the importance of branding in financial service relationships. The research findings indicate that brand experience appears to be far more salient than brand image in shaping and building meaningful and lasting brand perceptions and promoting customer retention.     

Performance Measurement in Government Service Provision: The Case of Police Services in New South Wales

The NSW Government is implementing a financial framework which is designed to encourage government service providers to become more efficient and effective. NSW Treasury is using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency of major government service providers, such as police, courts and hospitals. This paper outlines the progress in implementing the new financial framework and illustrates the way NSW Treasury will use DEA to help improve the efficiency of government service providers by describing an analysis of the NSW Police Service. The results suggest that NSW police patrols (local police districts) could, on average, reduce input usage by 13.5 percent through better management, and by 6 percent if the patrols could be restructured to achieve the optimal scale. Results also indicate that differences in operating environments, such as location and socioeconomic factors, do not have a significant influence upon the efficiency of police patrols.     

Neo-institutionalism is not yet a scientific success: a reply to Barry Weingast

Barry Weingast agrees that the idea of liberalism was crucial for the making of the modern world, though in most of his comment he turns to his own writings making institutional change the crux. Yet institutions in Britain did not in fact change much, the changes had little economic oomph, and underlying property rights were good in numerous economies worldwide since ancient times. An ideational economic history works better: liberty caused our riches.     

Securing graduate commitment: an exploration of the comparative expectations of placement students, graduate recruits and human resource managers within the hospitality, leisure and tourism industries

This research begins the process of mapping out human resource (HR) strategies appropriate to the needs of actual and potential graduate employees. The perceptions and attitudes of placement students, recent graduates working in the sector and managers with responsibility for graduate development were surveyed, looking at the elements that make up the initial psychological contract of students on first encounter with the sector; the types of organisational HR practice that are seen as meeting the needs of employees; the role that universities can play in constructing expectations and bridging gaps between the graduate and the employer. It was found that the nature of the contract shifts from relational to transactional between placement and employment.     

Culture,consumption and choice: towards a conceptual relationship

Abstract Manufacturers and retailers are continually extending the geographical scope of their activities, and the degree of acceptance by local consumer cultures is integral to the success or failure of their operations. It is, therefore, important that cultural influences on consumption behaviour are fully conceptualized and understood. Central to this understanding is a need to address how consumers prioritize their own principles and set them against other criteria, bringing these to bear in the process of choosing particular products. This paper attempts to address the paucity of research in this respect by attempting to integrate areas of literature on culture, consumption and product choice. These relationships are explored through a simple conceptual framework, which is then used to discuss the influence of culture on one particular type of behaviour —‘ethical consumption’— the degree to which consumers prioritize their own ethical concerns when making product choices. The paper concludes by highlighting the general implications of the framework for research.     

Why Economics cannot Explain the Modern World

Why indeed? Because the Great Fact, 1800 to the present, incomes rising by a factor of a factor of 30, and higher if quality is acknowledged, cannot be explained by piling brick on brick, or BA on BA, in the absence of new ideas. As Keynes said, the marginal product of capital would be driven quickly down to zero. If the key were accumulation, which economists love, the Great Fact of modern growth would have happened earlier, or in China. Only ideas, in an environment of liberty and dignity for ordinary people, historically unique to northwestern Europe, work.     

In search of fair trade: ethical consumer decision making in France

While the market for fair trade products has been growing in many countries, this paper examines the French market where fair trade remains marginal but is experiencing growth. Using a modified Theory of Planned Behaviour framework the research examines consumer intention to purchase fair trade grocery products in order to explain the pertinent decision‐making criteria of both consumers of and potential consumers of fair trade. Results reveal that concerned consumers should not be treated as one homogeneous group, rather, the distinct variations in the factors that influence their decision making must be considered when promoting, labelling and distributing fair trade products. Implications for both sustaining and developing the market for fair trade products in the future are highlighted and discussed.     

Enacting risk reduction: an examination of the volitional stages of smoking cessation within Scotland

This study examines an extended version of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in the context of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) as an aid to smoking cessation. An attempt is made to address the intention–behaviour gap identified in the literature by specifically focusing on the role and interrelationships of volitional stages, namely intention, planning and anticipated effort. A convenience sample of 207 female smokers, aged 16–36, provided information about their views, attitudes and volitional behaviour regarding the use of NRT as an aid to smoking cessation. Results of this study show the TPB to be pertinent, accounting for 41% of the variance in intention to use NRT as an aid to smoking cessation. Furthermore, behavioural intention is found to mediate the relationship between the TPB antecedents (attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control) and each of the two volitional elements, planning and anticipated effort. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Conceptualising the dynamics of employee information and consultation: evidence from the Republic of Ireland

The debate concerning the emerging regulatory environment for employee voice continues apace, in particular the requirements to inform and consult employees as a result of the European Employee Information and Consultation Directive. This article examines the processes used to inform and consult employees across 15 case studies in the Republic of Ireland. It evaluates different voice arrangements using a conceptual framework that seeks to capture the dynamics of different employee voice schemes across union and non‐union companies. The findings suggest that participation is more robust when the channels for information and consultation accommodate both conflictual and cooperative processes. It is shown that robust forms of participation are more likely through processes that facilitate independent representation. The evidence also shows that some employers may devise their own counterbalancing forms of (pseudo) consultation, in an attempt to minimise the impact of regulatory rights for employee voice.