Marketing

Six studies show that subtle contextual cues that increase customers' self-awareness can be used to influence their satisfaction with service providers holding the objective service delivery constant. Self-awareness cues tend to increase customers' satisfaction when the outcome of a service interaction is unfavorable, but tend to decrease customers' satisfaction when the outcome of the interaction is favorable. This is because higher self-awareness increases customers' tendency to attribute outcomes to themselves as opposed to the provider.

Applies economic, marketing, and finance concepts to develop a metric, Customer Value Added, that explains how marketing activities drive the financial performance of an organization.  Includes empirical results for a consumer packaged goods company where Customer Value Added predicted revenue and contribution with R-squared values greater than 0.90.

How to view pricing, cross-selling, and customer loyalty during difficult economic times.  (Reprinted from "Marketing in Difficult Times," Effective Executive, July, 2009, pp. 11-18.)

We present a broad-based, consumer-centric view of innovation — referred to as "perceived firm innovativeness" (PFI). PFI is conceptualized as the consumer's perception of an enduring firm capability that results in novel, creative, and impactful ideas and solutions. We develop and validate a PFI scale and show that PFI impacts consumer loyalty via two processing routes: a functional-cognitive route and an affective-experiential route.

In the customer expectations arena, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact on expectations of variation in cultural variables unique to a country. Here the authors focus on one country, India, and a major cultural influence there — the extent of belief in karma. Prior research in the United States suggests that disconfirmation sensitivity lowers expectations. Here the authors examine whether belief in karma and, consequently, having a long-term orientation, counteracts the tendency to lower expectations in two studies that measure and prime respondents' belief in karma.

On a visit to any major U.S. department store, consumers can observe vendor shops (typically for cosmetics, apparel, apparel accessories, electronics, and toys), each selling a particular brand exclusively and designed to reflect the image of that brand. For these vendor shops, also called boutiques or "stores within a store," retailers rent out retail space to the respective manufacturers and give them complete autonomy over retail-level decisions, such as pricing and in-store service.