Despite the opportunities of conversational marketing, today little has been investigated regarding the role of the fan/team conversation in sport management through the use of digital engagement platforms (such as instant messaging apps) and regarding the impact generated by their involvement on fan engagement and loyalty. The literature on sport management has investigated the role of social media in the behavior of supporters (Na et al. 2019; Li et al. 2019; Filo et al. 2015; Stavros et al. 2013) but to date little is known about the role of conversation in service production processes in contexts of digital engagement platforms that lead the consumer from involvement to loyalty to a brand team: therefore, understanding the role that these have in the transition from lead generation actions to satisfaction and loyalty is a priority for those sports companies who wish to ride the wave of innovation in customer relations. This paper proposes a research model for investigating the effect on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty of the three dimensions of the customer engagement construct on Mobile Instant Messaging Apps when they are used as Engagement Platforms in a conversational marketing approach. In addition, the aim of this paper is to verify the mediating role of fan engagement and satisfaction on loyalty to the sports team. A survey was conducted on fans of a famous football team in Italy that recently, has decided to use WhatsApp (Mobile Instant Messaging App) to allow fans to communicate directly with football players. To test the hypotheses, a regression sequence was performed to evaluate the relationships between engagement and involvement and the mediating effect of fan engagement and satisfaction, checking for gender, instruction level and age. The results highlight the importance of emotional engagement on fan satisfaction and the role of behavioral engagement through the use of WhatsApp for enhancing fan commitment. The results also reveal that involvement and fan engagement are determining for the loyalty to the sports team and for the continued use of the MIM apps in the future. In particular, this is true for young people who are particularly satisfied when using WhatsApp with players. It means that WhatsApp, also in sports management, is capable of giving young fans a more active role, increasing the fan engagement by means of emotional and behavioural engagement. Fans who are engaged and more satisfied thanks to the use of MIM apps can be ambassadors for the sport brand thus affecting the WoM and the support to the team. For this reason, sports team managers have to consider the MIM app as a tool that can increase fan engagement.
M-commerce has been defined in a variety of ways over the years and essentially encompasses all online-based transactional activities conducted through wireless handheld mobile devices (e.g., Hillman and Neustaedter 2017). As such, it has been considered an umbrella term for more specific types of commerce activities; Marriott et al. (2017) suggest that m-commerce can be divided into three main subcategories: mobile banking (m-banking), mobile payments (m-payments), and mobile shopping (m-shopping). M-shopping is defined as the online searching, browsing, comparing, and purchasing of goods and services by consumers through wireless handheld mobile devices, in particular, smartphones and tablets (Marriott et al. 2017). Three fundamental observations arise within the m-shopping literature. First, the role of m-shopping within the global marketplace is apparent with the surge of literature since 2015 (Marriott et al. 2017) and academic response to emerging retailing trends. Second, the incorporation of risk and trust within m-shopping literature remains in its infancy; although discussions surrounding risk and trust have increased in the recent years, more research is required to examine their specific roles within m-shopping adoption. Finally, most m-shopping literature adopt a technology-based acceptance model as a theoretical grounding; although this is commonplace and has given rise to an interesting array of findings, it becomes questionable as to validity of using a technology-based model to predict a service-based activity. Therefore, this research aims to develop understanding into consumer’s m-shopping adoption intention through incorporating risk and trust into a contemporary theoretically grounded technology adoption model to explore their future roles within this area. The theoretical foundation for this study was UTAUT2 (Venkatesh et al. 2012) due to its contemporary nature and suitability to a voluntary or service setting. In the form of online and face-to-face questionnaires, data were gathered from 435 consumers who are UK residents over the age of 18 and who have had at least some experience in the m-shopping process. Covariance-based Structural Equation Modelling, using AMOS software, was used to test the hypothesized relationships to identity the influence of utilitarian, hedonic, trust, and risk factors on consumer m-shopping adoption intention.
Augmented reality (AR) has emerged as a new technology available to retailers to engage with customers in a novel and vivid way (Yim et al. 2017). While AR is in its infancy in terms of its application in consumer markets, spending on the technology is expected to reach $60 billion by 2020 (Porter and Heppelmann 2017). Augmented reality aims to link the real world with the virtual world (Rauschnabel et al. 2015). Azuma (1997) asserts that augmented reality integrates computer-generated objects with the real world and provides individuals with real-time interactions. For a long time, AR has been hindered by large and cumbersome devices (Rese et al. 2017). However, with the adoption of the ubiquitous smartphone, developers, retailers and consumers’ interest in augmented reality has significantly grown, as many retailers are now implementing augmented reality features into their mobile applications (Dacko 2017). Pantano (2014) highlights the potential of augmented reality in engaging customers and influencing their purchase intentions. AR’s ability to overlay the physical environment with virtual elements, including information and images, which can interact with the physical environment during real-time, offers firms new possibilities in delivering content to consumers. In turn, the functions available through augmented reality have the potential to change a number of consumer activities, including product trials, virtual try on and information search and acquisition (Javornik 2016). Drawing upon Javornik’s (2016) augmented reality research agenda, as well as Rese et al. (2017), Kim and Hyun (2016) and Yim et al. (2017) research on the adoption of AR mobile apps, the aim of this research is twofold. First, to explore the variables that influence customer engagement with augmented reality features on mobile applications, and second, to assess the influence of such augmented reality brand engagement on satisfaction with the customer experience and brand usage intent. In the form of an online questionnaire, data were gathered from 474 consumers who had used the augmented reality features on the IKEA Place app, which is downloadable from the Play Store on the android platform and the App Store on the IOS platform. Respondents had downloaded and retained the app for at least one month and used the augmented reality feature more than once. A model of hypothesised relationships was examined with the use of structural equation modelling to identify the influence of AR and technology attributes on consumer brand engagement and subsequent outcomes of satisfaction with the experience and brand usage intention.
As expectations grow for students to gain “real world” experiences during their college careers, faculty members must be creative to integrate transformational activities into their curriculum to close the gap between what employers are looking for and what higher education provides. Every year, LinkedIn compiles data and survey results to report the most in demand hard skills and soft skills (business.linkedin.com). This report alone speaks to the importance of soft skills, with the 2018 report emphasizing leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management. Further, a PwC report stated that 77% of CEOs believed lack of soft skills was the biggest threat to business (www.pwc.com). As millennials and digital natives enter the workforce, there needs to be an increasing focus on developing the soft skills of the current generation of college graduates (e.g., Tulgan 2016). A review of the literature in marketing education reveals little if no focus on implementing soft skills into college classroom as an assessed means to prepare students for their transition to the workforce. Despite a certain level of innateness, soft skills can be taught, as evidenced by the countless courses on LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. In a survey of business executives, soft skill attributes included communication, courtesy, flexibility, integrity, interpersonal skills, attitude, professionalism, responsibility, teamwork, and work ethic (Robles 2012). In this paper, we advocate to focus on these attributes by adding soft skills as a course component and encouraging its use as displayed through attitudes, behaviors, and communications throughout the semester.
Customer revenge as a form of customer misbehaviour has attracted increasing attention in service marketing. Previous research suggests that customer revenge can take various forms, ranging from aggressive behaviours towards the employees to negative word of mouth (NWOM) (Grégoire, Laufer, & Tripp, 2010). While a number of studies have examined the cognitive aspect of customer revenge (i.e. perceived unfairness), the emotional aspect is relatively understudied. This research aims to contribute to the literature in two ways. First, it will investigate the role of three moral emotions (i.e. anger, contempt and disgust) in translating perceived unfairness into various revengeful behaviours (i.e. H1). Second, it will examine whether revenge is employed by customers as an emotion regulatory strategy to ameliorate their negative emotions (i.e. H2). To test H1, a 2 (distributive fairness: low vs high) × 2 (procedural fairness: low vs high) × 2 (interactional fairness: low vs high) between-subject experimental design was conducted. Participants were asked to read a hotel service recovery scenario where the various dimensions of fairness were manipulated. Results demonstrated that anger mediates the effect of distributive and interactional fairness in the various revengeful behaviours (i.e. aggression, vindictive complaining, vindictive NWOM and third-party complaining). Furthermore, contempt mediates the effect of distributive and interactional fairness in aggression, vindictive complaining and vindictive NWOM but not third-party complaining. Procedural fairness did not have a significant impact on customer revenge. Similarly, disgust did not act as a mediator between perceived fairness and customer revenge. To test H2, a 2 (mood change beliefs: present vs control) one factor experimental design was employed. Participants read an airline service scenario that involved a failed service recovery. Following the procedures used by Bushman, Baumeister and Phillips (2001), participants in the mood change belief condition were led to believe that at the end of the experiment they will have positive emotions, while in the control condition, there were no such instructions. The logic behind this manipulation is that if individuals believe that exacting revenge will alleviate their negative emotions, providing them with another way to feel better (i.e. recall of a happy experience) will reduce their revengeful behaviours. Findings from the experiment demonstrate that individuals employ vindictive complaining, vindictive NWOM and third-party complaining but not aggression with the intention to feel better.
The management of the New Service Development (NSD) process remains a key research priority for service organizations. As a diverse mix of team members with different skills, perspectives and backgrounds participate in development teams and close collaboration is required among them, conflicts are likely to arise among team members. Different team members perceive conflict episodes in a different way and often embrace different conflict management behaviours and orientations (e.g. competing, avoiding) to deal with them. This study recognises NSD team as a complex system, through which individual members’ conflict management style choices enable team developmental dynamics, which sequentially lead to intragroup conflict resolution. Although a lot of work exists around the role of individual members’ conflict management styles, little research scrutiny is attracted on how teams solve intragroup conflicts and even limited empirical evidence is available regarding the linkages between individual and team factors can contribute to resolve intragroup conflicts. The present study taking under consideration the causal complexity, asymmetry and idiosyncratic nature of NSD conflict resolution, utilizes Complexity theory and leverages the advantages of fs/QCA in order to shed light on the NSD intragroup conflict resolution. Data was collected from employees in several service industries such as advertising, financial, insurance, consulting, IT services and telecommunications providers. The results confirm the major tenets of Complexity theory highlighting that any attempt to examine complex phenomena, such as NSD conflict resolution, as simple ones, based on symmetrical methodological approaches, may lead to simplistic and distorted explanations. In fact, the results demonstrate that there is not a ‘one fits all’ solution in order to solve NSD conflicts. Different facets for both the conflict-management styles and team dynamics act in various combinations in order to predict high scores in NSD conflict resolution.
In an increasingly competitive higher education sector, universities face significant challenges when it comes to recruiting new students. Recruitment is only the beginning of a long-term relationship that higher education institutions (HEIs) need to cultivate, not only while students attend the programs but also beyond graduation. Previous studies highlight the need for research in relation to the power that comes from successful branding and the implications for HEIs (Dholakia and Acciardo 2014). This paper aims to contribute to an underdeveloped area in the literature related to brand attributes and their importance in the context of the higher education sector (Chapleo 2010). The paper has three aims which represent major research gaps identified in contemporary literature. Specifically, the first aim of this work is to investigate whether universities’ positioning strategies should continue focusing on building prestige or whether strategies aimed at improving student satisfaction could have more positive effects on brand equity. The second aim of this work is to examine whether the perceived by the students brand equity of an institution is different for students and graduates. The third aim of the paper is to examine the relationship between attachment strength and satisfaction.
Companies empower customers more than ever, and reversely customers increasingly demand more control. Even pricing mechanisms show an increasing level of customer participation (Kim et al. 2009). While traditional fixed pricing models do not contain any interaction with the customers (buyers), in participative pricing models companies (sellers) offer customers the opportunity to participate directly in the price-setting process. Hence, companies delegate a certain level of control to the customers (Chandran and Morwitz 2005). These pricing strategies have become increasingly important over the last decade for three reasons: (1) Opposed to fixed prices, participative pricing mechanisms enable companies to address consumers’ individual willingness to pay (WTP), (2) to differentiate themselves from competitors due to their unconventional, innovative character, and (3) to create a rather balanced win-win relationship between companies and customers (Kim et al. 2009). Therefore, it is not surprising that auctions, reverse auctions, price negotiations, and other participative pricing mechanisms have gained increased attention, both in practice and in scientific research (Spann and Tellis 2006). The most progressive form of participative pricing is Pay What You Want (PWYW) as it gives the buyer full control over the transaction price (Kim et al. 2009). From a seller’s perspective, the obvious risk of PWYW is that customers might exploit their control in order to maximize their utility in line with rational choice theory. However, practical examples and scientific studies provide evidence that consumer behavior in PWYW pricing is not completely opportunistic (Kim et al. 2014; Kim et al. 2009).
Brand personality has become an increasingly important concept within brand theory, and factor-based methods constitute the standard measure in brand personality research. However, questions have been raised about the validity of current factor-based models. This research explores how brand personality characteristics that are salient in verbal and visual advertising content change over time as the brand is extended into multiple product categories. The empirical data are based on a case study of four sub-brands of the personal and skin care brand Nivea, including an advertising analysis and a document analysis. The results show that the meanings of words that represent brand personality characteristics in advertising content shift across different product categories. The study emphasises the problems related to the use of a generalised brand personality scale and develops an alternative methodological approach for brand personality research.
SPECIAL SESSION: Difficult Destinations : Attracting People and Organizations to Peripheral Places
Communication and public relations play a pivotal role in crisis management (Tirkkonen and Luoma‐aho 2011). Due to the high levels of uncertainty created during a crisis, stakeholders have a strong need for fast and accurate information (Seeger and Griffin Padgett 2010). For public sector organizations, crisis communication is perhaps even more challenging and complex, given that government agencies have democratic obligations to serve and communicate with all citizens (McCoy 2014). A main goal of crisis communication is to restore reputation and regain customers’ trust (Utz et al. 2013). It seems likely that individuals have different perceptions of the information quality of crisis communication, which in turn may influence their trust in government. We also suggest that the level of perceived information quality is related to the extent to which people find positive meaning in a crisis (Fredrickson et al. 2003), and to their level of crisis involvement (Claeys and Cauberghe 2014). In this chapter, we identify segments of citizens based on their perceptions of the information quality of local governments’ crisis communication, and assess whether there are differences between these segments in terms of their post‐crisis trust in government, perceptions of positive meaning, and crisis involvement.
Contact employees constitute an integral part of the consistent delivery of the firm’s brand promise on customers. Although internal brand management research stresses the importance of brand-supporting behaviours on behalf of contact employees during customer interface (Punjaisri et al., 2008), few attempts have been made to identify cognitive or affective routes through which organizations can enhance employees’ internalization of the firm’s brand values and eventually leverage their brand performance, (King and Grace, 2010). This study integrates the fit theory and the equity theory in order to address how the adoption of internal market orientation (IMO) can enhance employee brand performance within an interpersonal service setting through two different routes; by increasing their fit with different aspects of their environment and by enhancing their brand knowledge and brand identification levels. In this context, we examine whether IMO adoption promotes employee-organization fit (E-O fit), employee-supervisor fit (E-S fit) and employee-job fit (E-J fit), brand knowledge and brand identification and assess the joint impact of these variables on brand performance. This study extends present knowledge by illustrating the importance of IMO for several types of employees’ fit with their environment and by offering two different routes, a cognitive and an affective one, through which IMO adoption can promote brand performance. Third, the impact of several types of employees’ fit with their environment on brand performance is explored. To test the conceptual framework of our study we draw evidence from an interpersonal services context and particularly high-elaborate services, acknowledging that employees’ brand performance represents a significant part of customers’ evaluations of the brand within this context. This study delivers a holistic approach of brand performance within an interpersonal service context and clearly suggests two distinct but interrelated mechanisms through which contact employee brand performance can be leveraged. Our results further reveal two complementary routes through which service firms can also improve employees’ delivery of brand-consistent messages. Fostering employees’ fit with their working environment is a prerequisite before top management employs an internal branding strategy so as to reinforce contact staff to act in a brand-consistent way. Enhancing employees’ emotional attachment with the brand will promote their brand performance. Likewise, when acquiring knowledge about the brand and internalising the brand image before customer interactions, employees are expected to boost their brand performance. Although adopting an IMO has no direct influence on brand performance, IMO could strengthen the relationships the employees have with the brand and help them embrace the brand and internalize brand values; two key prerequisites for rendering contact employees as brand ambassadors.
Although memory has been studied extensively in the fields of psychology and physiology, and to a lesser extent in advertising, this literature gives insufficient attention to the role and function of memory in the consumption of service experiences. Episodic memory includes recollections of our autobiographical experiences and events (Tulving 2002). Many researchers have suggested that memory mediates behavioural intentions (Kozak 2001; Mazursky 1989). Despite more than a decade of interest amongst practitioners, research by marketing researchers remains scant. Fundamental questions remain unanswered. What do consumers remember from their experiences and do these memories change over time? What makes an experience memorable? Is a positive experience more memorable than a negative one? If a first time experience is memorable, what is the impact of subsequent exposure to the same experience? What are the antecedents and possible consequences for consumer behaviour? And finally, how should we measure experience memories?
