Gaining Compliance and Losing Weight: The Role Of the Service Provider In Health Care Services

This research provides and empirically tests a conceptualization of health care services in which customer compliance outside of the service organization is necessary for successful health outcomes. Using data from service providers and customers in a weight-loss clinic, the authors examine the provider\u27s role in gaining customer compliance. They find that provider expertise and attitudinal homophily play a role in bringing about customer role clarity, ability, and motivation. This study demonstrates that compliance leads to goal attainment, which results in satisfaction. More important, compliance also leads to satisfaction directly; consumers who comply with program requirements have greater satisfaction with the program

The price of peace in the household: A commentary on "The Price of Unconditional Love: Consumer Decisions Concerning High-Dollar Veterinary Care"

Brockman et al. [Brockman, Beverly K, Taylor, Valerie A, Brockman, Christopher M. The price of unconditional love: consumer decisions concerning high-dollar veterinary care. J Bus Res Forthcom 2007] use an interpretive approach to investigate a consumer decision made under emotional circumstances. Unlike mundane purchases of food and household appliances, emotional consumer decisions that affect the entire family are ripe for conflict. This commentary highlights gaps in our understanding of household decision making that the work of Brockman et al. suggests and proposes ways in which new insights are achievable in established streams of research.

Employees as internal audience: how advertising affects employees’ customer focus

Ad campaigns target consumers with information about the company, its products, and sometimes its employees. Ads also reach the organization’s employees and may contain information useful to employees in meeting customer needs. Results from a study involving a high-tech firm indicate that when employees believe ads are effective and value congruent, their customer focus increases. Pride completely mediates the effects of value congruence and effectiveness on customer focus. Organizational identification of employees generally results in a more favorable reaction to ads. A second study involving a regional health facility replicates and extends these findings to include employee portrayal accuracy when employees are featured in ads. Employee portrayal accuracy affects promise accuracy, effectiveness and value-congruence. In addition, employee portrayal accuracy has a direct effect on customer focus

Exploring income nonresponse : a logit model analysis

Includes bibliographical references (p. 13-14)

Consumer Identity Renaissance: The Resurgence of Identity‐Inspired Consumption in Retirement

Using multimethod data, we investigate retirement as a life stage centered on consumption, where cultural scripts are particularly contested and in flux and where we witness an increase in breadth and depth of identity‐related consumption, which we term consumer identity renaissance. While prior research on older consumers focuses on corporeal and cognitive decline and its impact on individual decision‐making situations, our attention is drawn to the competency and growth potential of those who have exited their formal productive stage and privilege consumption as a means to create and enact identity. Contrary to the received view of older consumers simply reviewing and integrating their already developed identities, we find retirement can be a time of extensive identity work with multiple revived and emergent inspirations weaving across all time orientations (past, present, and future) and involving intricate consumption enactments.

International Marketing

711hal.;xxxi.;27c