Image, brand relationships and customer value

Purpose – While service brands are conceptualised as being both the company’s presented brand and the customer’s relationship experience, most research to date has supported the central role of the latter over the former in creating customer value and developing loyalty. Studies supporting the central role of relationship experience have relied on classification schemes that have been developed around the role of employees. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test the effect of two new moderators, namely advertising spending- and labour-intensity (LI), in predicting the impact of company image and employee trust. Design/methodology/approach – Four contexts (banking, internet provider, insurance and hairdressing) were selected based on their advertising spending- and LI, and a multi-group structural equation modelling technique was employed to test for differences between contexts. Findings – Company image and employee trust were found to have a significant impact on customer value and loyalty perceptions, with considerable differences in patterns across the chosen contexts. This study has confirmed that differences in advertising spending intensity can explain discrepancies in the relative influence of customer value and loyalty drivers across multiple service industries. Originality/value – The findings of this study shed new light on the results of previous studies that relied solely on classification schemes and which supported the primary importance of employeecustomer interactions for service brands. Ultimately, this research can help managers better understand the driving forces of their business.Laszlo Sajtos, Henning Kreis, Roderick Brodi

Impact of service failure: the protective layer of customer relationships

Although there has been considerable research about service failure in the last 15 years, scholars have only recently started to examine its impact on relational constructs. This study proposes a holistic model that jointly investigates the role of company image and trust in response to service failures and their impact on the customer value-loyalty process across routine and service failure scenarios. Using survey data of a sample of 552 airline customers, the empirical results find evidence of a relational protective layer for the firm. This layer protects the customer value-loyalty process from the negative impact of service failure by exerting a halo effect on customer value and loyalty, which is concurrently magnified by this negative impact. Further analysis also indicates the diverse roles of company image and company trust in service failures, which reveals the coexistence of the buffering and magnifying effects. The findings underline that company image is the most versatile asset of the firm, and it can serve as an indicator of how service failures will affect the company. Company trust, as opposed to its passive role in routine situations, acts like a safety net in service failures by enhancing the customer’s value perception.Laszlo Sajtos, Roderick J. Brodie, and James Whittom

The Role and Determinants of Electronic Commerce and On-line Advertising within Corporate Activity

The research focuses on the application of the Internet in three major areas: sales, purchasing and advertising, which, from a marketing point of view, are the most relevant activities in a company. It is argued that by the end of the 1990s in Hungary Internet-related business activities had become new and increasingly important areas of competition - and this observation holds even though the penetration of the Internet amongst the Hungarian population remains low, so that consumer fears are major obstacles to the more widespread use of this type of media. In this research, the “supply side” of business activities is investigated - that is, companies. In this article (which relies on a large-scale representative national survey carried out in 2000), there will first of all be provided an overview of the intensity of Internet usage among Hungarian companies in relation to marketing activity. Second, based on cutting-edge international literature, the possible factors in the model which determine Internet usage in companies' purchasing, sales and advertising activities will be outlined. Finally, there is an empirical testing of the given model on a representative sample of Hungarian companies

A new perspective on market dynamics Market plasticity and the stability–fluidity dialectics

Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to multiple change efforts. However, the neoclassical view of objective, detached, and deterministic market still influences the dominant models used to describe market change. We argue that in order to better understand market dynamics, both academics and practitioners need new concepts and constructs that go beyond existing linear process and development stage models. We seek to contribute to improved understanding of markets by studying a special characteristic of markets that enables market dynamics. Borrowing a term used by Alderson (1957: 277), we propose that markets are characterized by plasticity, that is, a “potentiality for being remolded and responding in a different way thereafter.” Even though the plasticity concept was introduced into the marketing literature nearly 60 years ago, the plastic character of markets remains underresearched. This article investigates the meaning and manifestations of market plasticity, drawing analogies from the physical, natural, and social sciences. We define market plasticity as the market’s capacity to take and retain form and propose that the dialectic between market stability and market fluidity lies at the heart of market change