Fake smiles: customer reactions to employees' display inauthenticity and choice restrictions

Frontline employees’ fake smiles (i.e., positive emotion display inauthenticity) frequently occur despite firms’ efforts to ensure real smiles in service delivery. Previous research on the effects of display inauthenticity on customers reveals considerable heterogeneity. Attempts to resolve this have largely been limited to stable and dispositional factors, which often escape managerial control. The present research investigates the impacts of display inauthenticity, choice restrictions, and their interaction on service performance. Choice restrictions may buffer inauthenticity effects as demonstrated by results from three factorial experiments in different contexts (e.g., restrictions of service provider choice in predelivery in Study 1 and in-store choice restrictions during service delivery in Studies 2 and 3). Frontline employees’ display inauthenticity negatively affects service performance only if customers are subjected to low but not high choice restrictions. The interaction effect is explained by customers’ interdependent self-construal and is generalizable to actual spending behaviors. Our findings inform managers about the interplay of increasingly common inauthenticity and choice restrictions due to market shocks such as COVID-19 and provide insights into managerial interventions that can be used to mitigate the effects of inauthenticity on customers.</p

The Influence of Age, Gender, Health-Related Behaviors, and Other Factors on Occupationally Relevant Health Complaints of Singers

Objectives: Professional singers' careers are usually associated with health-relevant factors that they themselves may or may not be able to influence. We have therefore investigated the effect of modifiable health-related behaviors and non-modifiable factors on singers' occupational health. Methods: In an explorative, questionnaire-based study, self-reported, occupationally relevant health complaints and behaviors, along with singer-specific characteristics, were surveyed from 349 professional singers and voice teachers (116 men, 233 women; age 18-73 years) and the influence of age, gender, duration of daily and lifelong singing, voice category, and health-related behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity) on occupationally relevant health complaints were analyzed using bi- and multivariate statistical methods. Results: Singers reported less risky alcohol consumption (5.4% versus ≈15%) and smoking (15.5% versus 29.7%) than the general population, and too little physical activity was described in two thirds of both populations. After controlling for multiple testing, no effect was found for these behaviors, the time spent singing daily, gender, or voice categories on singers' complaints. Health complaints were significantly fewer for males (P < .001) and older women and were reported more frequently for higher-pitched male voices, a trend not found in females. Conclusion: Singers seem to smoke and drink less than members of the general population. These factors did not affect their complaints. Female singers described more work-related health complaints than males, a finding that corresponds to women in the general population. Older singers reported fewer complaints than younger singers, possibly because of selection effects or older singers acquiring strategies to avoid health-damaging behavior

Been there, done that: quasi-experimental evidence about how, why, and for who, a previous visit might increase stopover destination loyalty

© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Despite stopovers being a part of long-haul air travel since commercial flights commenced over 80 years ago, the first published research on the phenomenon did not appear until 2016. Also, even though destination image has been the most researched construct in the destination marketing literature, no studies had measured perceptions of a destination in the context of a stopover until 2018. This study makes a contribution to this emerging research field by reporting how a quasi-experimental design found previous visitation enhances destination image and destination loyalty in the context of a stopover during long haul international air travel. However, this effect was weakened for individuals high in prevention focus. Conceptually, the research design is underpinned by Regulatory Focus Theory, which has rarely been reported in the destination marketing literature. The results have practical implications, for Dubai as a stopover destination, and for other destination marketing organizations responsible for emerging destinations or destinations in regions that have experienced negative publicity

When Plentiful Platforms Pay Off: Assessment Orientation Moderates the Effect of Assortment Size on Choice Engagement and Product Valuation

Popular digital platforms, such as Netflix and GrubHub, purposefully aggregate offerings, according to the premise that customers value products chosen from plentiful assortments. Yet academic literature provides little clarity about when, for whom, or how larger online retail assortments affect the value of the products. To provide new insights, the current article aims to address ambiguous extant findings about the effects of larger product assortments. Specifically, this research tests whether customers with high, as opposed to low, assessment orientation value products more when they have chosen them from larger, as opposed to smaller, assortments. Four experiments affirm this idea, such that customers with a high assessment orientation value products more when they have chosen them from platforms with relatively larger assortments. Sequential mediation of the effect occurs through increased choice engagement and attitude certainty. For managers, customer segmentation along the assessment dimension offers benefits, while assessment type marketing communications can increase the likelihood of product selection, like in our field study, where we find an increase of 27%

Every Step Counts: When Physical Movement Affects Perceived Value

Physical movement is an important contextual factor during customer’s decision-making. Yet, little is known about how movement can affect customer’s response to mobile promotions, or how it can influence the search and evaluation of products in a retail setting. Across three studies, this research shows that physical movement improves the perceived value of products and promotions for customers with a predominant locomotion motivation. Such effects are mediated by engagement. One implication is that retailers may increase engagement for individuals with a predominant locomotion motivation by playing mobile adverts when cellular sensors indicate movement

Short break drive holiday destination attractiveness during COVID-19 border closures

Research into the topic of destination image has been popular in the tourism literature since the 1970s. However, only a minority of destination image studies have focused on the context of short break drive holidays. Domestic holidays have taken on increased importance for the tourism industry in many parts of the world during travel restrictions caused by COVID-19. Building on theorizing from evolutionary psychology, this paper reports a study with the data collected from two samples in New Zealand and Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conjoint analysis revealed the two most important destination attributes in terms of crowdedness and accommodation type, and latent class analysis revealed four segments. These insights have practical implications for marketers of smaller, less crowded destinations interested in the short break drive market, particularly given uncertainties about international leisure travel during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility of future coronavirus outbreaks

When Size Matters: Sensitivity to Missed Opportunity Size Increases with Stronger Assessment

This research shows that the strength of assessment orientation, defined as the “aspect of self-regulation concerned with critically evaluating entities or states” (Kruglanski et al., 2000, p. 794), increases a person’s sensitivity to the size of a missed opportunity. Study 1 revealed that the experimental induction of an assessment orientation reduced the likelihood to act on a present offer after missing out on a large opportunity. Following a small missed opportunity, on the other hand, seizing the present offer was more likely. Studies 2 and 3 generalized this effect to chronic assessment orientations. In Study 4 the findings were replicated in a field study, which also demonstrated that differential value judgments explain assessors’ sensitivity to the size of a missed opportunity

E1 Theme: Trust-building for collaborative win-win customer solutions. Opportunity Assessment Roadmap Report

This report proposes a five year roadmap that address the opportunities for understanding, building and measuring trust in the Australian energy sector. Providing customer education alone is not consistent with best practice. Deficits in public knowledge are not the problem; therefore, educating energy users about the energy system is not the solution. This roadmap leverages customers strengths, knowledge, and practices to cultivate trust using a shared value approach. The conceptual centrepiece of this report is the ‘ecosystem of shared value’ – an industry-wide approach to valuing consumers’ contributions to the creation of value

Seeing eye to eye: social augmented reality and shared decision making in the marketplace

Firms increasingly seek to improve the online shopping experience by enabling customers to exchange product recommendations through social augmented reality (AR). We utilize socially situated cognition theory and conduct a series of five studies to explore how social AR supports shared decision making in recommender–decision maker dyads. We demonstrate that optimal configurations of social AR, that is, a static (vs. dynamic) point-of-view sharing format matched with an image-enhanced (vs. text-only) communicative act, increase recommenders’ comfort with providing advice and decision makers’ likelihood of using the advice in their choice. For both, these effects are due to a sense of social empowerment, which also stimulates recommenders’ desire for a product and positive behavioral intentions. However, recommenders’ communication motives impose boundary conditions. When recommenders have strong impression management concerns, this weakens the effect of social empowerment on recommendation comfort. Furthermore, the stronger a recommender’s persuasion goal, the less likely the decision maker is to use the recommendation in their choice