Free upgrades with costly consequences: can preferential treatment inflate customers’ entitlement and induce negative behaviors?

Purpose Companies often provide preferential treatment, such as free upgrades, to customers. The present study aims to identify a costly consequence of such preferential treatment (i.e. opportunistic behavior) and reveal which type of customer is most likely to engage in that negative behavior (i.e. new customers). Design/methodology/approach Across two experimental studies, the authors test whether preferential treatment increases customers’ entitlement, which in turn increases their propensity to behave opportunistically. Moderated mediation analysis further tests whether that mediated effect is moderated by customers’ prior relationship with the company. Findings Preferential treatment increases feelings of entitlement, which consequently triggers customers’ opportunistic behaviors. New customers are more likely to feel entitled after preferential treatment than repeat customers, and hence new customers are more likely to behave opportunistically. Preferential treatment also increases customers’ suspicion of the company’s motives, but suspicion was unrelated to opportunistic behavior. Research limitations/implications Future research may focus on other marketplace situations that trigger entitlement and explore whether multiple occurrences of preferential treatment provide different effects on consumers. Practical implications Present findings demonstrate that preferential treatment can evoke opportunistic behaviors among customers. The authors suggest that preferential treatment should be provided to customers who previously invested in their relationship with a company (i.e. repeat customers) rather than new customers. Originality/value Prior research has focused more on the ways companies prioritize their repeat customers than how they surprise their new customers. The present research instead examines preferential treatment based on customers’ relationship with a firm (i.e. both repeat and new customers) and demonstrates behavioral and contextual effects of entitlement

Gap di progettazione: come innovare e sviluppare nuovi servizi

Analisi dei processi di sviluppo dei nuovi servizi attraverso la prospettiva della Service-Dominant Logic

The Ties that Bind: How Cooperative Norms and Readiness to Change Shape the Role of Established Relationships in B-to-B E-Commerce

Mainstream research indicates that close, long-term ties with business customers have beneficial effects; however, an alternative stream advances the possibility of a “dark side” of close relations, especially when the original conditions of the relationships change. This empirical study investigates how established buyer–seller relationships respond to significant changes in their exchange context by considering the value of close ties in the presence of an e-commerce strategy, which generally represents a radical shift. By exploring both the direct effects of close, long-term ties on e-commerce success and the moderating effects of two key contingency factors (partners’ readiness and cooperative norms), this study reveals that the mere presence of strong, long-term customer relationships cannot guarantee performance improvements or enhance e-commerce potential. Instead, the two contingency factors modify the role of established relationships, making them as either points of strength or weakness in presence of a change. These findings suggest important theoretical and managerial insights

Le tappe principali del dibattito sul marketing dei servizi

Review sui principali contributi scientifici che hanno caratterizzato la nascita e lo sviluppo della tematica del marketing dei serviz

What makes crowdfunding projects successful ‘before’ and ‘during’ the campaign?

This chapter sets out to deepen the understanding of crowdfunding campaigns, and investigates a hand-collected database of 500 projects taken from Kickstarter.com, the biggest crowdfunding website in terms of revenue. Through a logistic regression and mediation model, our study tries to explain which are the predictors that can help reaching the funding goal of a crowdfunding initiative

Information Technology and Small Businesses

Today, critical IT solutions are instruments for strategic changes in business processes, whose adoption and impact likely follow different rules than those expected for automation. For this reason this book has two basic purposes, which are reflected in the content of its two main parts: • To build a coherent model explaining IT adoption among SMEs (part one); and • To investigate the conditions under which such technologies may improve the performance of SMEs (part two)

Forgiare il futuro : l'effectuation theory e il percorso imprenditoriale di Loccioni

No abstract availabl

Service Innovation Viewed Through a Service-Dominant Logic Lens: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Analysis

Research to date on service innovation is rooted primarily in traditional new product development focusing on tangible goods. In this article, the authors invoke insights from the emerging service-dominant logic (SDL) perspective and propose a conceptual framework for investigating the antecedents and consequences of service innovation. They then develop a set of hypotheses pertaining to potential predictors of two distinct facets of service innovation (volume and radicalness) and the impact of the latter on two measures of firm performance (revenue growth and profit growth). They test their proposed model using data from a sample of luxury hotels and find that (a) collaborating with customers fosters innovation volume but not radicalness (and vice versa for collaborating with business partners); (b) a firm’s customer orientation—both directly and in interaction with innovative orientation—contributes to innovation radicalness; (c) collaborating with contact employees enhances both innovation volume and radicalness; (d) the use of knowledge integration mechanisms contributes to innovation radicalness (but not volume); and (e) both innovation outcomes have significant but somewhat different effects on the two performance measures. They discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of their findings and conclude with the study’s limitations and directions for further research

Facing supply chain disruptions: strategies to ensure relational continuity

The COVID-19 pandemic is not comparable for extension and implications to any other crisis faced by organizations over the last decades. Understandably, in its first and most acute phases, managers have focused their attention on how companies could ensure business continuity at the organizational level, by guaranteeing safe operating conditions and reshaping working procedures. Yet, for companies operating in business markets, adjusting internal processes to face a supply chain disruption is not enough to ensure business continuity, as these companies also need to sustain the network of external relationships in the whole supply chain in which they operate. To avoid jeopardizing their long-term survival, maintain their scope of action, and keep up with the challenges of the new normal, business companies need to engage in effective strategies that focus on a different component of business continuity, which we call relational continuity. After a brief review of the literature, the chapter first introduces the relational continuity concept in supply chain relationships. Drawing on a series of qualitative in-depth interviews with managers from the industrial machinery industry, whose sampled firms are actually connected through a direct supplier-client relationship, the chapter identifies three strategies that industrial companies should implement to ensure relational continuity with their key partners (suppliers and especially clients): supply chain intelligence, relational slack and key partners’ integration. Their full-fledged implementation proved to smooth and strengthen relationships among all players in the supply-chain and make business companies more responsive and capable to address the relational challenges of the “new normal” scenario