Exploring the preference structure for online and traditional retail formats

The growth of Internet technology and electronic commerce has not been matched by theoretically-guided social science research. Clear and well designed consumer research is needed to describe, explain, and predict what will happen to this changing landscape. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the structure for consumer preferences to make product purchases through three available retail formats - store, catalog, and the Internet. Conjoint analysis was used to assess the structure of the decision and the importance of the attributes in the decision-making process. The results from this study noticeably show that the structure of the consumer decision-making process was found to be primarily one of choosing the retail format (store, catalog, or Internet) and price of product (set at low, medium or high) desired. The strength of the retail store format suggests that fears that the Internet will take over the retail arena seem, at least at this point in time, overblown and exaggerated. However, there seems to be an identifiable segment of customers that has a preference for the Internet as a retail shopping alternative

The Impact of Team Efficacy Development on Performance in Multi-Team Service Systems

Prof. dr. Martin Wetzels, hoogleraar Marketing and Supply Chain Research in de Faculteit der Economische Wetenschappen & Bedrijfskunde

The role of corporate image and extension similarity in service brand extensions

In this article we examine the role of corporate image in extending service brands to new and traditional markets in the telecommunications sector. With regards to corporate image, service brand extensions are primarily associated with innovation-related attributes, such as order of entry (i.e., pioneers versus followers). Increasingly, firms are extending their services to markets that are beyond the markets that they traditionally have been active in. The results of an experimental study show that consumers evaluate service extensions by providers with an innovative late mover image more favourably that service extensions by companies with a pioneer image in terms of perceived corporate credibility and expected service quality. With regards to these evaluation criteria, it was also found that consumers prefer service brand extensions to related rather than unrelated markets. In addition we find that the relative distance between service providers with an innovative late mover image and pioneers is larger in related markets

Customer evaluations of after-sales service contact modes : an empirical analysis of national culture's consequences

Technological advances extend the after-sales services portfolio from traditional service encounters to voice- and bit-based services. Technology enables service organizations to transcend geographical as well as cultural boundaries. It might even result in geographical convergence, often treated synonymously with cultural convergence. In this paper we address this issue. This paper examines the interaction between perceived service performance and national cultural characteristics in the formation of customer satisfaction for three types of after-sales service contact modes. The results suggest that, in contrast to the traditional face-to-face service encounter, the perceived quality-satisfaction relationship is particularly moderated by national culture in case of an after-sales service contact mode mediated by technology

An assessment of measurement invariance between online and mail surveys

One of the latest trends in marketing research is the increasing use of online surveys, which offer lower costs and faster responses. Yet, critics question whether data collected via online surveys are equivalent to data collected via traditional mail surveys. Since existing evidence from the comparison of Web-based and paper-and-pencil surveys is inconclusive, we empirically examine the equivalence of online and traditional mail surveys in a marketing context