Through qualitative and empirical research, the authors find that the service quality construct conforms to the structure of a third-order factor model that ties service quality perceptions to distinct and actionable dimensions: outcome, interaction, and environmental quality. In turn, each has three subdimensions that define the basis of service quality perceptions. The authors further suggest that for each of these subdimensions to contribute to improved service quality perceptions, the quality received by consumers must be perceived to be reliable, responsive, and empathetic. The authors test and support this conceptualization across four service industries. They consider the research and managerial implications of the study and its limitations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3203465.pdf

Some New Thoughts on Conceptualizing Perceived Service Quality: A Hierarchical Approach:

The End of History and the Last Man

This article provides a synthesizing overview of the past 20 yr. of consumer research addressing the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption. Our aim is to provide a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory (CCT). We propose that CCT has fulfilled recurrent calls for developing a distinctive body of theoretical knowledge about consumption and marketplace behaviors. In developing this argument, we redress three enduring misconceptions about the nature and analytic orientation of CCT. We then assess how CCT has contributed to consumer research by illuminating the cultural dimensions of the consumption cycle and by developing novel theorizations concerning four thematic domains of research interest.

/pdf/consumer-culture-theory-cct-twenty-years-of-research-3gcdikziju.pdf

Consumer Culture Theory (Cct): Twenty Years of Research

From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing

In today’s highly dynamic and interactive business environment, the role of “customer engagement” (CE) in cocreating customer experience and value is receiving increasing attention from business practitioners and academics alike. Despite this interest, systematic scholarly inquiry into the concept and its conceptual distinctiveness from other, associated relational concepts has been limited to date. This article explores the theoretical foundations of CE by drawing on relationship marketing theory and the service-dominant (S-D) logic. The analysis also examines the use of the term “engagement” in the social science, management, and marketing academic literatures, as well as in specific business practice applications. Five fundamental propositions (FPs) derived from this analysis are used to develop a general definition of CE, and distinguish the concept from other relational concepts, including “participation” and “involvement.” The five propositions are used in the development of a framework for future r...

http://www.artexperience.it/uploads/9/2/9/2/9292963/brodie_et_alt__customer_engagement.pdf

Customer Engagement Conceptual Domain, Fundamental Propositions, and Implications for Research

This paper presents an alternative, “Latin” vision of our societies. Here the urgent societal issue is not to celebrate freedom from social constraints, but to re‐establish communal embeddedness. The citizen of 2002 is less interested in the objects of consumption than in the social links and identities that come with them. This Latin view holds that people like to gather together in tribes and that such social, proximate communities are more affective and influential on people’s behaviour than either marketing institutions or other “formal” cultural authorities. There is also an element of resistance and re‐appropriation in the acts of being, gathering and experiencing together. This view of the shared experience of tribes sets it apart from both Northern notions of segmented markets and one‐to‐one relationships. In this Latin view, the effective marketing of 2002 and beyond is not to accept and exploit consumers in their contemporary individualisation, as Northern approaches might. Rather the future of marketing is in offering and supporting a renewed sense of community. Marketing becomes tribal marketing. In a marketing profession challenged by the Internet phenomenon, tribal marketing is by no means just another passing fad but a Trojan horse to induce companies to take on board the re‐emergence of the quest for community.

Tribal marketing: The tribalisation of society and its impact on the conduct of marketing

The notion of experience entered the field of consumption and marketing with Holbrook and Hirschman's pioneering article of 1982. Twenty years later, this notion has become a key element in understanding consumer behaviour, and, in some views, a foundation for the economy and marketing of the future. In our view, however, this development is not without its risks, as the concept of experience is still illdefined or, worse, defined in ideological terms. To this end, the present paper looks 1) to give an overview of the different meanings ascribed to the word `experience' in various scientific disciplines and to detail the different meanings ascribed to the notion of consumption experience; and 2) to highlight, using a deconstructive approach, that in the field of marketing we must use a typology of consumption experiences which goes beyond an ideological view that tends to consider every experience as extraordinary.

Revisiting Consumption Experience A More Humble but Complete View of the Concept

Purpose – To analyse the power that a virtual brand community exerts over a brand of a mass‐marketed convenience product. To draw implications about the strategy that a company can employ facing this power shift. To track emerging trends in virtual brand communities applied to convenience product (as opposed to niche or luxury goods).Design/methodology/approach – Case study of the web community “my Nutella The Community” promoted by the firm Ferrero in Italy. The study applied multiple methods and was conducted through interviews with key informants, netnography and document analysis.Findings – The virtual community that gathers around a convenience product brand shows a new form of sociality and customer empowerment: it is not based on interaction between peers, but more on personal self‐exhibition in front of other consumers through the marks and rituals linked to the brand. The company should play the role of non‐intrusive enabler of these personal expressions, reducing its control over the brand's mea...

Brand community of convenience products: new forms of customer empowerment – the case “my Nutella The Community”

Encapsulates the debate on the topics of confusion in consumption and the return of community. Starting with an ethnosociological analysis structuring the passage from modernity to postmodernity around the metamorphosis of the social link, aims at clarifying and explaining the different levels of the postmodern confusion in consumption. Modernity entered history as a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from everyday obligations and traditional bonds. As a consequence, modern consumption emphasized essentially the utilitarian value (“use value”) of products and services. Postmodernity, on the contrary, can be said to crown not the triumph of individualism, but the beginning of its end with the emergence of a reverse movement of a desperate search for community. With the neo‐tribalism distinguishing postmodernity, everyday life seems to mark out the importance of a forgotten element: the social link. Consequently, postmodern consumption appears to emphasize the “linking value” of products and services. Concludes with an exploration of the implications of postmodernity for rethinking marketing with the integration of the linking value concept.

Community and consumption

In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorized as producers. However, these theorizations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This pap...

/pdf/working-consumers-the-next-step-in-marketing-theory-574vhen5nz.pdf

Bernard Cova

Papers

Tribal marketing: The tribalisation of society and its impact on the conduct of marketing

Revisiting Consumption Experience A More Humble but Complete View of the Concept

Brand community of convenience products: new forms of customer empowerment – the case “my Nutella The Community”

Community and consumption

Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?: