This research, investigating retailer-consumer relationships, has three distinct intended contributions: (1) It shows that different relationship marketing tactics have a differential impact on consumer perceptions of a retailer’s relationship investment; (2) it demonstrates that perceived relationship investment affects relationship quality, ultimately leading to behavioral loyalty; and (3) it reveals that the effect of perceived relationship investment on relationship quality is contingent on a consumer’s product category involvement and proneness to engage in retail relationships. The authors empirically cross-validate the underlying conceptual model by studying six consumer samples in a three-country, transatlantic, comparative survey that investigates two industries.

Investments in Consumer Relationships: A Cross-Country and Cross-Industry Exploration

Hedonic shopping motivations

Louis Wirth's classic description of the social and psychological effects of urbanism is organized into a model for the purpose of reviewing relevant theory and empirical research. Evidence on predicted structural effects (differentiation, formal integration and anomie) and individual effects (sensory overload, role mobility, isolation and deviance) is, at most, mixed. The best-supported predictions are of differentiation and deviance. Alternative models of urban life are explored, and, in the process of the review, research directions are suggested.

"Urbanism as a Way of Life" A Review and an Agenda

Consumers use a variety of decision-making styles. This paper conceptualizes eight basic characteristics of these styles and develops a Consumer Styles Inventory to measure them empirically. Factor analysis of the Consumer Styles Inventory validates these eight consumer characteristics. A valid and reliable method for presenting a Profile of Consumer Style, based on measures of the eight style characteristics, is described. Unique findings of the research are discussed, and applications of the Consumer Styles Inventory in consumer education, consumer research, and family financial counseling are suggested.

A methodology for profiling consumers' decision-making styles

A typology of online shoppers based on shopping motivations

Chicago housewives comprise four types of shoppers: economic, personalizing, ethical, and apathetic. The personalization and moralization of customer-clerk relationships cannot be inferred from conventional proposition about the anonymity of city life, yet the shoppers are urbanites. Each type of shopper is distinguished by a specific pattern of social characteristics reflecting her position in the social structure of her residential community. Moreover, some evidence suggests that personalizing shoppers draw on their relationships with clerks to form subjective identifications with a community in which they have restricted opportunities for participation.

Gregory P. Stone

Papers

City Shoppers and Urban Identification: Observations on the Social Psychology of City Life