This research examined the impact of culture on customer evaluations of complex services. The goal was to underStand the trade-offs that Western and Asian customers are willing to make between personalized service and pleasant physical environment in a context of luxury hotels. Overall, the results from the conjoint analysis suggest that customers with Western cultural backgrounds might be more likely than their Asian counterparts to rely on the tangible cues from the physical environment. Furthermore, the hedonic dimension of the consumption experience might be more important for Western consumers, whose core values include fun and enjoyment, than for Asians, whose value structures tend to reflect duty in life.

The Role of Culture in the Service Evaluation Process

This study was developed to shed some light on the role of culture and purchase motivation in influencing consumers’ evaluations of services. More specifically, the goal was to contrast Asian and Western travelers’ perceptions of brief, routine‐type service encounters in a hotel context. The results of this empirical study suggest that culture‐based biases in the evaluation process might depend on the consumers’ purchase‐related goals. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the use of expressed emotions as an indicator of how the customer feels about the service might be restricted to Western customers. Managerial implications of this study relate to the training of customer‐contact employees.

The role of culture and purchase motivation in service encounter evaluations

Retailer Pricing and Competitive Effects

This article aims to show the potentialities of means-end chains for cross-cultural hospitality research. By means of laddering interviews, this work attempted to uncover major attribute-consequence-value chains for luxury hotels that may exist among Asian and Western business travelers. The results, although exploratory, suggest that the personally relevant meanings that customers hold for luxury hotels might depend on the individual's ethnic background. Managerial implications of the findings for global luxury hotels are discussed.

An Analysis of Means-End Hierarchies in Cross-Cultural Context: What Motivates Asian and Western Business Travelers to Stay at Luxury Hotels?

Among the most important activities for supermarket retailers is the creation and marketing of store brands, also known as private label brands. Given the increasing quality-equivalence between national brands and store brands, they have become direct competitors, and pricing decisions should take this into account. In most cases, national brands still possess some degree of pricing and market power over store brands. In this chapter, we defi ne three components of market power for national brands versus store brands: (1) price premium; (2) volume premium; and (3) margin premium. Our chapter proceeds along the following lines. First, we delineate the factors that are the most important drivers of the three components of premium. Second, we discuss managerial implications about key success factors in the pricing of national brands and store brands. A key contribution of this chapter is that we incorporate emerging insights from the marketing literature on the pricing and market power of national brands versus store brands. Finally, we conclude by offering important future research directions.

Pricing of National Brands Versus Store Brands: Market Power Components, Findings and Research Opportunities

The current crisis in East Asia has prompted many questions about the Tiger economies and their consumers:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fbm.1998.6.pdf

Tigers don't change their stripes: East Asian consumer trends and the economic downturn

/pdf/the-brand-is-dead-long-live-the-brand-3lrjryxa3m.pdf

Ralph Kugler

Papers

Tigers don't change their stripes: East Asian consumer trends and the economic downturn

The brand is dead: Long live the brand