Alexander Buoye

Data‐driven services marketing in a connected world

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the benefits of data-driven services marketing and provide a conceptual framework for how to link traditional and new sources of customer data and their metrics. Linking data and metrics to strategic and tactical business insights and integrating a variety of metrics into a forward-looking dashboard to measure marketing ROI and guide future marketing spend is explored. Design/methodology/approach – A detailed synthesis of the literature is conducted and contemporary sources of marketing data are categorized into traditional, digital and neurophysiological. The benefits and drawbacks of each data type are described and advantages of integrating different sources of data are proposed. Findings – The findings point to the importance and untapped potential of data in its ability to inform tactical and strategic marketing decisions. Future challenges, including top management support, ethical considerations and developing data and analytic capabilities, are discussed. Practical implications – The results demonstrate the need for executive service marketing dashboards that include key metrics that are service-relevant, complementary and forward-looking, with proven linkages to business outcomes. Originality/value – This paper provides a synthesis of data-driven services marketing and the value of traditional and contemporary metrics. Since the true potential of data-driven service management in a connected world is still largely unexplored, this paper also delineates fruitful avenues for future research

Perceptions are relative: An examination of the relationship between relative satisfaction metrics and share of wallet

Purpose – There is general agreement among researchers and practitioners that satisfaction is relative to competitive alternatives. Nonetheless, researchers and managers have not treated satisfaction as a relative construct. The result has been weak relationships between satisfaction and share of wallet in the literature, and challenges by managers as to whether satisfaction is a useful predictor of customer behavior and business outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the best approach for linking satisfaction to share of wallet. Design/methodology/approach – Using data from 79,543 consumers who provided 258,743 observations regarding the brands that they use (over 650 brands) covering 20 industries from 15 countries, various models such as the Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR), Zipf-AE, and Zipf-PM, truncated geometric model, generalization of the WAR and hierarchical regression models are compared to each other. Findings – The results indicate that the relationship between satisfaction and share o...

A Five-Component Customer Commitment Model: Implications for Repurchase Intentions in Goods and Services Industries

Empirical studies in marketing conceptualize commitment as a three-component construct comprised of affective, normative, and calculative commitment. We develop and empirically test a five-component typology of consumer commitment—affective, normative, economic, forced, and habitual commitment. The broadened conceptualization of commitment is tested using qualitative and quantitative studies with data from 9,000 consumers and 10 countries. The broadened five-component commitment model demonstrates high levels of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and stability, as well as unique associations with repurchase intentions. Managerially, it provides a roadmap for optimizing commitment: while forced commitment should be minimized, economic and habitual commitment should be enhanced. These prescriptions vary for goods and services. Namely, affective, normative, and habitual commitment exhibit stronger positive effects on repurchase intentions for goods than for services; the opposite pattern is found for economic commitment. By showing how managers should optimize specific commitment dimensions rather than simply maximize overall commitment, while accounting for contextual factors such as differences between goods and services, our results provide an actionable strategic blueprint for firms’ customer commitment strategy.

The cumulative effect of satisfaction with discrete transactions on share of wallet

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model for how consumers aggregate satisfaction with individual service encounters to form a summary evaluation of satisfaction, and further examines its effect on customers’ share of category spending (share of wallet (SOW)). Design/methodology/approach – The data used consist of 10,983 completed surveys from 1,448 customers whose transaction-specific satisfaction with a retailer and their subsequent purchase behaviors in the category were tracked for more than four transactions. Mixed effects models were employed to test the relationship between the cumulative effect of satisfaction with multiple service encounters on SOW. Findings – Cumulative satisfaction is a weighted average of satisfaction with specific encounters, with weights decaying geometrically so that more recent encounters receive more weight. More recent transaction-specific satisfaction levels tend to have greater influence on customers’ next purchase SOW allocations; this, ho...

SIGNALS, SYMBOLS, AND VIBES: AN EXERCISE IN CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTION*

AMONG THE TOPICS usually covered in introductory sociology courses, culture may be the most far-reaching and immediately relevant. Not only do cultural concerns cut across virtually every other topic in introductory courses, but the increasing diversity of the American population and the trend toward globalization demand that students understand the challenges and rewards inherent in cross-cultural interaction (Schmid 1995). As cross-cultural contact continues to increase and the boundaries among cultures become less and less clear, the skills needed to negotiate a culturally complicated world will continue to grow in importance (Sleek 1998). When concepts about culture are

The interplay of customer experience and commitment

Purpose This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research. Design/methodology/approach This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature. Findings The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment. Practical implications Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions. Originality/value This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics.

An examination of relative satisfaction and share of wallet

Purpose – Absolute satisfaction ratings are widely used, but demonstrate a poor link to share of wallet (SOW), in part because this relationship is mediated and/or moderated by customer characteristics (including total spend in the category) and heterogeneity of scale usage. Relative satisfaction metrics, such as the Wallet Allocation Rule, have been shown to produce a much stronger link to SOW than absolute monadic ratings. The purpose of this paper is to compare absolute and relative satisfaction models after controlling for these mediating and moderating factors and re-examine the impact of these factors when using relative, rather than absolute metrics. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 3,793 satisfaction ratings by 1,172 unique grocery customers across five countries (USA, Brazil, Chile, France and Germany) are used to evaluate the mediating and moderating impacts of scale usage and customer characteristics on the relationship between satisfaction and SOW. Findings – Relative metrics continue t...

Campus racial disorders and community ties, 1967–1969

A common tactic in the analysis of the racial civil disorders of the 1960s has been to eliminate from data sets those events that occurred on university and college campuses. This procedure assumed a disjuncture between urban and campus collective violence, specifically in that the former would be related to local economic and social conditions and the latter would not. As a result, campus racial riots have not been well represented in the research on the rioting of the 1960s and their place in, and contribution to, the riot wave are not well understood. Contrary to earlier assumptions, our analysis shows a strong connection between campuses and their local context. First, campuses having stronger ties to local communities had higher rates of racial disorder during 1967–1969. Second, economic competition indicators for the local community influenced campus rioting, just as they influenced inner-city rioting. We conclude by discussing the implications of omitting campus events from past riot research.

Relative Value and Customer Choice in Loan Decisions: An Application of the Wallet Allocation Rule

Abstract Purpose – This research applies the Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR) to provide marketing scholars and practitioners with a deeper understanding of the key drivers of loan selection and to estimate the relative value borrowers place on various attributes when selecting a loan provider among competitors. Design/methodology/approach – A survey of 642 credit union (CU) members from nine geographically dispersed USA CUs was conducted. WAR analysis was conducted to measure the relative value customers place on the selected variables within and across the financial institutions that were part of the borrowers’ consideration sets. Findings – WAR analysis revealed stark differences in the value of factors in the selection of a bank or a credit union for first mortgages, suggesting that WAR analysis is a useful tool for understanding the relative value of various attributes in the selection of one loan provider over another. Originality/value –This research provides a significant contribution to both the service literature and the scientific literature in general by providing a user-friendly and scientifically tested analysis tool to measure relative value distances of ranked data and providing additional evidence for the usefulness of WAR analysis to better understand relative customer satisfaction and its implications for consumer behavior and service marketing.

Why Loyalty Matters in Retailing

Retailers have long known that their long-term success depends upon customer loyalty. In fact, legendary retailers were the first businesses to champion customer satisfaction as a source of competitive differentiation. In 1875, Montgomery Ward differentiated his mail order catalog by promising “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” By the early 1900s, Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store and London’s Selfridges department store were championing “the customer is always right” (although it is not clear whether Mr. Field or Mr. Selfridge was first to coin the phrase). Today, these catchphrases and the ideals that they convey are ubiquitous throughout the business world (although some might question the degree to which most businesses actually adhere to these principles).