Aron O'Cass

Fashion clothing consumption: antecedents and consequences of fashion clothing involvement

For many years fashion clothing has been an area of interest in consumer research. This study examines the effect of materialism and self‐image product‐image congruency on consumers’ involvement in fashion clothing. It also examines purchase decision involvement, subjective fashion knowledge and consumer confidence. Data were gathered via a self‐completed mail survey, resulting in 478 responses being returned. The results indicate that fashion clothing involvement is significantly effected by a consumers degree of materialism, gender and age. Further, it was found that fashion clothing involvement influences fashion clothing knowledge. Finally, the results indicate that fashion clothing knowledge influences consumer confidence in making purchase decisions about fashion.

Examining firm and environmental influences on export marketing mix strategy and export performance of australian exporters

This study examines the impact of specific firm characteristics, environmental characteristics and marketing mix strategy on export marketing performance. Data were gathered via a mail survey of firms engaged in exporting. The results indicate that firm characteristics and environmental characteristics impact significantly on both overall performance and marketing mix strategy adaptation by exporting firms. However, the decision to adapt or standardise the marketing mix strategy did not significantly impact marketing performance, implying that either standardisation or adaptation is appropriate and yields comparable performance.

Exploring the relationships between e‐service quality, satisfaction, attitudes and behaviours in content‐driven e‐service web sites

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to develop a conceptual model to examine the relationships among e‐service quality, consumer satisfaction, attitudes towards the web site and behavioural intentions in the context of content‐driven web sites.Design/methodology/approach – Data from an online survey of 518 consumers were collected with the partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modelling technique used to empirically test the model.Findings – Findings suggest that positive evaluations of e‐service quality influences positive levels of consumer satisfaction, consumer attitudes towards the web site and behavioural intentions within the specific service context of content‐driven professional sports web sites.Research limitations/implications – The study specifically focuses on content‐centric web sites within a single service domain being professional sport. Future research can apply the framework to other service sectors on the internet, as well as to other cultural settings.Practical implicat...

Examining the role of international entrepreneurship, innovation and international market performance in SME internationalisation

Purpose – The current study aims to examine the role of international entrepreneurship and innovation in small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) internationalisation, also touching on the role of the firm size as a proxy of resources in the SME internationalisation process. The study seeks to look at these issues in the context of manufacturing firms, arguing that entrepreneurial SMEs pursuing international market entry undertake organisational innovation, which in turn enables such firms to achieve higher marketplace performance.Design/methodology/approach – The paper was based on the development and administration of a self‐completed survey of 302 managers.Findings – The results suggest that international SMEs differ from non‐international SMEs in terms of international entrepreneurship, organisational innovation intensity and firm size.Research limitations/implications – The cross‐sectional research design and the regional nature of the sampled firms may limit the generalisability of the findings. The m...

Exploring consumer experiences with a service brand

The commercial importance of services has been realised in recent times and the importance of research to understand service brands and their meaning for consumers is a growing priority. This study focuses on consumer based perceptions of brand associations of a service brand, attitudes toward and intention to use the branded service via qualitative and quantitative methods. The results indicate a number of key dimensions that are important for consumers of services such as core service, experience with brand, self‐image congruency, feelings, servicescape and interpersonal service, publicity, advertising, price and brand. However, in this study country of origin and word of mouth were not significant. Largely, the findings indicated that service brand associations influence brand attitude and attitude and associations influence intention to use a service brand.

Examining the effects of service brand communications on brand evaluation

Purpose – This study seeks to examine the effects of three communication avenues, namely controlled communication (e.g. advertising/promotions), uncontrolled communications (word‐of‐mouth (WOM)/publicity), and brand name, on consumer service brand evaluation.Design/methodology/approach – This study employed a quantitative methodology and data were gathered from consumers intercepted in a shopping mall via a self‐completed survey.Findings – The results show that controlled communications and brand name have a significant effect on customer satisfaction, brand attitudes and brand reuse intentions. WOM was shown to have a significant influence only on brand reuse intentions. In addition, comparisons made across different retail service types (e.g. stores and banks) showed differences in relationships between the examined variables.Research limitations/implications – The brand stimuli used in the survey instrument limit the findings to retail stores and banks and, thus, may not be applicable in all service si...

An exploratory perspective of service brand associations

Over the past 20 years the commercial importance of services has been realised, highlighting the importance of research to understand service brands and their meaning for consumers. However, to date, the branding models developed lack empirical testing, are derived from the perspective of brand practitioners rather than consumers, and pay little attention to the branding of services. This study seeks consumer‐based information via qualitative and quantitative methods regarding brand dimensions that hold meaning to consumers for branded services. The results indicate a number of key dimensions that are important to consumers for both goods and services, such as core product/service, experience with brand and image of user. Dimensions such as feelings and self‐image congruence were not found to be important, while word‐of‐mouth, servicescape, and employees held importance for branded services. The results also indicate significant relationships for brand dimension importance and brand associations, associations and attitudes, and attitudes and intentions. The results suggest important implications for brand managers, in addition to providing a platform on which future research can be built to further understand service branding.

Examining the Firm's Value Creation Process: A Managerial Perspective of the Firm's Value Offering Strategy and Performance

The primary pursuit of any business is to understand what customers value and to create that value for them. While customers are the final arbiter of value, it is the firms role to explore, interpret and deliver value based on what they believe customers are seeking. Based on this premise we adopt the firms perspective on value creation to extend both Bowman and Ambrosinis theoretical framework and the work of DeSarbo, Jedidi and Sinha and focus on two issues. The first is the strategic emphasis firms place on the design and delivery of their value offering. The second is the extent the firms value offering explains performance differentials at the customer-centric performance level. We present a conceptual model of how firms gain positional advantage via their value offering and the realized outcomes they achieve. We present two approaches to modelling the firms value offering (type II and type IV models) and articulate the theoretical underpinnings and results for these models. Our results validate the conceptualization of the firms value offering and suggest that creating superior value offerings enables firms to achieve superiority in customer-centric performance.

Implementing competitive strategies: The role of responsive and proactive market orientations

Purpose – This study seeks to draw on the strategy implementation approach and the resource‐based view of the firm (RB theory) to investigate the relationships among competitive strategies (i.e. differentiation and cost‐leadership), responsive market orientation (RMO), proactive market orientation (PMO) and firm performance. The purpose is to show that competitive strategies have a significant effect on market orientation and market orientation has a significant effect on firm performance.Design/methodology/approach – The paper designed a mail‐survey that was sent to senior executives, which resulted in 189 usable surveys. Data were analysed using partial least squares (PLS) to test the hypotheses.Findings – The findings show that both competitive strategies influence RMO and PMO, which then influence firm performance. However, the results show that differentiation strategy has a stronger influence on RMO and PMO than cost‐leadership strategy, and that PMO has a stronger influence on performance than RMO....

Developing a framework for understanding e-service quality, its antecedents, consequences, and mediators

Purpose – This research seeks to extend the work of Dabholkar et al. into the e‐retail domain to assess alternate theoretical frameworks of e‐service quality. Particular focus is placed on e‐service quality and whether elements of e‐service quality should be viewed by dimensions, as antecedents to a global evaluation of e‐service quality, or as a formative configuration to predict behavioral intentions. The mediating role of customer satisfaction is also to be explored in these frameworks.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is premised on an empirical study using cross‐sectional data from actual consumers. Data from a survey of 518 online consumers were used to test the research models through the use of a structured equation modeling (SEM) tool.Findings – The results show support for all three theoretical models, and slightly stronger support for the formative model. Customer satisfaction was also found to play a mediating role on behavioral intentions within these e‐service quality models.Research ...