Daniel Hampson

Opportunities and challenges of value co-creation: the role of customer involvement in hotel service development

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the double-edged sword of customer involvement (perceived relationship quality and coordination cost) in new service development in the hotel industry, and to explore when customers should be involved from the service provider’s view. Design/methodology/approach A total of 252 valid questionnaires were collected from hotel managers, and ordinary least squares regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses. Findings Results not only show that customer involvement causes higher coordination cost but also show no direct positive effect on perceived relationship quality. Furthermore, this study finds that service climate reduces the negative effect of customer involvement and enhances its positive effect. By contrast, customer complexity intensifies the negative effect of customer involvement. Originality/value This study empirically examines the double-edged sword of customer involvement and tests the boundary conditions associated with hotel back and front office factors (service climate versus customer complexity).

Adaptive Spending in an Economic Crisis: Segmentation by Adaptation Patterns

There exists a very limited academic research base regarding consumer behavior in economic crises. Consequently, important lessons have either not been learned or have been quickly forgotten. Baker (2009) attributes the dearth of recessionary research in marketing to ‘research myopia’, specifically, that marketers tend not to perceive similarities between present events and past experience. However, though some consumer adaptations are transient, research suggests many more endure economic recovery (e.g., Lamey et al. 2007). The limited research base that does exist has several fundamental limitations. These include a focus on very broad categories of products and services (e.g., McDaniel et al. 1986); a tendency to measure changes at only one point in time during what are very turbulent phenomena (e.g., Ang 2001); and, analyses that focus on aggregate change rather than on a spectrum of adaptive responses (e.g., Zurawicki and Braidot 2005). Based upon these limitations, this research seeks a more robust understanding of how consumers adjust their spending patterns during an economic crisis. The researchers build hypotheses regarding the types and causes of spending adaptations, likely consumer differentials in adaptive behaviors, and the dynamic nature of consumer adaptations over the course of an economic crisis.

Consumers in a turbulent economy: normative, egoistic and economic antecedents to store (dis)loyalty and store-brand proneness

Since 2007, the global economic downturn has become one of the most destabilizing, ambiguous and deterministic macro-environmental step changes to confront retailers in recent decades. Although it is often (erroneously) assumed that conditions revert to “normal” post-crisis, the theory of cyclical asymmetry suggests that consumers are quicker to reduce their spending in response to a crisis than they are to revert back to “normal” (Deleersnyder et al. 2004). In this context, the researchers seek to understand how and why the economic crisis has impacted the key retailing foci of store loyalty and store-brand proneness.

Attitudinal Segmentation and Loyalty of Retailer Online Community Users

Over the past decade, online communities have been discussed in terms of their utility to facilitate new product development (e.g., Fuller et al., 2004) and word of mouth marketing (Kozinets et al., 2010) and as a marketing research tool (Pitta and Fowler, 2005). However, only a very limited amount of research has been conducted that attempts to segment users of online communities. Instead, it has been commonly assumed that a community is comprised of individuals that share a large degree of homogeneity in their attitudes and preferences (e.g., Muiniz and O’Guinn, 2001). However, evidence from studies of the broader construct of brand communities has highlighted that there is a greater amount of heterogeneity between members than some conceptualizations permit (Ouwersloot and Odekerken-Schroder, 2008). However very few of papers exist that identify the structure and implications of this heterogeneity in the more specific context of online brand communities.