Francis Farrelly

The role of value change management in relationship dissolution:hygiene and motivational factors

Responding to client needs is a central tenet of marketing, and thought vital to relationship renewal in the business-to-business context. We explore this issue by examining whether supplier response to client requests for value change is sufficient motivation for client firms to renew relationships with advertising agencies. Based on 17 dyadic interviews we find that reacting to client initiated value change is a relationship hygiene factor that does not of itself encourage renewal as it fails to evolve the structure of the relationship over time, and leads to client perceptions of supplier complacency. Although firms must respond to customer requests for value change to avoid dissatisfaction developing in the relationship, they must also actively seek to improve the relationship through driving market actions. We identified these as supplier initiated value change (SIVC), contributing to the emerging literature on value change by identifying a more vital component of managing client relationships to avoid dissolution and enhance the prospects of renewal.

The viral marketing metaphor explored through Vegemite

Purpose – Viral marketing draws heavily on the success of a few mythic campaigns. However, the viral metaphor limits previous perspectives as to why consumers engage with content and importantly, why they pass it on. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – The authors explore why consumers engaged with Kraft’s “How do you love your Vegemite?” campaign using multiple sources of evidence including interviews, blog post comments, and firm market research. Findings – The choice to engage with content is driven by consumers’ desire for self-authentication, in particular the desire to express one’s identity through an authenticating act, and express membership of a collective via an authoritative performance. In so doing, the authors identify the limits of adopting an epidemiological metaphor for campaigns reliant on consumer agency. Originality/value – This study is unique because it proposes an alternative focus to a fundamental metaphor and has both conceptual and practical value.

Student Engagement: A Multiple Layer Phenomenon

Universities are seeking to actively and strategically manage student engagement through providing opportunities for students to interact and engage with the institution on a range of levels and in different ways. However, this increasingly complex and multi-layered nature of student engagement within a tertiary education environment is not well understood. Through qualitative focus groups and a series of interviews with undergraduate and postgraduate students, this study explores and articulates the cognitive, emotional, behavioural and social dimensions of engagement that depict the nature of student engagement. This is one of the first studies that considers social engagement as a dimension of the broader engagement construct and provides an illustration of social engagement at different levels within a tertiary education setting. Further, we demonstrate that engagement occurs with three key focal objects (or levels) embedded within the university structure; the lecturer, course and the institution itself. Hence, this paper contributes to the literature by providing a multi-layered consideration of student engagement and demonstrating the nested nature of engagement across the broad service system (the university), the narrow service system (the course), and the individual dyadic level of engagement (the student-lecturer interaction). These findings could be further considered and empirically tested in other engagement contexts (e.g. employee engagement, customer engagement).

Loyalty or liability: Resolving the consumer fanaticism paradox

“Fanaticism” and its cognates, “fan” and “fanatic,” have been defined in inconsistent, contradictory, and often, nondiscriminant ways across disciplines. Due to these problematic conceptualizations, and particularly the mixed yet growing state of the literature in marketing, there is a need to revisit the phenomenon. Through a comprehensive review and synthesis of the existing literature, this article identifies the key defining characteristics of consumer fanaticism (i.e. “affective commitment” and “extraordinary pursuit”) and presents a typology (consisting of four types of fanaticism, i.e. rewarding, destructive, stigmatized, and rogue) to demonstrate the socially situated and subjective nature of the fanatic label. In doing so, the authors advance current theorizing on this topic by explaining and resolving the conflicting and paradoxical perspectives that currently exist in the literature. The authors also present a framework that distinguishes consumer fanaticism from other forms of consumption. They propose a research agenda for future studies of consumer fanaticism and demonstrate its strong potential to contribute fresh insights into other marketing phenomena.

Tourism Ethnocentrism and its Effects on Tourist and Resident Behavior

People often demonstrate a home country bias toward their own nation over other nations. This bias is an important determinant of their behavior. Drawing on seminal research from marketing and psychology, the authors provide the first investigation of the tourism ethnocentrism (TE) phenomenon that captures tourists’ and residents’ motivation to support the domestic tourism economy. The research reported herein develops the parsimonious, reliable, and valid TE scale, and provides an empirical test thereof. The results show that TE is an important means to investigate both tourists’ and residents’ behavior. It drives tourists’ willingness to engage in and recommend domestic tourism, as well as residents’ support for domestic tourism development. The results further reveal that higher levels of tourists’ “perceived self-efficacy to contribute to the domestic economy” and lower levels of “perceived economy support of others” strengthen TE’s effect. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.

Co-Creation in a Service Innovation Context

In the recent past, research on innovation was primarily concerned with processes which were initiated, executed and managed by the provider themselves. Unique skills were developed internally by the organizations and kept secret from the market until launch (Chesbrough 2003). More recently, organizations have realized the importance of collaborating with other actors to advance their capabilities and innovation competencies (Camarinha-Matos 2009; Chen, Tsou and Ching 2011). Current approaches to innovation embrace a multi-actor approach and a paradigm shift has occurred from closed innovation to collaborative and open innovation (Greer and Lei 2012). Aligned with Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s (2000) concept of ‘co-creation’, scholars have started to examine the collaborative role of customers in innovation. While there has been a focus in past on integrating lead users into the innovation process (e.g. von Hippel 1986; Herstatt and von Hippel 1992), more research is needed on general customer innovation and community innovation contributions, particularly in a service context. Attention has accordingly shifted from the tangible aspects of product innovation to the co-produced innovation process and the co-created value between an organization and its customers. Understanding how this notion can be harnessed for the purposes of innovating service and service solutions, is a current managerial and academic challenge (Ordanini and Parasuraman 2011). This paper addresses calls for a greater understanding of the involvement of customers in service innovation and argues for collaborative behaviors to drive service innovation performance. The specific behaviors exhibited by customers in this process will be investigated by way of the proposed co-creation construct and its behavioral manifestations (Yi and Gong 2012).

Exploring Voids and Consumer Addiction

Consumers can form intense relationships with products and brands (Fournier 1998), where some may “fall in love” with and become highly passionate, devoted, and deeply committed to their favorite product/brand (Batra et al. 2012; Lastovicka and Sirianni 2011; Ortiz et al. 2013). These highly devoted consumers voluntarily engage in behaviors that are beneficial to the product/brand such as by remaining loyal to its repeat purchases, spreading positive word-of-mouth and/or being protective of the product/brand and its continued pursuit, sometimes despite criticisms from others (Chung et al. 2008). The existing literature, however, also reveals a dark side to some of these highly intense attachments to products/brands, where some consumers can become obsessed, consumed, or addicted to its continued pursuit and acquisition (e.g., Belk 1995; Holbrook 1987; Hill and Robinson 1991; Lehmann 1987).

Towards an Understanding of The Motivations to Play Games on Smartphones

Smartphones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous personal items that continue to evolve and shape our consumption experiences through the applications (apps) used on them, almost half of which are games. The mobile game ‘Angry Birds’ has been downloaded over one billion times. These consumption patterns continue to define what is fast becoming an ‘emerging ludic society’ (Kallio, Mayra, & Kaipainen, 2011) and implications for marketers lie in the growing area of gamification (Deterding, Dixon, & Khaled, 2011). Video gaming is now a social norm (Kallio et al., 2011; Mayra, 2008). This research seeks to fill a gap in the consumer behaviour literature by providing a conceptual model to explain motivation as the antecedents of play on smartphones. Since the continuing cultural penetration of video games is inevitable, employing new theoretical models and empirically exploring these domains becomes ever more important in order to inform more effective health and education interventions as well as advancing the basic science of humans at play (Przybylski, Rigby, & Ryan, 2010).

Interview with Carl Grebert, Brand Director Nike Asia Pacific

In this interview the context, strategic dimensions and success factors underpinning sponsorship are discussed. In the context of Nikes corporate philosophy and the forces of globalisation, Grebert and Farrelly look at the importance of aligning the brands of both the sponsor and the property and the implications for market segmentation. A strong emphasis is placed on factors that contribute to the effectiveness and success of Nikes sponsorship programmes.