George Skourtis

Segmenting East Asian Tourists to Greece by Travel Motivation

This study compares the push and pull motivations of East Asian (Japanese, Chinese and Korean) tourists who visit Greece and also proposes market segmentation based on travel motivations that transcend the national boundaries of those countries. Four main push factors were identified: “Knowledge”, “Ego-enhancement”, “Escape & Relaxation” and “Novelty”. Similarly, four pull factors were also identified: “Leisure, shopping and safety”, “Variety and cost”, “Culture & heritage” and “Travel arrangements and facilities”. Cross-cultural differences were found regarding the importance of travel motivations. Chinese tourists scored higher than other nationalities for almost all motivation categories. Although the cross-cultural differences are important, this study proposes another way to tackle the market segmentation by conducting an international segmentation based on inherent similarities across different nationalities of travelers. Three segments emerged from that analysis with the “Novelty Seekers” to be the largest followed by the “Want-it-All” and the “Lowly Motivated”.

Building Brand Love Through Co-creation

The last few years, the concept of co-creation emerges as central for both academia and industry (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder 2011). Despite the undeniable importance of this topic, the investigation of co-creation’s role in building strong brands in the literature is limited. More precisely although there is some research investigating the role of co-creation in branding issues (e.g. Payne et al. 2009; Tynan et al. 2010; Bello et al. 2007), the impact of co-creation on consumer’s love for a brand remains unexplored. This conceptual paper is a first effort to build the theoretical grounds for the relationship between co-creation and brand love. More specifically, we examine how co-creation affects various dimensions of brand love, as they have been conceptualized by Batra et al. (2012). At the same time, we provide some first theoretical insights on how co-creation can indirectly positively influence brand love through other constructs such as product quality and brand personality.

Service Failures as Value Co-destruction Moments

Although Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic is an emerging school of thought in marketing literature, recovery strategies after service failures continue to be conceptualized under the good-dominant logic paradigm. This paper proposes a different conceptualization for service failures and recoveries strategies in the S-D Logic framework. Thus, we re-conceptualize service failures as co-destruction moments due to the fact that when a service failure occurs some forms of consumption value (functional, social, emotional, epistemic, and conditional) are co-destroyed (co-destruction-moment) in similar way that they co-created during the value co-creation. Moreover, we introduce a Mechanism of Value Restoration (MVR) in order to identify and restore the loss value as a more effective service recovery strategy by applying Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s DART (dialogue, access, risk assessment and transparency) model.

The Influence of Product Knowledge on Consumer’s Company and Product Evaluations in Product-Harm Crisis Situations

This paper assesses the role of product knowledge on consumer response to product-harm crises. An experiment with three product categories – cars, notebooks, and sports drinks – was carried out. The study reveals that the company’s product evaluation, as well as company attitude and company trust depends on subjective product knowledge. Results indicate that in the case of notebooks and sports drinks experts react more positively towards a company and its products than novices do. Particularly, experts put more trust in a company facing a crisis. Moreover, they show a more favorable attitude towards the company and evaluate its products and the product confronted with the crisis higher than novices. Following these findings, assumption are made that this is based on the fact that experts have more information stored in their memories about the product category in general, and adding one piece of information – even if it is negative – makes little difference in how consumers react. The results did not confirm the hypothesis for the product category of cars; there are no significant differences between experts and novices.

CO-Creation and Brand Love: Developing a Theoretical Framework

The objective of this study is to develop a conceptual model of co-creation and brand love. The main contribution of the present study is that is suggests both a direct impact of co-creation on brand love sub-dimensions as well as an indirect one through quality. More precisely, the authors explore the influence of co-creation on self-brand integration, passion-driven behaviors, positive emotional connection, long-term relationship, anticipated separation distress, overall attitude valence, and attitude strength. It is clearly demonstrated that co-creation is associated or could lead in the aforementioned sub-dimensions of brand love. Furthermore, it is showed that co-creation has an impact on quality, which is conceptualized as one of the main antecedents of brand love. As a conclusion the authors suggest that co-creation can lead to brand love.