Gillian Hogg

Consumer behaviour and services: A review

This article reviews the current literature in the fields of consumer behaviour and the marketing of services in order to examine the main issues facing the consumer in purchasing services, as opposed to goods. Five distinguishing characteristics of services are discussed and the implications of these for the consumers are placed within the information processing model of consumer behaviour theory. The article suggests that there are particular problems for consumers in acquiring effective information regarding services, making comparisons on the basis of that information and subsequently evaluating the service encounter. It is our contention that unless consumer responses to the particular problems associated with services are clarified, service marketing may be in danger of pursuing provider‐orientated solutions rather than understanding the actual nature of the consumer decision process when purchasing services.

The glory of stories: Using critical incidents to understand service evaluation in the primary healthcare context

This paper reports the results of a research project into the determinants of consumer evaluation of services. The research uses the healthcare context to explore consumer perceptions of the service product dimensions. Using a critical incident technique, a consumer‐derived model of the relationships between core and peripheral aspects of the service is presented. The results indicate that evaluation is a function of both personal and organizational factors which comprise core and peripheral components of the service.

Competing for Patients: Understanding Consumer Evaluation of Primary Care

The introduction of a competitive market into primary care means that general practitioners must consider the way in which their patients evaluate the service which they receive. Reports the results of an exploratory study carried out in Scotland to investigate the evaluative strategies used by patients in assessing the service they receive. Identifies six particular dimensions of the care process which have implications for GPs protecting their existing patient lists and in understanding how to attract new patients. Suggests through its results that while communicating certain features of the service to potential patients is relatively straightforward, the experiential nature of primary care services leads to a reliance on word-of-mouth communication which depends on ensuring that existing patients are satisfied.

Purchasing public relations: The case of the public relations industry in Scotland

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of various sources and types of information used by purchasers in a specific context; the purchase of public relations services. This paper discusses the particular characteristics of public relations services that affect the information available in the pre‐purchase phase and the various sources of that information. The research concludes that both the type of information used and the sources of that information are affected by both the public relations product variant and the availability of in‐house public relations specialists.

The Role of Interpersonal Trust in the Client-Consultancy Relationship: An Exploratory Analysis

As the concept of relationship marketing becomes the dominant paradigm in understanding business to business exchange, the role of trust has received increasing attention, indeed Spekman ( 1988) calls it the “cornerstone” of a strategic partnership. Trust is a word that has many interpretations. It has been considered in a number of academic disciplines, for example social psychology, sociology, psychology and marketing each focusing on the particular elements of the concept that they view as most salient. As a result, we can identify 3 broad categories of interpersonal trust: basic or fundamental trust, the personality trait that disposes an individual to be trusting; general trust, an individual’s general tendency to trust or not to trust another individual and finally, situational trust which is dependent on the situational cues that modify the expression of generalized tendencies (Dibben, Harrison and Mason 1996). Situational based trust is posited to be the most important of the trust types and is the focus for this research. In order to construct a framework for the understanding of situational based trust we firstly review the three main trust typologies described in the literature and then put forward a model of trust by (Dibben 1998) which attempts to extend the current conceptualization. This model identifies five theoretical trust types, faith based trust (c.f. Meyerson et al, 1996), dependence based trust (c.f. Lewicki and Bunker, 1996,and Murphy and Gundlach 1997) familiarity-reliance based trust ( c.f. Lewicki and Bunker, 1996), situational cue (SQ) reliance based trust ( c.f. Clark, 1993) and confidence based trust ( c.f. Lewicki and Bunker, 1996, or Murphy and Gundlach 1997).