Jacques Nantel

A reliable and valid measurement scale for the perceived service quality of banks

Describes a study performed in Canada to develop a reliable and valid scale for the measurement of the perceived service quality of bank services. A sample of retail banking customers was questioned. The proposed scale is called banking service quality (BSQ) and comprises 31 items which span six dimensions: effectiveness and assurance; access; price; tangibles; services portfolio and reliability.

Corporate codes of ethics and sales force behavior: A case study

A growing public concern regarding ethical business conduct has stimulated marketing research in the ethics area. This study is the first empirical research to investigate the relationship between a code of ethics and sales force behavior. The findings present preliminary evidence that a well communicated code of ethics may be related to ethical sales force behavior. Furthermore, it appears that a sales force that is employed in such an environment can be profiled as being relatively high in job performance and receiving equally high satisfaction from their positions. Suggestions are made for future research and recommendations are offered for marketing practitioners.

Marketing ethics: is there more to it than the utilitarian approach?

Of all the management fields, marketing is probably that which seems the most paradoxical when it comes time to consider its ethical aspect. This paradox stems from the fact that the main objective of marketing is to respond to the needs of consumers. Yet these same consumers often take marketing to task out of a concern for certain of its manifestations, such as advertising or pricing. Since they endeavour to satisfy consumers’ needs, marketing managers often take it for granted that their actions are ethical. Underlying this position is an essentially utilitarian approach to ethics. Attempts to determine to what extent marketing fulfils the basic principles of the utilitarian ethic. Adopting the position that the utilitarian and the deontological approach ‐ a belief that certain things are inherently good to do (also referred as duty‐based ethics) ‐ do not have to be mutually exclusive, proposes a third direction, that is a combination of both of these approaches. Concludes by suggesting the necessity for managers to integrate a deontological dimension in their practices.

The Measurement of Electronic Service Quality: Improvements and Application

Several measurement scales have been designed by both practitioners and researchers to evaluate perceptions of electronic service Quality. This article tests three of the main academically developed scales: Sitequal (Yoo & Donthu, 2001), Webqual 4 (Barnes & Vidgen, 2003) and EtailQ (Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2003) and compares them against the scale ensuing from our research: NetQual (Bressolles, 2006). Based on 204 evaluations of consumers that participated in a laboratory experiment involving two Canadian Web sites in travel and online insurance, NetQual best fits the data and offers the highest explanatory power. Then the impact of nature of task and success or failure to complete the task on the evaluation process of electronic service quality and attitude toward the site is examined and discussed on over 700 respondents that navigated on six different Web sites.

The impact of reading a web site's privacy statement on perceived control over privacy and perceived trust

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to study the impact of reading a web sites privacy statement on the perceptions of control over privacy and trust in a cyber merchant.Design/methodology/approach – Two experiments were designed to monitor the actual reading of the privacy statement. Study one compares the influence of actual reading with self‐reported claims. Study two manipulated the format of the privacy statement (opt‐in or opt‐out) and included a control condition to assess the influence of the presence of a privacy statement and the influence of the format on the dependent variables.Findings – The findings show that the mere presence of a privacy statement has a positive influence on perceived control. However, reading the privacy statement does not necessarily have a positive influence on perceived control and trust, contrary to commonly held assumptions. Participants who read the opt‐in format felt significantly more control and trust than the participants who read the opt‐out format. The ...

Is more always better? Investigating the task-technology fit theory in an online user context

Abstract We used Task-Technology Fit (TTF) theory to examine the drivers and consequences of successful task completion by a user in an online context. The theory suggests that the fit between characteristics of the task and those of the website predicts user performance and behavioral intentions. Our hypotheses were tested using the input of two large scale studies performed in twelve industries and involving 13,135 participants. Results, which were replicated in a proximate culture, lend support to the predictions of Task-Technology Fit theory. The site information quality and ease of use were the only technology factors that significantly drove the users to a successful completion of their information tasks, rather than the sites graphical attractiveness, interactivity, security and privacy factors. The findings further suggested that focusing on the enhancement of site characteristics that have low fit with the task is not effective as it resulted in slowing the successful completion of the online task.

Predicting On-Line Task Completion with Clickstream Complexity Measures: A Graph-Based Approach

A model that uses navigational complexity to classify on-line shopping sessions and information-search tasks as successful or unsuccessful is described. A graph-based approach to representing clickstream is employed to capture the complexity. A total of 485 individual goal-oriented shopping sessions on five different Web sites were analyzed. Ten complexity metrics were studied in order to select the ones that can predict the outcome (i.e., success or failure) of a goal-oriented navigational session. The practical applications to e-business, including the implementation of the proposed model, are discussed.

The Impact of SMS Advertising on Members of a Virtual Community

ABSTRACT This empirical research brings interesting insights concerning mobile commerce. Our objective is to determine the influence of language (conventional language versus short message service (SMS) language) and spokeperson on the effectiveness of SMS advertising. The experiment took place in a virtual community of gamers equipped with cellular telephones. After having exchanged messages during several days in the forums community, participants received one of four messages (varied with the language and the source of the message) that they evaluated afterward. Our results offer new and significant insights to managers wishing to use this medium. Unlike what is often thought, our results show that SMS language is not always recommended. While known and credible companies could use shortened, original, and entertaining SMS language, little known companies or ordinary spokepersons should refrain from doing so. Thus a message relayed by a spokeperson with little credibility, even if he is a member of the targeted community, should have a sober and clear content with a conventional language.

Positioning cultural arts products in the market

Traditionally, product positioning have been studied on the basis of perceptual maps. Often taking the form of a cartesian map (formed of one, two or more dimensions), these maps provide two important sets of information. First, the dimensions of the maps (made of orthogonal vectors) illustrate the criteria which are being used by consumers to compare and evaluate the products. Second products are being projected on these maps in such a way that their relative position describe the way consumer evaluates them.

Uncovering the nature of information processing of men and women online: the comparison of two models using the think-aloud method

This paper compares two models predicting gender differences in information processing to determine if either of the models is more pertinent to goal-oriented Internet searches. The Selectivity Model (Meyers-Levy 1989) proposes that women make more comprehension effort than men whereas the Item-Specific/Relational Processing Model (Putrevu 2001) suggests that men and women differ primarily in their processing style, with men tending to use item-specific processing by focusing on product attributes and women tending to use relational processing by looking for interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. The study participants (106 total, 50% female) were asked to think aloud while performing one of two goal-oriented search tasks on a website. Their thoughts were then coded according to relevant categories by two independent analysts using Atlas TI software. Consistent with the Selectivity Model, women made more comprehension effort than did men. However, our hypotheses related to a difference in processing style between men and women received less support. Overall, the results help disentangle the two theories and provide website developers with a basis for creating sites that are suited to mens and womens distinctive information processing strategies.