Janelle McPhail

Forming Service Relationships with Hotel Business Travelers: The Critical Attributes to Improve Retention

Customer defections have been linked to service encounter failure in service organizations. This study embraces the idea of improving customer retention through proactively promoting the important role of the interpersonal service encounter to build long-term service relationships between customers and service organizations. More specifically, this study determined the critical relational attributes in the face-to-face service encounter that were most influential in the formation of a service relationship from the business traveler’s perspective. Five critical relational attributes were selected and tested in a high interpersonal service context; namely, a hotel reception encounter. Through factor analysis, the number of factors (critical relational attributes) was reduced from five to four. The results from multiple regression analysis revealed that hotel guests perceived personalization, social bonding, reliability, and familiarization to be most influential in the relationship formation process in that order of significance. Based on the findings, management could develop proactive relationship-building strategies to build customer loyalty and thus reduce the need to use recovery strategies by focusing on the psychological needs emulated in the critical relational attributes.

Does accent matter in international television advertisements

Standardisation of international advertising campaigns and relaxed advertising regulations have led to Australian consumers being exposed to higher levels of foreign-produced advertising. The study described here assessed the impact on Australian consumers of foreign spokespersons in TV advertisements using a ‘voice-over’ technique. This technique was assessed with respect to the following characteristics: expertise, trustworthiness, professionalism, likeability, dynamism, similarity to the audience, and their overall attitude towards the advertisement Subjects evaluated either American, British or Australian spokespersons. American and British spokespersons were rated less favourably by Australian audiences than Australian spokespersons across a range of characteristics, but they did not report a less favourable overall attitude towards advertisements that used an American or British spokesperson compared to those with an Australian spokesperson. Hence, the results tend to support the trend towards stand...

Will the Next Generation of Professionals Advertise More

ABSTRACT This paper reports the results of an empirical study which tests the idea that older professionals may dislike advertising their services because they led that such activities are incompatible with their professional role. Role conflict is hypothesised as a central variable that influences the advertising propensity of older professionals. It is argued that conclusions based on the notion that acceptance of advertising will diffuse over time may be premature.