Janet Wagner

A model of customer satisfaction with service encounters involving failure and recovery

Customers often react strongly to service failures, so it is critical that an organizations recovery efforts be equally strong and effective. In this article, the authors develop a model of custom...

Pricing store brands across categories and retailers

As sales of store brands increase, retailers are shifting their store branding strategies by raising store brand prices, extending their store brand assortments to high‐risk categories, and marketing store brands in high retail image formats. The purpose of the research is to explore the effects of these changes on consumers’ judgments of store brands. The conceptual framework is derived from pricing, prospect, and information processing theories. It is tested in two experiments. The study finds that consumers’ use of price information varies by decision‐making context. In particular, price‐based effects for store brands are moderated by the contextual factors of category risk and retail image.

Information sources and retail buyer decision-making: The effect of product-specific buying experience

Abstract The effect of product-specific buying experience on the mix of information sources in retail buyer decision-making was studied. Sixty retail buyers completed a decision-making task, based on a fractional factorial design, composed of eight information sources varied at two levels each. The results of an individual-subject ANOVA showed the dominant information source to be the buyers own knowledge, followed by customer requests, consumer magazines, selling history, buyers from similar stores, sales representatives, and reviews and ads in the trade news. A post hoc analysis showed that the number and relative importance of information sources differed by level of product-specific buying experience.

The effect of ethnicity on selected household expenditures

Abstract A subsample of expenditure data, collected from 3,481 households as part of the 1980–1981 Consumer Expenditure Survey, was used to analyze the effect of ethnicity on expenditures for clothing, food at home, and food away from home. Previous research has been criticized for failing to control for the effects of income and other socioeconomic and demographic variables on the behavior of ethnic consumers. The results of a multiple regression analysis in which the effects of those variables were controlled demonstrated that Hispanics spend more than other households on food at home, while Afro-Americans spend more on clothing and less on food away from home.

Expenditures For Household Textiles And Textile Home Furnishings: An Engel Curve Analysis

Annual family expenditures for household textiles and textile home furnishings were analyzed using Tobit regression techniques. This research was based on a subsample of expenditure data from 3,007 households, representing 33 percent of the households interviewed during the 1973 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results demonstrate that expenditures for both household textiles and textile home furnishings are influenced by total consumption expenditures, family type, and moving expenses. In addition, expenditures for household textiles are re lated to race of the household head, region of residence, and city size, while expenditures for textile home furnishings are affected by housing tenure. The results of this study lend support to existing consumption theory and contribute new information concerning the effects of socioeconomic and demographic vari ables on expenditures for household textiles and textile home furnishings.