Kenneth K. Kwong

Chinese women at the crossroads: an empirical study on their role orientations and consumption values in Chinese society

Women’s current high levels of education and participation in the labor force have focused attention on their changing lifestyles and consumption patterns, which create a challenge to marketers who are desperate to explore this new market opportunity. This study investigates the significance of the emerging roles of Chinese women in Hong Kong to marketers and also helps to identify some common roles held by Hong Kong females, who are influenced by Chinese and western cultures. Through personal interviews, data were collected in the form of a structured questionnaire from a sample which consisted of 1,000 Chinese females randomly selected in Hong Kong – one of the most important cities in Southern China. This study successfully segmented Hong Kong’s females into three different groups based on six female role orientation dimensions: individualists, traditionalists, and pro‐docietalists. These three groups were found to be statistically significant in demographic characteristics, such as age, educational level, martial status, and number of children, as well as in consumption values associated with purchase decisions. Implications were drawn for marketing practitioners and directions for future research were provided.

Attitude Toward Counterfeits and Ethnic Groups: Comparing Chinese and Western Consumers Purchasing Counterfeits

ABSTRACT This study examines the differences between Chinese and Western consumers on attitude toward counterfeits. Results show that these two ethnic groups are different on most of the components of attitude toward counterfeits. In particular, they rated differently on social cost of counterfeiting, social benefit of reproduction, and anti-big-business mentality. However, these two groups have no significant difference on ethical belief. This does not affect attitude toward counterfeits and ethnic groups in predicting the purchase of counterfeits. Thus, the following conclusions are drawn from this study: (a) Chinese and Western consumers are different in attitude toward counterfeits; (b) a higher number of sampled Chinese consumers have purchased counterfeits before; and (c) purchasing counterfeits is explained by ethnic groups, social benefit of reproduction, and ethical belief.

A structured approach to describing service for creating a delightful experience

In this paper, a new structured approach integrating three different tools is used to describing a service experience. These three different tools include: a context diagram, which depicts the process flow at the highest level; an emotion transition diagram or a state transition diagram, which describes a service delivery process that provides customers a delightful experience; and an action specification in a textual form. With this new approach, different stakeholders have a common communication tool that shows a service delivery process from various angles including the scope, the operations flow, and the emotion flow between customers and service personnel. More importantly, it gives practitioners a new insight of how to create a delightful experience in service delivery. It is believed that the input of a structured service description can contribute further to the recent application of artificial intelligence (AI) in identifying the hidden pattern of the customers needs.

A Theoretical Framework of Brand Image and Service Quality on Third-Party Logistics Service

Since its origins in the 1980s, third-party logistics is maturing as an option to help increase supply chain effectiveness. The trend of using third-party logistics services becomes prominent especially in the industrializing countries like China where manufacturing constitutes a major part of the GDP. This development poses a great challenge to channel managers in selecting the third-party logistics service provider (3PL) and evaluating the quality of its services. Unfortunately, the research nowadays does not provide a sufficient insight on these aspects. Many third-party logistics studies are descriptive in nature, which address the issues such as the benefits of using third-party logistics services and the areas to be outsourced. To resolve this challenge in channel management, it needs to go a step forward in examining the causality between satisfaction and loyalty on third-party logistics services. Drawing the concepts from marketing, a research model is proposed to integrate brand image and service quality in predicting satisfaction and loyalty. It also considers the effect of manufacturer-3PL relationship on these causations.