Larry Neale

The interactions of consumption characteristics on social norms

Purpose – Using an extended theory of planned behaviour (TPB) model to test how customer loyalty intentions may relate to subjective and descriptive norms, this study further seeks to determine whether consumption characteristics – product enjoyment and importance – moderate norms‐loyalty relationships.Design/methodology/approach – Using a two‐study approach focusing on youth, an Australian study (n=244) first augmented TPB with descriptive norm. A Singapore study (n=415) followed up with how consumption characteristics might moderate norms‐loyalty relationships. With both studies, linear regressions tested the relationships among the variables.Findings – Extending TPB with descriptive norm improved TPBs predictive ability across studies. Further, product enjoyment and importance moderated the norms‐loyalty relationships differently. Subjective norm related to loyalty intentions significantly with high enjoyment, whereas descriptive norm was significant with low enjoyment. Only subjective norm was signif...

Investigating the factors influencing the adoption of m-banking: a cross cultural study

Purpose Little is known about the adoption of mobile banking technologies in emerging Asian economies. This paper aims to empirically examine the motivators that influence a consumer’s intentions to use mobile banking. Design/methodology/approach A web-based survey was employed to collect data from 348 respondents, split across Thailand and Australia. Data were analyzed by employing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, path and invariance analyses. Findings The findings indicate that for Australian consumers, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and perceived risk were the primary determinants of mobile banking adoption. For Thai consumers, the main factors were perceived usefulness, perceived risk and social influence. National culture was found to impact key antecedents that lead to adoption of m-banking. Research limitations/implications The actual variance explained by our study’s model was higher in Australia (59.3%) than for Thailand (23.8%), suggesting future research of m-banking adoption in emerging Asian cultures. Practical implications We identify the important factors consumers consider when adopting m-banking. The findings of this research give banking organisations a foundational model that can be used to support m-banking implementation. Originality/value Our study is perhaps the first to examine and compare the intention to adopt m-banking across Thai and Australian consumers, and responds to calls for additional research that generalises m-banking and m-services acceptance across cultures. This study has proposed and validated additional constructs that are not present in the original SST Intention to Use model.

The international search for ethics norms: which consumer behaviors do consumers consider (un)acceptable?

Purpose – Businesses cannot rely on their customers to always do the right thing. To help researchers and service providers better understand the dark (and light) side of customer behavior, this study aims to aggregate and investigate perceptions of consumer ethics from young consumers on five continents. The study seeks to present a profile of consumer behavioral norms, how ethical inclinations have evolved over time, and country differences.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from ten countries across five continents between 1997 and 2007. A self‐administered questionnaire containing 14 consumer scenarios asked respondents to rate acceptability of questionable consumer actions.Findings – Overall, consumers found four of the 14 questionable consumer actions acceptable. Illegal activities were mostly viewed as unethical, while some legal actions that were against company policy were viewed less harshly. Differences across continents emerged, with Europeans being the least critical, while Asi...

The Google Online Marketing Challenge and Research Opportunities.

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is an ongoing collaboration between Google and academics, to give students experiential learning. The Challenge gives student teams US

Learner-focused evaluation cycles: facilitating learning using feedforward, concurrent and feedback evaluation

200 in AdWords, Googles flagship advertising product, to develop online marketing campaigns for actual businesses. The end result is an engaging in-class exercise that provides students and professors with an exciting and pedagogically rigorous competition. Results from surveys at the end of the Challenge reveal positive appraisals from the three—students, businesses, and professors—main constituents; general agreement between students and instructors regarding learning outcomes; and a few points of difference between students and instructors. In addition to describing the Challenge and its outcomes, this article reviews the postparticipation questionnaires and subsequent datasets. The questionnaires and results are publicly available, and this article invites educators to mine the datasets, share their results, and offer suggestions for future iterations of the Challenge.

Comparing the Diffusion of Online Service Recovery in Small and Large Organizations

There is a growing trend to offer students learning opportunities that are flexible, innovative and engaging. As educators embrace student-centred agile teaching and learning methodologies, which require continuous reflection and adaptation, the need to evaluate students’ learning in a timely manner has become more pressing. Conventional evaluation surveys currently dominate the evaluation landscape internationally, despite recognition that they are insufficient to effectively evaluate curriculum and teaching quality. Surveys often: (1) fail to address the issues for which educators need feedback, (2) constrain student voice, (3) have low response rates and (4) occur too late to benefit current students. Consequently, this paper explores principles of effective feedback to propose a framework for learner-focused evaluation. We apply a three-stage control model, involving feedforward, concurrent and feedback evaluation, to investigate the intersection of assessment and evaluation in agile learning environments. We conclude that learner-focused evaluation cycles can be used to guide action so that evaluation is not undertaken simply for the benefit of future offerings, but rather to benefit current students by allowing ‘real-time’ learning activities to be adapted in the moment. As a result, students become co-producers of learning and evaluation becomes a meaningful, responsive dialogue between students and their instructors.

Gender identity and brand incongruence: when in doubt, pursue masculinity

A key concern organizations face is how to incorporate Internet tools into their marketing communications mix. Where and how should companies invest their human, technological, and financial resources? This paper explores a subset of this problem, online complaining and electronic customer service. It applies diffusion of innovation as a theoretical framework to investigate organizational implementation of email technology and explain the outcome of annual customer service surveys in 2001, 2002, and 2003. The results add to the small body of research on electronic service recovery by extending diffusion of innovations to email service recovery and underscoring the importance of adoption phases, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Larger companies provide more channels for submitting complaints, which represents an early phase of adoption. There was little difference in how large and small companies respond to online complaints, a later phase of adoption.

Loyalty and the ritualistic consumption of entertainment

Gender identity is the extent to which an individual identifies with masculine or feminine personality traits. Sex roles in Western societies continue to evolve, so this research examines the developing relationship between gender identity and consumer responses to gendered branding. Grounded in self-congruency theory [Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9, 287–300], the present research reports an experiment that supports a congruence relationship between gender identity and brand response. Masculine consumers prefer masculine brands. The results also show incongruent brand rejection where masculine consumers react negatively to feminine brands although feminine consumers are more accepting of masculine brands. Further, the results suggest that gender identity is a more effective dimension for customer segmentation than biological sex. Overall, the results suggest that masculine brands are more effective than other gendered brand profiles for masculine, feminine, and androgynous consumers.

The Google online marketing challenge : hands on teaching and learning

Entertainment is consumer-driven culture, and some consumers of entertainment products display uncommon levels of loyalty towards their favourite sports star, actor or musician. This essay examines fanaticism and loyalty through the prism of consumer rituals. Further, a Ritual–Loyalty model is proposed to help investigate the relationship between the constructs. Finally, the paper offers directions for future research regarding entertainment consumers.

How gratitude influences customer word-of-mouth intentions and involvement: the mediating role of affective commitment

Abstract The Google Online Marketing Challenge is perhaps the worlds largest in-class competition for higher education students. Merging education with hands-on advertising, the Challenge exposes students to the increasingly important field of online marketing, engages students with local businesses and gives students the thrill of an international competition. Feedback from participating students, academics and businesses in the inaugural Challenge was overwhelmingly positive. Based on experience and feedback, Google plans an improved version in 2009. Global organisations such as CHRIE should consider a special division for hospitality and tourism students in the 2009 Challenge.