Leyland Pitt

Service quality: a measure of information systems effectiveness

The IS function now includes a significant service component. However, commonly used measures of IS effectiveness focus on the products, rather than the services, of the IS function. Thus, there is the danger that IS researchers will mismeasure IS effectiveness if they do not include in their assessment package a measure of IS service quality. SERVQUAL, an instrument developed by marketing researchers, is offered as a possible measure of IS service quality. SERVQUAL measures service dimensions of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The suitability of SERVQUAL was assessed in three different types of organizations in three countries. After examination of content validity, reliability, convergent validity, nomological validity, and discriminant validity, the study concludes that SERVQUAL is an appropriate instrument for researchers seeking a measure of IS service quality.

U-Commerce: Expanding the Universe of Marketing

This article introduces several new concepts that lay the conceptual foundation for thinking about next-generation marketing based on ubiquitous networks. U-commerce, orÜber-commerce, is predicated on the characteristics of network ubiquity, universality, uniqueness, and unison. It is proposed that the keys to managing network-driven firms are the concepts of u-space and attention analysis. The implications for next-generation marketing in the u-space are explored, with a research agenda identified for scholars and managerial implications recognized for practitioners.

To Serve or Create? Strategic Orientations toward Customers and Innovation:

This article reviews a central tension in management—the relationship between customers and innovation. It explores the contrast between serving and creating customers and examines the sometimes uneasy relationship between an innovation orientation and a customer orientation. From this discussion, the article develops a model that provides an inclusive paradigm of the different strategies that firms have used to resolve the tension and explores the dynamics of the change process for several well-known companies. It concludes by developing the managerial implications of the model, with a particular emphasis on how new technology is changing the desirability of alternative strategies.

Market orientation and business performance: some European evidence

While market orientation has almost been taken for granted by both academics and some practitioners, attempts to define and operationalize the construct have been very limited. Moreover, efforts to link market orientation to business performance have been few and far between. Recent work in the USA has led to the development of a scale to measure market orientation in organizations, and this measure has also been positively linked to performance. Describes efforts to measure the level of market orientation in samples of British and Maltese firms. Confirms the reliability of the measure, and tests some aspects of its validity. While the link between market orientation and firm performance is not a strong one, it is indeed significant. Discusses implications of the studies, and identifies some avenues for further research.

Measuring information systems service quality: lessons from two longitudinal case studies

IS service quality was measured three times in an information management consulting firm and an information service business. After the first measurement, IS management initiated several actions to improve service quality. The second measurement indicated that service quality improved in the intervening period. When service quality was measured a third time, it had returned to the levels of the first measurement. The evidence suggests that management’s attention to service quality waned after about a year, and IS management needs to recognize that service quality is not a fad but an ongoing commitment. The paper concludes by recognizing that defivering IS service quality requires action at three levels (strategic, tactical, and operational) and that the ClO must pay continuing attention to IS service quality. A model for building service quality into IS is described.

Measuring information systems service quality: concerns for a complete canvas

This paper responds to the research note in this issue by Van Dyke et al. concerning the use of SERVQUAL, an instrument to measure service quality, and its use in the IS domain. This paper attempts to balance some of the arguments they raise from the marketing literature on the topic with the well-documented counterarguments of SERVQUALs developers, as well as our own research evidence and observations in an IS-specific environment. Specifically, evidence is provided to show that the service quality perceptions-expectations subtraction in SERVQUAL is far more rigorously grounded than Van Dyke et al. suggest; that the expectations construct, while potentially ambiguous, is generally a vector in the case of an IS department; and that the dimensions of service quality seem to be as applicable to the IS department as to any other organizational setting. Then, the paper demonstrates that the problems of reliability of difference score calculations in SERVQUAL are not nearly as serious as Van Dyke et al. suggest; that while perceptions-only measurement of service quality might have marginally better predictive and convergent validity, this comes at considerable expense to managerial diagnostics; and reiterate some of the problems of dimensional instability found in our previous research, highlighted by Van Dyke et al. and discussed in many other studies of SERVQUAL across a range of settings. Finally, four areas for further research in this area are identified.

The World Wide Web As An Advertising Medium

This paper discusses the role of the World Wide Web as an advertising medium and its position in the marketing communication mix. It introduces a conceptual framework for measuring the efficiency of a Web site. Efficiency indexes are defined for five Web advertising communication activities, and an overall measure of Web site efficiency measure is presented.

The penguin’s window: Corporate brands from an open-source perspective

The open source (OS) movement allows us to re-vision corporate branding from a corporate to a coproducer perspective. Corporations own their brands and unilaterally determine their positioning and evolution. Power and control are centralized and hierarchical: producers produce brands, which customers then consume. With OS, power and control are radically decentralized and hierarchical: producers and consumers coalesce into “prosumers.” The authors introduce marketers to the OS phenomenon and develop a typology of brand aspects that can be “open” or “closed”: physical, textual, meaning, and experience. The authors elaborate new dimensions for brands and revisit the functions that brands perform and link these to the evolutionary trajectory of branding, arguing that OS represents a final phase in the evolution of corporate brands from closed to open brands. The article concludes with a research agenda.

Aesthetics and Ephemerality: Observing and Preserving the Luxury Brand

While luxury brands are one of the most profitable and fastest growing segments of the brand pantheon, they are the least understood. There is no established definition as to what a luxury brand is; no clear understanding of the value dimensionality of luxury brands; and no rigorous conceptualization of the different types of luxury brands. They are generally treated as homogenous. Little wonder that the management of these brands is shrouded in mystery. This article explores the value dimensionality of luxury brands, differentiates among luxury brands, and proposes a typology to help firms understand the managerial implications and challenges of each type. All luxury brands are not the same—they can mean different things to different people or even different things to the same people, which makes target marketing of luxury brands both difficult and important. This also means that they react differently to each other both in times of economic prosperity and in downturns. This article also explores strategies for migrating mass-market brands into luxury brand markets.

Ad Lib: When Customers Create the Ad

Consumers are now generating, rather than merely consuming advertising. The consequences for brands, marketers, and senior executives are significant. Advertising was traditionally generated by, or on behalf of, the firm and broadcast to relatively passive consumers. With the rise of digital media, the Internet, and inexpensive media software, considerable creative and distributive power has been handed to the consumer. Liberated from the exclusive control of the firm, ads now express a myriad of different voices. Some ads are subversive, others laudatory, but the fact remains that the firm is no longer in exclusive control of the message. Using a number of high profile cases, this article explores the motivations that drive consumers to create their own ads and develops a typology of the ads created. It develops a model for the various strategic stances that a firm can adopt in response to this phenomenon so that managers can anticipate and thus deal more effectively with some of the extreme consequences of liberated advertising.