Mahesh Gopinath

A Social-Cognitive Model of Consumer Well-Being: A Longitudinal Exploration of the Role of the Service Organization

This study establishes a social-cognitive model of consumer well-being to explain the psychological mechanism underlying the relationships between service organizations’ marketing strategies and consumer well-being. Using a two-wave longitudinal design, we surveyed 168 clients from a major credit counseling organization. Results show that organizational strategies influence consumers’ domain-specific well-being via social-cognitive variables (including self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and process expectations) and goal-pursuit processes (both goal setting and goal striving). Specifically, organizational strategies, including organizational support and organizational socialization, contribute to consumers’ goal intentions both directly and indirectly via outcome and process expectations at the goal-setting stage. In the goal-striving stage, goal intention leads to goal achievement, a path strengthened by organizational support. Goal achievement contributes to increases in consumers’ domain-specific well-being. Customers who are in the early or late stages of a service program are more likely to fail in achieving their goals than those who are in the middle of the program. This study sheds new light on transformative service research by demonstrating the role of the service organization in enhancing consumer well-being and suggests that service strategies should focus on shaping consumers’ social cognitions and facilitating their pursuit of valued personal goals.

Do Charities Benefit from a Top-Dog or Underdog Positioning Strategy? An Abstract

This paper explores how the perception of a charity as a top dog or an underdog impacts beliefs about the charity, attitudes toward it, and intention to donate to it. The top-dog concept is prevalent in the business literature such as when there is overwhelming support for breast cancer charities. Yet, being top dog can cause problems. The term underdog has been defined numerous ways including not being well known and lacking financial backing to not being able to succeed.

The Impact of Packaging Languages on Product Evaluation: Evidence from the Czech Republic: An Abstract

Consumers in the Czech Republic are likely to see products targeted at more affluent Western consumers as being of higher quality, while, given the negative feelings toward Russia, products targeting Russians are viewed as of lower quality.

Biased Evaluation of Products Caused by Targeting Effect of Multilingual Product Packaging

This study investigates the influence of bilingual product packaging descriptions on product evaluation. In an experimental study, the evaluation of a product with an English-only package is compared to the evaluation of the same product in English-Spanish and English-Spanish-French packaging. Study 1 compared product evaluations of the same product in English-only (English), English-Spanish (bilingual), and English-Spanish-French (trilingual) packaging. The bilingual product received the lowest evaluation. Adding French mitigated this effect as did attributing a relatively high price (versus a low price) to the product. Study 2 compared Country of Origin effect to Culture of Targeting and found that the effect of Culture of Targeting is bigger.

The Influence of Public Commitment on the Attitude Change Process: The Effects of Attitude Certainty, PFC and SNI

This research investigates the effect of public commitment on resistance to persuasion, and examines the influence of attitude certainty, susceptibility to normative influence (SNI) and preference for consistency (PFC) on resistance to attitude change when subjects make a public commitment to their attitude. In two studies the initial attitude of subjects are measured along with their attitude certainty, SNI and PFC. Change in attitude is measured after exposure to counter attitudinal information. Confirming our hypotheses, we find that subjects who make a commitment in public become more confident in their evaluations, leading to more resistance to attitude change. We are also able to confirm that the dispositional variables SNI and PFC increase resistance to persuasion under conditions of public commitment. This paper extends the research done on resistance to persuasion under conditions of public commitment by studying the influence of two dispositional variables and two mediating variables.