Manjit S. Yadav

An Empirical Investigation of Customer Satisfaction after Service Failure and Recovery

Relatively little research has addressed the nature and determinants of customer satisfaction following service failure and recovery. Two studies using scenario-based experiments reveal the impact of failure expectations, recovery expectations, recovery performance, and justice on customers’ postrecovery satisfaction. Customer satisfaction was found to be lower after service failure and recovery (even given high-recovery performance) than in the case of error-free service. The research shows that, in general, companies fare better in the eyes of consumers by avoiding service failure than by responding to failure with superior recovery.

The Decline of Conceptual Articles and Implications for Knowledge Development.

This article presents a framework for understanding and revitalizing the important role of conceptual articles in the development of knowledge in the marketing discipline. An analysis of 30 years (1978–2007) of publishing data from major marketing journals indicates that conceptual articles are declining, despite repeated calls for more emphasis on this form of scholarship. The sharpest decline has occurred in Journal of Marketing (JM), with much of the shift occurring over the past decade. Many substantive areas remain largely unexplored in conceptual articles. Over this 30-year period, conceptual articles published in JM have disproportionately more citations relative to their numbers, attesting to the importance of their role in knowledge development. Addressing the decline of conceptual articles and restoring their synergistic balance with other forms of scholarship will require concerted efforts on several interrelated fronts: the current generation of scholars; doctoral programs and students; journals, reviewers, and review process; and promotion, tenure, and incentive systems.

Marketing strategy and the internet: An organizing framework

Competitive strategy is primarily concerned with how a business should deploy resources at its disposal to achieve and maintain defensible competitive positional advantages in the marketplace. Competitive marketing strategy focuses on how a business should deploy marketing resources at its disposal to facilitate the achievement and maintenance of competitive positional advantages in the marketplace. In a growing number of product-markets, the competitive landscape has evolved from a predominantly physical marketplace to one encompassing both the physical and the electronic marketplace. This article presents a conceptual framework delineating the drivers and outcomes of marketing strategy in the context of competing in this broader, evolving marketplace. The proposed framework provides insights into changes in the nature and scope of marketing strategy; specific industry, product, buyer, and buying environment characteristics; and the unique skills and resources of the firm that assume added relevance in the context of competing in the evolving marketplace.

Interactivity in the electronic marketplace: An exposition of the concept and implications for research

It is widely recognized that a better understanding of interactivity and its implications is essential for facilitating research focused on the emerging electronic marketplace. However, deficiencies persist in our understanding of this important concept. Building on research in various fields of study (e.g., information systems, marketing, and computer-mediated communication), this article presents a conceptualization of interactivity from a marketplace perspective that is missing or inadequately articulated in the literature. Specifically, interactivity is conceptualized as a characteristic of computer-mediated communication in the marketplace that increases with the bidirectionality, timeliness, mutual controllability, and responsiveness of communication as perceived by consumers and firms. The article concludes with a research agenda focusing on issues relating to measurement, conceptual refinement, and management of interactivity in the electronic marketplace.

Marketing in Computer-Mediated Environments: Research Synthesis and New Directions

Although an extensive body of research has emerged on marketing in computer-mediated environments, the literature remains fragmented. As a result, insights and findings have accumulated without an overarching framework to provide structure and guidance to the rapidly increasing research stream, which is detrimental to long-term knowledge development in this area. To address this issue, the authors organize and synthesize findings from the literature using a framework structured around four key interactions in computer-mediated environments: consumer–firm interactions, firm–consumer interactions, consumer–consumer interactions, and firm–firm interactions. The proposed framework serves a valuable organizational function and helps identify a broad spectrum of gaps in the literature to advance the next generation of knowledge development.

Bundle Evaluation in Different Market Segments: The Effects of Discount Framing and Buyers' Preference Heterogeneity

Heterogeneity of buyers’ preferences has played a significant role in the earlier economic analyses of bundling and continues to be important in the recent investigations initiated by marketing and consumer researchers. Guided by a decision-framing conceptualization, this study suggests that in a market characterized by heterogeneous preferences for items included in a bundle offer, buyers’ bundle evaluations may vary significantly depending on which item is featured as the price leader (i.e., the discounted item). When two unequally preferred items were evaluated for purchase as a set, bundle evaluation was more enhanced when the price leader was also the more preferred item. Thus, under such preference conditions, bundle evaluation may be quite sensitive to the choice of the price leader. Besides highlighting the importance of incorporating psychological considerations in bundling research, the results of this study also raise questions about the validity of a key assumption made in the extant analyses of bundling strategies. Specifically, perceived savings on one item may not always transfer readily to other items included in a bundle offer.

First-Mover Advantage in the Internet-Enabled Market Environment

The past quarter century has been characterized by major and game changing market developments such as the evolution of the competitive market environment from a physical market environment (PME) to an Internet-enabled market environment (IME) that encompasses both the physical and electronic marketplaces, and the digitization of an increasing number of information products. Such developments raise questions concerning the extent to which extant perspectives on first-mover advantage developed in the context of the PME hold in the IME, generally, and for information products in digital form specifically. This chapter addresses this issue by developing a conceptual framework that focuses on selected sources of first-mover advantage delineated in the extant literature and advancing two sets of propositions. The first set of propositions focus on sources of first-mover advantage (network externalities, consumers’ non-contractual switching costs, technological leadership and innovations, consumers’ information asymmetry and consumption experience asymmetry, spatial resource position and installed capacity) that can be expected to have a greater versus lower effect in the IME relative to the PME. The second set of propositions focus on the moderating effect of product form (information products in digital form versus information products in analog form and non-information products).

Buyers’ Evaluations of Mixed Bundling Strategies in Price-Promoted Markets

Price bundling, the joint offering of two or more items at a single price, is increasingly being viewed as strategically important for stimulating demand and increasing profit (Guiltinan, 1987; Simon, 1992; Dolan and Simon, 1996; Wuebker, 1998). The literature in this area has traditionally focused on sellers’ motivations for implementing bundling strategies, such as price discrimination (Stigler, 1968; Adams and Yellen, 1976; Schmalensee, 1984), extension of monopoly power (Burstein, 1960; Whinston, 1990) or cost advantages (Kenney and Klein, 1983). In marketing, two main streams of research on bundling can be observed. One stream has focused on extending previous economic analyses, developing sophisticated models for optimizing the design and pricing of bundles (Hanson and Martin, 1990; Venkatesh and Mahajan, 1993, Fuerderer, 1996). A second research stream has focused on the behavioral aspects of bundling to understand consumers’ evaluations of bundles (Drumwright, 1992; Gaeth et al., 1990; Yadav and Monroe, 1993; Yadav, 1994, 1995).