Mark Heitmann

Choice Goal Attainment and Decision and Consumption Satisfaction

Several individual, social-setting, and choice-set factors have been shown to be related to satisfaction. This article argues that these factors operate through a set of choice goals. Using panel data on purchasers of consumer electronics, the authors examine how five goals (justifiability, confidence, anticipated regret, evaluation costs, and final negative affect) drive decision and consumption satisfaction, which in turn determine loyalty, product recommendations, and the amount and valence of word of mouth.

The Impact of Brand Equity on Customer Acquisition, Retention, and Profit Margin

The authors investigate the relationships between brand equity and customer acquisition, retention, and profit margin, the key components of customer lifetime value (CLV). They examine a unique database from the U.S. automobile market that combines ten years of acquisition rate, retention rate, and customer profitability data with measures of brand equity from Young & Rubicams Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) over the same period. They hypothesize and find that BAV brand equity is significantly associated with the components of CLV in expected and meaningful ways. For example, customer knowledge of a brand has an especially strong positive relationship with all three components of CLV. Notably, however, differentiation is a double-edged sword. While it is associated with higher customer profitability, it is also associated with lower acquisition and retention rates. The authors also find that marketing efforts exert indirect impacts on CLV through brand equity. Simulations show that changes in marketing, or exogenous changes in brand equity, can exert important effects on CLV. Overall, the findings suggest that the “soft” and “hard” sides of marketing need to be managed in a coordinated way. The authors conclude with a discussion of these and other implications for researchers and practitioners.

Managing brand consistent employee behaviour: relevance and managerial control of behavioural branding

Purpose – This study aims to show that brand success can be improved if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by each employee of a company. The paper terms such brand consistent employee behaviour behavioural branding and identifies managerial instruments for its implementation and management.Design/methodology/approach – The model in the paper explains the brands contribution to company success by brand consistent employee behaviour, functional employee performance and brand congruent mass media communication. Brand consistent employee behaviour and functional employee performance in turn are modelled as determined by formal and informal management techniques as well as employee empowerment. The model is tested on a sample of 167 senior managers using partial least squares and finds empirical support. Furthermore, practical implications are provided based on additional top management focus groups.Findings – The paper finds that behavioural branding determine...

Order in Product Customization Decisions: Evidence from Field Experiments

Differentiated product models are predicated on the belief that a product’s utility can be derived from the summation of utilities for its individual attributes. In one framed field experiment and two natural field experiments, we test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the order of attribute presentation in the product customization process of custom‐made suits and automobiles. We find that order affects the design of a suit that people configure and the design and price of a car that people purchase by influencing the likelihood that they will accept the default option suggested by the firm.

Customer centred community application design: Introduction of the means-end chain framework for product design of community applications

Abstract This paper discusses the application of the means‐end chain (MEC) framework for investigating customers cognitive”; structure regarding community applications. It is argued that the understanding of customers cognition is crucial for the development of sustainable communities. MEC analysis is seen as a mean to support the community design tasks, especially concept development. The MEC analysis within concept development helps to improve the success rate of a newly designed community by the early integration of customer needs and benefits. Based on theoretical considerations about the MEC framework and its limitations a case study regarding an information community is illustrated. Data was collected conducting individual laddering interviews online at a major information portal in Germany. Dividing answers into attributes, consequences, and values and using content analysis hierarchical value maps (HVM) for both, messaging applications and information ‐portals, were constructed. To support concept development of a new information community, as a distribution platform for content, the findings of both HVMs were considered. Examples illustrate, that the MEC analysis helps to create a community concept that is focused on the targeted customers. It is supporting the creative process of finding community functions and features that are fitting or can be linked to the existing cognitive structures.

Strategic Partnerships and Competitiveness of Business-to-Business E-Marketplaces: Preliminary Evidence from Europe

Business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces offer the potential of substantial increases in efficiency and transparency in their target industries. We argue that to realize this potential they must form strategic partnerships. While the need to partner with companies in their target industries has been coming to the forefront with the rise of industry-sponsored marketplaces, firms find that there is a further need to partner with other organizations to create more extensive and adaptive service offerings. The goal of this research is to support the view that forming strategic partnerships with specialized service providers and other marketplaces is an important means for marketplaces to create successful business models and to improve their competitive position. We examine the relevant theory and explore the status of partnering activities of European B2B marketplaces, which we surveyed from April to May 2001. Additionally, we report on a set of in-depth interviews with the management of a number of major B2B marketplaces. The results support our view that partnering skills are critical for B2B marketplaces to improve their competitive position.

Designing Mobile Brand Communities: Concept and Empirical Illustration

Brand communities are a commonly used marketing instrument to enhance customer attraction and retention. Well-known success stories of brand communities include brands such as Jeep®, Apple Macintosh®, or Harley Davidson®. Despite the great importance for companies to effectively manage the social facet of their products, research in this field has been rare. In literature, indications for success factors and constituting elements of communities have been found. However, seldom have viable business cases for the community operator been provided. We propose the mobile channel to be a particularly promising media for establishing brand communities. Due to the significant and still increasing worldwide penetration of mobile devices and current always-on location sensitive mobile services, innovative community concepts bear the potential for substantial value creation, which tends to result in positive effects on customer loyalty and brand equity for the community operator. In this article, we review selected literature to develop propositions on how concepts for mobile brand communities can be developed. Building on the 4 constituting elements of a community, which are member entities, shared interest, common space of interaction, and relation, combined with the specific characteristics of the mobile channel, which are location awareness, ubiquity, identification, and immediacy, we developed a procedure on how to design mobile brand communities according to perceived consumer value. We use the case of a mobile content provider to illustrate the suggested process. Starting from the theoretical mobile community model, we apply means–end chains to do justice to the specific brand values. In concluding, we propose a 4-step model of key mobile brand community design tasks.

Consumers cognition towards communities: customer-centred community design using the means-end chain perspective

This paper presents research on the application of the means-end chain (MEC) framework for investigating customers cognitive structure regarding community applications. It is argued that the understanding of customers cognition is crucial for the development of sustainable communities. MEC analysis is seen as a means to support the community design tasks, especially concept development. The MEC analysis within concept development helps to improve the success rate of the new designed community by the early integration of customer needs and benefits. Based on theoretical considerations about the MEC framework and its limitations, a case study regarding an newly designed information community is illustrated. Data was collected conducting individual laddering interviews online at a major information portal in Germany. Dividing answers into attributes, consequences, and values and using content analysis hierarchical value maps (HVM) for both, messaging applications and information portals, were constructed. To support concept development of a new information community, as a distribution platform for content, the findings of both HVMs were considered. Examples illustrate, that the MEC analysis helps to create a community concept that is focused on the targeted customers. It is supporting the creative process of finding community function and features that are fitting or can be linked to the existing cognitive structures of the targeted individuals regarding community applications.

Using means-end chains to build mobile brand communities

Brand communities are a traditional concept to enhance customer attraction, loyalty and retention (e.g. Tupperware, Apple Macintosh). Brand communities are supported through either companies or customers themselves. Companies that are able to encourage their customers to interact stimulated by the brand could position the brand value proposition of their product as a link between their customers and employ the developing brand communities for marketing purposes. To stimulate this kind of interaction, companies have increasingly used Internet functionalities in the past years. Drawing on the overwhelming penetration rate of mobile devices of over 80 percent in Europe, we propose to employ the mobile channel to support this kind of brand community building process. We derive four constitutional elements of brand communities based on existing research and develop a structured and theoretically founded four step method to analyze the potential of mobile services for specific community building purposes and compare our findings to a mini case study.

Automobilwahl online - Gestaltung des Car-Konfigurators unter Berücksichtigung des individuellen Entscheidungsverhaltens

ZusammenfassungCar-Konfiguratoren spielen bei der Spezifikation von Fahrzeugen durch die Kunden eine zentrale Rolle. Immer mehr Individuen nutzen diese Technik, um ihr Fahrzeug zu konzipieren oder einzelne Funktionen bereits vorab zu erleben. Jedoch sind diese Konfiguratoren zumeist aus Sicht der Techniker und Ingenieure entwickelt; in jedem Fall bleibt das Entscheidungsverhalten der Kunden beim Design solcher Konfiguratoren häufig unbeachtet. Auf Basis entscheidungstheoretischer Erkenntnisse lassen sich Hinweise über die kundenorientierte Gestaltung von (Car-)Konfiguratoren ableiten. In einem «real life»-Experiment wurde der Audi A4 Car-Konfigurator entsprechend manipuliert. Es zeigt sich, dass von den verschiedenen Manipulationen erhebliche Effekte auf unterschiedliche Facetten der Kundenzufriedenheit ausgehen. Zudem ist die Zahlungsbereitschaft der Kunden durch die variierenden Manipulationen betroffen.SummaryConfigurators are widely used by customers to specify their cars. However, these configurators are built mainly by engineers ignoring the decision patterns of the consumers. Based on findings of behavioral decision research this paper aims to develop recommendations for a customer oriented car configurator. A real life experiment with the Audi A4 configurator is carried out to test the derived hypotheses. It can be seen that the manipulations influence various satisfaction measures significantly. In addition, the willingness to pay is also driven by the different factor levels.