Martin Mende

Why Attachment Security Matters How Customers' Attachment Styles Influence Their Relationships With Service Firms and Service Employees

Relational orientations vary across customers, so marketing activities should be customized to individual customers or market segments. However, little is known about the underlying processes that influence how customers bond with a service firm and its employees. This article explains customer-firm and customer-employee relationships using attachment theory. It provides theoretical and empirical evidence that customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and low levels of attachment avoidance perceive a service firm and service employee more positively—in terms of satisfaction, trust, and affective commitment—than customers with high levels. However, since a service firm and service employee are separate attachment targets, this study also tests whether customers have a similar propensity to bond with both. Insecurely attached customers who find interpersonal bonds with employees deficient, compensate for this deficiency by being more likely to bond with the service firm. Companies that measure customer attachment styles can better segment markets, manage customer relationships, and allocate resources more effectively. For example, customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance toward the firm are candidates for social relationship programs, whereas customers with high levels of attachment avoidance are likely to be more responsive to financial reward programs.

Judging the Book by Its Cover? How Consumers Decode Conspicuous Consumption Cues in Buyer–Seller Relationships

Little empirical consumer research has focused on the decoding of conspicuous symbolism, that is, the inferences consumers make about others’ conspicuous consumption. Grounded in theory on social perception and role congruity, four experiments show that consumer inferences about and behavioral intentions toward conspicuous sellers are moderated by communal and exchange relationship norms. Specifically, conspicuous consumption by a seller decreases warmth inferences and, in turn, behavioral intentions toward the seller under the communal norm; conversely, it increases competence inferences and, in turn, behavioral intentions under the exchange norm. A sellers mere wealth triggers similar inferences, suggesting that conspicuous consumption is a surrogate for actual wealth. Priming consumers with persuasion knowledge inhibits the inferential benefits resulting from conspicuousness under the exchange norm. These findings reveal the theoretically meaningful role of the consumption context by showing that consumers’ warmth and competence inferences operate differentially in commercial relationships as a result of salient communal versus exchange norms, with important consequences for consumers’ behavioral intentions.

Coproduction of Transformative Services as a Pathway to Improved Consumer Well-Being: Findings From a Longitudinal Study on Financial Counseling

Although many consumers turn to financial counseling to improve their financial well-being, the effectiveness of these counseling services remains nebulous and the exact mechanisms through which they improve consumer well-being require further research. This longitudinal research demonstrates that consumers’ coproduction of financial counseling services is pivotal for increasing their credit scores and for decreasing their financial stress. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study also shows that financial literacy, consumer involvement, and attachment styles are important drivers of coproduction. Involvement plays a moderating role, such that higher involvement substitutes for lower levels of financial literacy and mitigates the negative effects of attachment avoidance on coproduction. These findings help both counseling agencies and public policy makers improve the effectiveness of financial counseling. Financial counselors should track their customers’ objective and subjective financial literacy, involvement, and attachment styles, then segment customers, and, finally, tailor the service provision accordingly, to leverage coproduction as the pathway to consumers’ financial well-being. From a public policy perspective, the findings suggest that efforts to improve consumer financial literacy are important but should be supplemented with programs designed to increase consumer involvement in financial counseling; this combination promises to foster coproduction and improve consumers’ financial well-being.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto: Emergence of Automated Social Presence in Organizational Frontlines and Customers’ Service Experiences

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of service, customers’ service frontline experiences, and customers’ relationships with service providers. Based on the prediction that in the marketplace of 2025, technology (e.g., service-providing humanoid robots) will be melded into numerous service experiences, this article spotlights technology’s ability to engage customers on a social level as a critical advancement of technology infusions. Specifically, it introduces the novel concept of automated social presence (ASP; i.e., the extent to which technology makes customers feel the presence of another social entity) to the services literature. The authors develop a typology that highlights different combinations of automated and human social presence in organizational frontlines and indicates literature gaps, thereby emphasizing avenues for future research. Moreover, the article presents a conceptual framework that focuses on (a) how the relationship between ASP and several key service and customer outcomes is mediated by social cognition and perceptions of psychological ownership as well as (b) three customer-related factors that moderate the relationship between ASP and social cognition and psychological ownership (i.e., a customer’s relationship orientation, tendency to anthropomorphize, and technology readiness). Finally, propositions are presented that can be a catalyst for future work to enhance the understanding of how technology infusion, particularly service robots, influences customers’ frontline experiences in the future.

Activating Consumers for Better Service Coproduction Outcomes Through Eustress: The Interplay of Firm-Assigned Workload, Service Literacy, and Organizational Support

Companies are allocating increasing coproduction workloads to consumers. Ironically, many consumers may be ill-equipped to coproduce, as indicated by widespread low service literacy (e.g., financial literacy, medical literacy). This research examines how consumers, particularly those low in service literacy, respond to varying levels of firm-assigned coproduction workload. Five studies, including a hospital field experiment, reveal three findings. First, service literacy plays a moderating role, such that higher (vs. lower) levels of coproduction workload improve service outcomes (e.g., compliance intentions), particularly for consumers with low service literacy. Second, coproduction eustress is a crucial mediator, such that positive service outcomes result from consumers appraising coproduction tasks as positive and meaningful challenges. In turn, eustress is elicited by consumers’ belief that they are collaborating with the provider to achieve a shared goal. Third, offering organizational support to consumers might mitigate the beneficial effects of coproduction eustress because it can trigger reactance. This research can help policy makers and managers in finding new ways to activate consumers, particularly those low in service literacy, as coproducers for better service outcomes.

Responsibility and Well-Being: Resource Integration Under Responsibilization in Expert Services

Responsibilization, or the shift of functions and risks from providers and producers to consumers, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Because responsibilization is often considered synonymous with consumer agency and well-being, the authors take a transformative service research perspective and draw on resource integration literature to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. The authors focus on expert services, for which responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, they develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider, and service system), the identification of structural tensions surrounding resource integration, and three categories of resource-integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for providers, public and institutional policy makers, and service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.

How Consumers Assess Free E-Services: The Role of Benefit-Inflation and Cost-Deflation Effects

Despite the ubiquity of free e-services (e.g., free music/video streaming services), little empirical research has examined how consumers assess such service offerings. This research reveals the crucial role of consumer-perceived nonmonetary costs (NMCs; e.g., related to advertising intrusiveness) to better explain the zero-price effect (ZPE). Four experiments show that free e-services elicit positive affect in consumers, which leads to two distinct effects that drive the ZPE: a benefit-inflation effect, such that consumers overemphasize the benefits of free e-services, and a cost-deflation effect, such that they also judge the corresponding NMCs as lower. Furthermore, the authors find that the social norm of reciprocity increases consumers’ acceptance of NMCs. This research provides managerial guidance on how to better market free service offerings. Companies that consider providing basic and premium offerings should include a free basic option, which increases consumers’ benefit perceptions, lowers their perceptions of NMCs, and consequently increases demand for this service option. Finally, the findings help managers model the trade-off between immediate additional revenue generated by the fees consumers pay for a premium option and the revenue stream that a free basic option generates (e.g., through higher advertising revenues).

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: The Penalty Effect of Conspicuous Consumption in Services and How It Changes With Customers and Contexts

A service provider’s conspicuous consumption can undermine customer attitudes and behavioral intentions toward the provider—a so-called penalty effect of conspicuous consumption. Four studies investigate customer and contextual factors that moderate this penalty effect. The results show that customers low in materialism penalize service providers who consume conspicuously (e.g., decreased patronage intentions). In addition, as another facet of the penalty effect, a service provider’s conspicuous consumption undermines customer cost-benefit assessments (decreased perceived value and price fairness), which function as mediating variables. However, service providers can use “service warmth” as a protective strategy to attenuate the penalty effect. Notably, materialistic customers do not react more favorably to service providers who engage in conspicuous consumption (in contrast with their established tendency to favor conspicuous goods). Taken together, the results provide a deeper and theoretically nuanced understanding of when and how customers respond negatively to conspicuous service providers, with meaningful implications for the management of services. For example, when service firms design their aesthetic labor strategy, they should consider their customers’ levels of materialism accordingly. In addition, service firms need to educate their frontline employees about the potential downsides of displaying conspicuous consumption cues.

Zur Unzulänglichkeit des operativen Managementfokus im Beschwerdemanagement

Die wissenschaftliche Diskussion des betrieblichen Beschwerdemanagements hat in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten eine bemerkenswerte Karriere durchlaufen (Hansen/Jeschke/Schober 1995), die sich in einer Vielzahl einschlagiger Publikationen widerspiegelt. Bernd Stauss hat sich nachhaltig und mit groser Hingabe an dieser Diskussion beteiligt und sie mit zahlreichen, wertvollen Beitragen masgeblich mitgestaltet (siehe Stauss 1985; 1989; 1997; 2002; 2003; 2004). Nicht zuletzt deshalb gelang es ihm — gemeinsam mit Wolfgang Seidel — eine ganzheitliche Beschwerdemanagement-Konzeption zu entwickeln, die sowohl den wissenschaftlichen als auch unternehmenspraktischen State-of-the-Art reprasentiert und diesem Aufsatz als Referenzkonzeption zugrunde liegt (Stauss/Seidel 2002).