Murali Chandrashekaran

CUSTOMER EVALUATIONS OF SERVICE COMPLAINT EXPERIENCES: IMPLICATION FOR RELATIONSHIP MARKETING

Many companies consider investments in complaint handling as means of increasing customer commitment and building customer loyalty. Firms are not well informed, however, on how to deal successfully...

Brand Retrieval, Consideration Set Composition, Consumer Choice, and the Pioneering Advantage

Recent research on the pioneering advantage has shown that consumers often prefer pioneering brands to follower brands. Recent research on consumer choice suggests that information about brands is filtered through a series of sequential cognitive processes. This study attempts to integrate these two separate lines of research by investigating the effects of pioneering on each stage of the multistage decision process. A within-subjects longitudinal experiment was conducted to simulate brand order of entry into a new market. We also developed a sequential logit model to isolate the direct impact of pioneering on each stage of the decision process while controlling for indirect effects of pioneering on previous stages. The results revealed that the pioneering brand (vs. followers) is more likely to be retrieved, considered, and selected. Moreover, the results revealed that consumers are more likely to bypass consideration set formation when the choice decision is simple (vs. complex). Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Customer Satisfaction Heterogeneity and Shareholder Value

It is widely recognized that business growth and shareholder value are engineered on the basis of investments aimed at acquiring and retaining customers. Along with this premise, however, the literature reveals a growing recognition that the manner in which important customer-based outcomes are constructed in the short term has vital implications for long-term firm performance. Adopting the view that customer satisfaction is a stochastic marketplace asset, the authors advance a mean-variance perspective that enables them to test two conjectures: (1) Objective service quality and advertising affect not only the level of customer satisfaction but also the heterogeneity in customer satisfaction, and (2) shareholder value is shaped by the interplay of satisfaction level and heterogeneity, through their impact on retention sales, acquisition sales, and servicing costs. The authors test these conjectures using secondary data from diverse sources that describe the dynamics in the U.S. airlines industry during a nine-year period (1997–2005). The results, derived from estimating structural models that account for the impact of several meaningful control variables, provide strong support for both conjectures. Importantly, the findings indicate that the return on satisfaction to shareholder value decreases by almost 70% in going from low to high satisfaction heterogeneity; at the same time, increasing levels of satisfaction heterogeneity serves to reduce the volatility in shareholder value.

From Uncertain Intentions to Actual Behavior: A Threshold Model of Whether and When Salespeople Quit

In this article, the authors focus on the formation of intentions to quit among salespeople and the link between these intentions and subsequent quitting behavior. Building on the foundations of the recently developed judgment uncertainty and magnitude parameters (JUMP) model, which statistically and simultaneously separates the drivers of judgment magnitude from those of judgment uncertainty, the authors present a model of the formation of uncertain intentions that decomposes a stated intention into a magnitude and an uncertainty dimension. The authors then develop hypotheses regarding the impact of affective and continuance commitment and critical sales events on intention magnitude and the effect of critical sales events and role stress on intention uncertainty. Subsequently, the authors develop a threshold model of the intention-behavior link that articulates a psychological mechanism within which uncertainty-laden intentions translate into actual behavior. Empirically, results from sales force intention and turnover data provide strong support for the theorizing. In addition to identifying some drivers of intention-to-quit magnitude and uncertainty, the authors identify the crucial role of intention uncertainty in shaping both the probability and timing of subsequent behavior. Consistent with the psychological underpinnings of the threshold model, the authors find that intention uncertainty lowers the probability of intended behavior. The results regarding the timing of quitting support an uncertainty avoidance conjecture: Given a stated intention, likely quitters with greater intention uncertainty quit faster than those with lower intention uncertainty.

Navigating Local Environments with Global Strategies: A Contingency Model of Multinational Subsidiary Performance

Multinational corporations (MNCs) often pursue global strategies that emphasize efficiency, flexibility, and learning, but globally developed strategies often clash with the environmental idiosyncrasies of MNC country subsidiary markets in which the strategy is actually implemented. Extant research pays little attention to the contingent efficacy of such global strategies from the perspective of MNC country subsidiary markets. We adopt the strategy-environment alignment principle and study how host country task- and institutional environments might influence the efficacy of global strategies for MNC subsidiary performance. We assess MNC subsidiary performance using subjective managerial judgments, and on the basis of recent research on human judgments, we theorize that these judgments embody information about judgment magnitude and uncertainty. A mean-variance function model simultaneously teases out the effects of the explanatory variables on the magnitude and uncertainty of MNC subsidiary performance judgments. To test the hypotheses, we analyze survey data from German and Japanese subsidiaries in the United States. The results support the use of the mean-variance function model and specific theory about the antecedents of performance judgment magnitude and uncertainty. Findings pertaining to interactions between global strategies and the facets of the local country environment reveal ways in which MNCs can adapt “global” strategies to navigate the complex array of country markets they face.

Modeling individual preference evolution and choice in a dynamic group setting

Organizational buying and strategic marketing decisions often emerge from a messy process of belief accommodation and compromise. In a longitudinal field study, the authors investigate how the beli...